Jim settled down on the couch and zapped over to his favorite show. The episode was already in progress, but then he didn't watch the show for the plot. David Hasselhoff's face was on the screen.
"Ugh! Go away and die, you no-talent loser!" said Jim. "C'mon people, you know what we wanna see. Gimme bountyful bodies in tight swimsuits!"
As if the producers of the series had heard his plea, Pamela Anderson appeared on the screen. "That's better," said Jim with a grin. He clutched his new remote and pressed a button. He had meant to adjust the volume, but instead pressed the color adjusting button on the new and unfamiliar remote control.
With a slight flicker of the screen, Pamela Anderson turned black. One moment she was the white, blonde, voluptous dream of many a slobbering teenager - and the next she was a gorgeous jungle queen with skin of ebony hue and raven hair. Her face, though still recognizably hers, had changed slightly to fit her newracial group and her tight red swimsuit had changed into an even tighter two-piece with a leopard-spot design.
Jim gaped at the screen. What the hell kind of plot twist was this? The plots were never anything to write home about, but this was going beyond unrealistic. Instinctively he pressed the remote control again, still thinking that his thumb rested on the volume control. At once Pamela turned asian. A mighty voluptous asian, at that.
Slowly it dawned on Jim. He looked down at the remote in his hand and saw the thumb on the color control button. Very slowly he brought the control up, pointed it at the screen and pressed the button again. Without much ceremony Pamela became a sexy latina. Jim couldn't believe it. He looked from the screen tothe remote and from the remote to the screen. He pressed the opposite directonof the color control twice and pamela on screen quickly turned back asian and then black.
With shaking hands Jim shut off the TV and really looked at the remote for the first time. It had all the standard buttons for changing channels and adjusting the display, but there were many more that Jim had assumed were to control an optional VCR or something, like many TV remotes have. The labels were cryptic, often just a single letter or symbol. There were up/down button pairs for "BE", "S", "A", "IQ" and several symbols that he couldn't quite make sense of. There was one large button, labelled "TV<->RL", whatever that meant, one bearing the typical "information"-i and one bearing the word "Menu".
With a whole new appreciation for what he held in his hands, Jim
Wed Apr 28 09:49:25 1999
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