I'm ready for my basic cable closeup

Did a good job of smashing one knuckle on my left pinky today by dint of having a large tree branch fall on it. Bradford pears are the herring-scented tree equivalent of kudzu, and the two in our front yard had managed such explosive growth over the last two months that they were starting to hang low over the street. So I went after the offending bits with the appropriate hardware, and one particularly stubborn bit of ligneous obstruction came down at an unexpected angle, i.e. zero degrees.

Ordin