May 1st, 2007

Thanks to mysterious forces beyond my control, the following image will be stuck in my head for years.

No Hard Jarring

If you live in Warren, Ohio and have Time Warner Cable, you may already know what this is. It all began on around the time that TWC replaced our second TV guide channel (comically 6 spots away from the first one) with a second slot of it’s digital preview channel. At some point in the evening that I’m usually at work or not paying attention during the weekend, the channel freezes on that image up there. For hours. This poor woman is stuck in an unflattering mid-sentence mouth pose along with a phrase that has some of the weirdest capital letter emphasis I’ve seen in a long time. For added laughs, it’s an interlaced image that flickers back and forth between two nearly identical frames in a way that’s hard JARRING like a MF’er. The jerkiness is subtle on some nights while other evenings look like a scene from Herbie Hancock’s Rock It. I tried to take a vidcap of the flicker, but the hard JARRING wasn’t trying to hear that noise. It’s cute and all, but I’m sure I’ll be wanting to dropkick somebody in the neck when they preview the Boomerang channel and I’m stuck with watching Kissyface Infomercial Lady instead of Frankenstein Jr., the Superfriends or the Herculoids.

8 Responses to ““NO hard JARRING””

  1. I live in Ohio but I never saw that. Haha That’s pretty funny. Also funny how you’re going to get Boomerang soon seeing how I had a preview month of it but NEVER got to see anything good. Every time I tuned in Justice League was just ending and I geuss they had just gotten rid of BTAS at that time of me getting the channel. Haha have a good time wiht that channel

  2. I think that’s just our small area’s Time-Warner being weird about it. I don’t know how that stuff works, though. I know we’re on different systems now since you mentioned getting a month-long preview instead of our weekly taste.

    When it was just on channel 96, the reception was always crappy when they previewed Boomerang. So I’ll actually be able to see it. Well… during the day time. Dammit.

  3. I searched the web for “no hard jarring” just to see if anyone else noticed it.
    The sad thing is there were a few times I got kind of turned on by that freeze frame.

  4. Since I’m the only one bored or irritated enough to have cared about it, this post is the only evidence of that even happening.

    And yes, at around 5 AM, that frame does start to look kinda good…

  5. I happen to work for Motorola on CATV digital video equipment and I was doing a digital controller upgrade for the Massillon Cable Company in Massillon, OH. I saw this image on one of the 15 or so channels in the crappy hotel I stayed in. The funny thing was that they had the mpeg stream stuck like this, while the audio kept going with Ronco and other various informercials all night long. I don’t blog, or I would have posted this, but I thought I was the only guy out there nerdy enough to actually take a picture of the stuck image. I was just laughing with my friend on teh IRC about this, and I decided to google search…. I find it somewhat comforting to know that there are others who were as amused by this as I was.

  6. […] what have I accomplished with this blog? Other than talking about the regional phenomenon known as no HARD jarring and the Funky Beat Puppet, not much. Who celebrates a milestone that was reached only because the […]

  7. […] picture of a mudslide while listening to a man talk about diarrhea, but no such luck. Even worse, no HARD jarring was nowhere to be […]

  8. I actually saw this, i googled no hard jarring today after seeing it on tv years ago. This woman was completely dominated HAH. She looks like a fool and the words apply perfectly. Someone must hate her, she looks like a bitch.