This might be a surprise to some of you, but buying a home costs money. Seriously giant piles of money, even for reasonably priced homes. So one of the things you do while you're trying to recover from the shock that washes over you whenever you realize you just dropped another $250 at Lowe's with practically nothing to show for it is watch television. You sit and you flip. Law and Order goes by, and then Top Gear and then you stumble upon The Discovery Channel's Planet Green channel. It'll be about five minutes after that revelation that the remote control leaves your hand and, if you're lucky, narrowly misses the television before shattering into the wall. Because if Planet Green is nothing else, it is surely the more irritatingly condescending channel in the history of television. To wit: 

1. I think it's great that some people have apparently unlimited financial resources to rebuild their homes from the ground up with various "green" installations. Truly fantastic. Dedicating a weekly show to celebrating their wealth? A bit much, by anybody's standards. They might as well call it Lifestyles of the Rich and Self-Congratulatory. 

2. Seriously, there's something deeply offensive about liberal minded people having a network on television for them to gloat about just how much they care about the environment. There are options available of course - not having families of four living in 4500 square feet homes for example. Because lest you forget that green homes aren't nice, the homes featured on this show are, without exception, palatial estates compared with what you and I are living in. 

3. Which is probably the reason that the show strays from telling you what, exactly, is being paid for all of this greening. Although some shows will hint around final costs - one woman mentioned a $200,000 home improvement budget, which must be nice - most don't, because they know damned well that the average viewer is going to have the aforementioned remote-chucking response if they knew exactly how much these people are paying to have homes which they can then dangle in front of the rest of us. "Oh, you bought a house? That's great? Is it green? My house is green. Very green. I don't even leave a carbon footprint." 

4. Of course, maybe I'm angry because the wooded lot behind my recently purchased home has been bought by a couple planning a green home themselves, a plan that involves cutting down all of the trees and making a huge racket at totally random points during the day.