I decided to spend a few minutes getting acquainted with my new Winamp 5 internet TV and radio stream viewer today, taking advantage of a little "quiet time" with my zippy network connection. I browsed:

• Chinese-language video streams, including the Qi Gong Channel and the Chinese Prophecy Channel
• WEEN-TV (the band's tv and video appearances looped), REM and Björk videos
• Saltwaterchimp.com, with streaming Sifl and Ollie, South Park, Monty Python and the Simpsons. Sweet!
• A few odd German cable and public access streams, and a Hungarian pirate radio station with overmodulated, outdated dance music and a webcam staring at a messy, unoccupied studio desk.
• ranttv::tv worth watching," and showed a man in full camo gear holding an automatic rifle, with his voice and face disguised, discussing a CIA's employee's very comfortable used camo Goretex pants - and where one can buy a pair. I learned more about camo pants that I ever thought I needed to know - including how to find the quietest pants, that lets you sneak up on people without them hearing you. Now, who would make good use of information like this? Yup. That's who.
• Amateur streams, one consisting solely of a poorly-focused webcam trained down a dark office hallway near the coffeepot, so viewers can occasionally glimpse a head-and-shoulders silhouette of some guy standing around sipping a cuppa joe. The caption read "new machine blues". Reminds me of when I heard of the first-ever "webcam," the now-defunct CoffeeCam set up at Cambridge University's Trojan room.
• FreedomTV had a man and woman lecturing on the dangers of allowing a company like Monsanto to internationally manufacture lock-and-key combos - herbicides and complementary genetically modified food crop seeds that are resistant to the chemicals - which they contended was a scenario akin to a poisoner selling you your own antidote.
• TV McGill, streaming student-run TV from the Canadian university of the same name: the fare included a news story of a Catholic priest discussing same-sex marriage, followed by "Party Central With Tara and Gert," two young McGill ladies interviewing fellow students about their favorite watering holes about town.
• And most quintessentially free-access-internet of all, there's The Paintball Channel - endless, poorly-edited home video of paintball competitions with an incessant death-metal soundtrack.

Try it sometime: there's so much bizarre, banal, but occasionally intriguing material from around the world to choose from, like the Oughties equivalent of CB and ham radio. Still, it's a heck of a lot more fun than network TV.