I have received some very bad news. I didn’t contract some terrible disease or lose my job or anything like that. This bad news came in a letter from my cable company.

They have decided to add a bunch of channels.

Why is this bad news? Well, I don’t think I’ll see my wife or daughter again once the channels hit my set unless they come down to the basement to see me.

I was giddy with excitement when I opened the envelope. It was like Santa Claus himself mailed the information to me.

Not only will I have On Demand, I will get two soccer-only channels. If you don’t understand the significance of this, I don’t know if I can help you.

Bruce Springsteen once wrote a song about 500 channels on the television with nothing good to watch. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

I find few things more relaxing than an evening in front of the TV. Even if I can’t find something I really want to watch, I can entertain myself for hours by just flipping channels.

That’s why I love knowing I have a dozen or so new choices to flip through when I’m hanging out in the basement on a Friday night. And that doesn’t even take into account the programming available through On Demand.

My only problem is that some of the channels are things I would never watch, even when I was desperately searching for some entertainment. And they haven’t gotten rid of the cooking channels.

I have trouble understanding all the fuss over these cooking shows. At then end of 30 or 60 minutes, you don’t have any food in front of you. How good can the show be when you have to go put pizza rolls in the microwave to crave the hunger pangs?

Luckily, I got a chance to weigh in with my disdain for this genre when Maria and I went to Vegas last month.

We spent part of one afternoon serving as a focus group for a new television show. I had hoped to screen a new comedy or funny talk show.

Instead, we had to endure 40 minutes of the worst television I have ever experienced. And I know bad television – I watched “Joey.”

We watched a show called “Bizarre Foods,” which featured a guy named Andrew who is a food critic from Minnesota. That’s kind of like being the tall Oompa-Loompa, I think.

Anyway, the show involves him traveling around to foreign cities, eating strange local delicacies and telling us how good they were. The only time I could bear the program was when it resembled a travel show.

Then he went back to eating brains or intestines or something and I tuned out. I don’t know what bothered me more – the fact that they actually plan to release the show or that my wife tried to defend the guy when we talked about it later.

That’s the kind of stuff that comes with 500 channels. I can always find something else to watch when I come across the bad stuff.