In Portugal, TV Cabo, the country's major Cable TV provider, keeps changing the available tv channels. Last month, the great Travel channel was banned out of the map... replaced by Video Italia, that now broadcasts the worst italian music, 24 hours / day. It is very depressing: all the songs have lyrics that go like this "amore, amore, ti amo, amore...". Kind of repetitive, but TV Cabo justifies the Travel death, under the argument that audiences were pressuring towards "an european music station".

Not only Video Italia is NOT "an european music station", but also the change is technically illegal, relative to the contract firmed with the customers, since Travel was NOT replaced by an alternative on the same theme.

More: TV Cabo regularly justifies internal commercial options, with "the customers were asking for it" excuse... which is a complete lie. Of course TV Cabo has no positive feedback from most customers; in fact, they have a tradition of NOT answering to the customers: there are people with dozens of e-mails sent and not replied, plus dozes of un-effective phone calls...

Talk about unanswered phone calls... Eurosport will [very probably] be kicked out of TV Cabo's map of stations, as they have been unable to contact the portuguese cable provider!! Of course this is not natural, but TV Cabo is childishly avoiding conversations, in order to cease contract with the aforementioned sport station.

But why?, you might ask. After all Eurosport is hugely popular, and covers many sports... not just [vomit!] soccer! The answer doesn't come easy, and it is all about SportTV - a premium product, that represents more money in, for TV Cabo, who expects to have new subscribers, as soon as people lose the Eurosport alternative.

On a different note, ARTE had a documentary on bullfighting, a few hours ago. The documentary was filmed at Spain and showed how matadores kill the bull, when the animal is [dead] tired, after being tortured for nearly 30 minutes. Bloody!

Matadores usually wear tight trousers that tend to show off their testicles... if they didn't have them removed before, as bullfighting accidents often cause such injuries!

GP Legends + Voodoo

GP Legends [GPL] doesn't show its age! In fact, the only real F1 simulator is still light years ahead of all other racing games! That is why, it is a true mystery why UK's great PC Gamer magazine doesn't include it, on its "recommend" list...

GP Legends is the reason why so many PCs still have 3DFX Voodoo 2 SLI installed!, now that such hardware acceleration is three generations behind current top gear. It is well known the wonderful performance of GPL on the Voodoo chipset, and I clearly state that I don't expect a racing title to come close to the Papyrus proposal, in 2000.

For example, Grand Prix 3 is not showing that good. The game is scheduled for March, and the development has been split in graphics and AI. The sound is still GP2's on a different pitch; all cars are based on the same model; too many aids; and the player's car power is as high as the best AI car, no matter the team you drive for...

All these details mixed, make me fear another a shift towards arcade racing. Blargh! Let's hope I am very, very wrong :)