I want to love TiVo, but it spurns me. It refuses to communicate. What am I supposed to do?

I want this relationship to work. I've pushed all the right buttons. I've murmured sweet nothings in its general direction. I've been supportive. I've told TiVo to relax, that there's no pressure, that we can take it slow. But still TiVo refuses to perform.

I got desperate enough tonight to try an expert consultation. The TiVo gurus tried to get my TiVo on the phone, but it just wouldn't talk. "Connection failed." I'm so ashamed.

I may actually have to resort to TiVo aids. The last TiVo guru suggested something that will boost the power, eliminate distractions, allow my TiVo to focus solely on its task. I'm not woman enough for TiVo? Oh, the infamy.

In other news, the TiVo help line hold music is absolutely diabolical. Really. Off-key soft jazz. Guh.

Quick update: Fastlane is good brain-candy fun. My recap will be posted sometime tomorrow. I'll link to it once it's up.

TiVo is proving a little more difficult to figure out then I had originally thought. The record-two-channels-at-once thing has remained elusive. Curses. If I don't figure it out soon, I will be calling the TiVo folks and begging for help.However, I did managed to record a couple of movies to watch in my copious spare time. (Can you believe I've never seen Mad Max?)

I have to get up like a normal person and go to a conference that runs during regular business hours tomorrow. Have I mentioned that I've discovered I'm not a morning person? This will be interesting... (I know, I know, everyone who has a real job with a real schedule, like Mary, is screaming "Cry me a river, bitch!" at me right now. Yeah. You're right. But it's haaaaard to adjust to getting up before 9 a.m.....)

Ahhhhhhhh. TiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiVo. If you never hear from me again, that's why.

Just in time for the new TV season, I got my Legitimate Business Expense DirecTV with TiVo. Wheee! Everything gets installed tomorrow.

I've had a bunch of friends say TiVo is "life-changing," which is ... well, a little pathetic. But I'm willing to be pathetic. Hell, pathetic is my life!

According to an article in Business2.0, I can look forward to watching more Discovery, HGTV, History, SciFi and TLC programs (at the moment, I don't tend to watch anything on any of those) and less CNN, Headline News, MTV, VH1 and Weather Channel programs (none of which I tend to watch -- ooh! But I can start TiVoing The Osbournes!). My Legitimate Business Expense reason is, of course, so I can make sure I don't miss a moment of the shows I'm covering, Fastlane (premiering Wednesday, September 18) and Firefly (premiering Friday, September 20). I urge you all to watch them (especially if you happen to be a Neilson household), so they don't get cancelled mid-season and leave me short of a paycheck.

There is much weirdness in the Chicago media world at the moment. Bob Greene, who, after Royko and Dear Abby died, was the Trib's most popular columnist, just resigned/got fired for screwing a high-school girl -- 10 years or so ago -- about whom he had written.

Now, there's all sorts of things wrong with the preceding. First, that Bob Greene was a popular columnist -- good lord people, he had all of three topics that he beat into the ground.

• "Abusing children is baaaaaad, and so I'm going to write about this poor kid's abuse horror story in almost fetishistic detail, over and over and over again. Because I'm outraged! That's it."
  
• "The 50s and 60s were soooooo cool, and anyone who didn't live then is so missing out, because that was the best time to come of age, which I will write about at length and without point."
  
• "The Midwest is full of great, simple, salt-of-the-earth, real people. And did I mention that Michael Jordan is a friend of mine?"

Second, that someone slept with him. Voluntarily. What the.... Bob Greene? Is that his real hair? Good lord, woman, I know you were young, but what were you thinking?

The weird part of the story (well, weirder), is that the chick apparently called Greene a couple of times this year, and then got a call from the FBI saying she "may be posing a threat to the columnist." Soon after that, the Trib got an anonymous e-mail saying "Oh my god, Bob Greene had an affair with a high school chick, who is not me or one of my friends, about 10 years ago. The horror!" What the...?

Here's what I imagine happened. It's all speculation. It's a guess. I DO NOT have any facts beyond what was inthe paper. Don't quote me, and don't sue me:

• Bob Greene and High School Chick, who is above the age of consent, have an affair. This is icky, sleazy and wrong, but legal.
  
• High School Chick goes to college and gets a journalism degree.
  
• High School Chick gets a job in journalism.
  
• High School Chick, having worked at some podunk little paper, or having been hit with one of the many waves of media downsizing, makes a couple of calls to her good friend and mentor, Bob Greene, feeling out the job market in Chicago. She may or may not have mentioned the good times they had lo, those many years ago.
  
• Greene panics, thinks she's blackmailing him for a job (which she may or may not be doing) and gets someone -- FBI? pretending to be FBI? -- to call her and tell her to quit it.
  
• High School Chick, or one of her friends/relatives/whatever, gets pissed and blows the whistle.
  
• Wackiness ensues.

It's just bizarre.

A lot of folks are saying "Oh, we're thinking of Bob Greene in his time of distress. Poor guy." To hell with that. He was a forty-something columnist screwing a teenage girl, and even if she is legal -- Ew. What the hell was he thinking? He's a married guy who is theoretically in full possession of his faculties. He claims to have a brain, to be a moral arbiter, whatever. And he chooses to sleep with a teenager? Yeah, yeah, it was consensual, she may even have initiated it -- who cares. She was a teenage girl. No matter how adult she was acting, she was still a teenage girl. She was, therefore, insane. All teenage girls are. Trust me, I was one. I know.

[Note: This is not man-bashing. I think it's the same for an adult woman and a teenage boy. You're using someone who doesn't yet know what he or she is doing -- what teenager has the slightest control/clue/rational thought when it comes to sex? Quit it.]

But the problem that the Trib has with him is not that he slept with a teenager, but that he slept with a source. This compromises his objectivity or some such bullshit. Folks, he's a columnist. He has no objectivity. He writes his opinion, his take on the news. He is, however, pointing the finger at moral failings throughout the country and making tsk-tsk noises in his column. The whole screwing a teenager part doesn't fit well into that image, I guess.

Should he have resigned/been forced to resign? That's a tough one. He made a stupid, boneheaded move. Was it a breach of particularly journalistic ethics? It depends. Did he write about her as a quid pro quo, and did she benefit from it? Then yeah, it was. Did he write about her to get her into bed? Ewwwww. Yeah, ethics violation. Did he quote her in one of his interminable "Decent People of the Midwest" pieces with no particular designs on her, and then fall into bed with her just by coincidence? Then it's probably not.

If it wasn't a breach of ethics -- if it was just icky and stupid -- then no, I don't think he should have been booted. I guess the argument could be that his readers will never respect him again, but I never respected him in the first place. If the idea is that a columnist should be a better person, on higher moral ground, than a normal person -- well that's just bullshit. Columnists aren't better human beings -- they're just people who can write well (in theory). If someone who wasn't in the public eye wouldn't have lost his job for this, Greene shouldn't have either.

But I still don't see why he had a column in the first place. And I'm not terribly sorry to see him go.

Now, anyone got any dirt on Andy Rooney? He drives me nuts.