When visiting friends and relatives, it’s hard not to be impressed with TV sets. They’re brighter and flatter than ever. Oddly, I can remember back in the fifties and sixties, when flat-screen TVs were always “right around the corner”. It hasn’t been until lately that they’ve actually arrived.
My 1995 Sony is simple and easy to use. I can’t record shows to watch when I want, but haven’t missed that ability. In the evening, I generally turned it on around nine o’clock, and after searching through forty or fifty stations, could sometimes find something interesting to watch. While doing so, I had the nagging feeling that “I am wasting time.” That feeling had been growing stronger. Then, last week, the once-reliable old Sony did not come on. The screen stayed black.
Going from TV to reading was like changing my diet from froth and souffles to meat and potatoes. I found that watching TV was much easier than absorbing and sorting much more information from reading. It was the intellectual equivalent of fluffy, chocolate pudding. While watching TV, I had absorbed a great deal of information on television about various crimes, mostly murders involving some rich or moderately rich person who had either killed or been killed so that gold, silver, annuities, stocks, bonds, women, and/or properties could be obtained.
My mind was about as filled with that as it needed to be, but those shows were usually the most interesting things on. After noticing a great deal of repetition, with the same crime being shown several times a year, often on different channels, I came to the conclusion that “Out of three hundred million people, the vast majority of us don’t kill anyone.” In fact, I began to wonder, after the number of repetitions became obvious, if there wasn’t an actual shortage of real crimes.
As more and more crime shows began to be “cold case” crimes, from newly re-opened files that were decades old, I realized that TV had, in actual fact, discovered there was a real “crime vacuum” going on. It became obvious that police agencies, to keep from having their funding cut, were looking up and keeping busy working on old crimes in order to maintain their budgets.
That’s was the most important thing I learned from television in the last couple of years. A thing of slightly lesser importance was the number of horse-owners involved in murder when the ownership of their horses was threatened. “Glad I don’t have horses.”, I remember thinking to myself after a stablehand was convinced to kill the husband so he couldn’t get rid of the wife’s horses and the stablehand’s job.
So, I haven’t replaced the old Sony. I’m reading more, exercising once in a while, and have no current plans to re-tube.
