Some boomers remember when there were only 3 or 4 television channels. Most TVs did not have a remote, so one had to get up, walk across the room and turn a knob to change the channel. In my house, that usually only happened between shows; we didn’t surf. The channel choices on our one TV were guided strongly by our parents. Whoever got up to change the channel also had to adjust the antenna for clear reception.
I was home this morning, a Friday, feeling ill, getting some rest in a comfy chair 10 feet from one of my four TVs. My cable plan includes only 78 channels, not the 300 that are available.
Within a 10 minute period of surfing I found the following:
- The Today Show (Katie laughing her last laughs before moving to her serious new CBS job)
- Simply Quilts
- The Firm (burn fat 3x faster)
- Al Roker Investigates
- The Sleep Number Bed
- C-Span2 – Senator Spector droning about immigration
- A bunch of guys welding a Harley
- History Channel - the history of machine guns
- The new Redskins schedule (their first game is on 9-11 !!!)
- Joan Rivers selling nail polish
- The County Council meeting from Tuesday
- Chuck Norris demonstrating a workout machine
- Chuck Norris talking about the Bible
- The Weather Channel – wow, it’s raining in Wichita
- A 1930s British war movie
- A beautiful woman telling me about stocks
- Teens having sex – an MTV reality show
- Bon Jovi performing his latest song on VH-1
- Bon Jovi performing the same song with a female country singer on CMT
- Doctors performing stomach surgery on an animal
Plus, three sports channels, five different weather forecasts and a channel that just tells us what is on the other channels.
Oh, one channel was playing a show that would have been on one of the 3 channels when I was growing up.
Boomers and Gen-Xers control TV now, but I’m not really sure having four televisions and 78 channels (or 300) is significantly better than having one TV with only three channels. While contemplating that idea, I used the Recall button to toggle between the History Channel and MTV. Hmmm, I wonder if I need the Psychiatrist Channel.
A Little Something I Wrote
2 months ago
1 comment:
Oh, but do you get the NASA Channel? The one where most of the time it's a still shot of whatever's on the launch pad? And when it's not that, it's the view of earth from space? Sometimes with audio from mission control? That is an addictive channel.
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