If you live in the five boroughs, it's official - you're not in charge of your television anymore. Since early October, Time Warner has been setting up its cable boxes in New York so that whenever your TV gets turned on, the box immediately goes to New York 1. This started in the outer boroughs, and the mind-control experiment should make its way through Manhattan by the end of the month. The move to make NY1 the box's default station is apparently a preemptive strike against Verizon, which doesn't carry the channel. But damn if it ain't a little bit... spooky. Between Obama's Chief Technology Officer and Tivo and Netflix doing something impossibly modern, this week in television had a real "Rise Of The Machines" feel to it, huh? Happy Halloween!

-- Jake Kalish is the author of Santa vs. Satan: The Official Compendium of Imaginary Fights