One of the motel’s TV channels offered this diversion:

Alas, no combination of keys on the overly complex remote fed themselves to tty1
. That didn’t surprise me, but ya gotta try, y’know.
Contrary to what you might think, that’s a well-focused image. Apparently, someone, somewhere, aimed a crappy camera at a monitor and devoted one video input to the result.
I wonder what critical infrastructure runs a Linux distro that end-of-lifed in December 2009.
We’ll never know the rest of the story…
There are normally a lot of feeds carrying information of varying degrees of interest that are not available via the remote (I hear you can get at them with a USB TV tuner). That one is an oddball, however.
Not much character development and very little plot.
Upside: no commercial interruptions!