my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

Gary Coleman has died at age 42. He was just a little bit older than me, and I grew up watching him grow up on TV. He wasn’t a great actor, and he had a lot of personal problems, from what I’ve read in the news and seen on the web, he seemed like he was always trying to do better.

I have a goal for 2008 to convert all my old VHS tapes to digital format. I’m not sure if I’ll bother burning them to DVD or not, but the VCR is going to die someday, and before that happens I want to make sure my collection of Godzilla movies is archived.

Ideally, I’ll have time to convert all my DVD’s to computer-type files too, so that I can load everything into a Mac and use Apple TV to do all my entertaining goodness. And that goes for my audio CD and tape collection too.

To what level have you made the digital leap, and are you willing to put your analog recordings in storage?

I would miss my books, so I am keeping them. Everything else can go digital. I don’t have any vinyl recordings, so for me the digital leap will be relatively transparent.

I remember hating going to the gym when I was in college, but my roommate talked me into going with him for a while. It’s boring. It’s not that I don’t enjoy exercise, but standing still is so boring. On our elliptical exercise machine at home, I listen to music to make it less boring, but it is still pretty dull. For a few weeks, the battery in the clock by the exercise machine was dead, so I didn’t really keep track of how long I was exercising. But now that I put a good battery in the clock, it seems to take a lot longer. Argh.

But not all indoor exercise is boring. Yesterday we went ice skating on an indoor rink, and that was pretty fun. I managed to not fall down at all, which believe me was a surprise, since it has been a year since I skated. One thing I will do before I skate again is buy some skates. When you rent, you gamble that you’re going to find a good pair in your size, and yesterday I lost that bet.

So tonight after work, I plan to put a small shelf right in front of the elliptical machine so that I can watch DVD’s on the portable DVD player that we got for long car trips. My friend Dan loaned me his Heroes season 1 boxed set, so I’ll use that for a couple week’s worth of 42-minute workouts. After that, I may have to get the Lost DVD’s, because I missed a lot of those episodes.

I don’t watch much TV. Most of what’s on is just not interesting. I try to enjoy the cop shows, but they are just so poorly written and stiffly acted. I used to watch E.R. almost every week, but somewhere along the way I lost interest. I tried to watch all the new episodes of Lost, but I haven’t seen that show in a long time, and I’m told that new episodes won’t be aired until February of next year.

Anyway, when I do turn on the TV, I try to find interesting things to watch. I caught part of a lecture by Steven Pinker on Book TV. It is the only powerpoint-type presentation I’ve ever seen with lots and lots of profanity. Steven Pinker is one of those smarty pants types (he taught at MIT and now he teaches at Harvard) who can talk intelligently about how the words we use have come to have meaning. According to the blurb on Book TV:

Steven Pinker talks about the relationship between language and the way we think. During this discussion hosted by the Smithsonian Associates, Professor Pinker looks specifically at our use of profanity and what it says about us. This program contains language that some viewers may find offensive.

If you are not offended by strong language, I recommend watching the lecture on Book TV. It is not just an excuse to have swear words on TV.

The original remote control for our TV is long gone, and we have no way of turning off close captioning now.

I hope that it help the kids learn to read better.

I can’t stop reading the text. I don’t watch the TV at all, I just read the text at the bottom of the screen. And catch typos. And occasionally catch instances when the person typing the text didn’t pay close attention to the words the character is speaking, something that happens with alarming regularity during the show Arthur on PBS. Usually, the captioning conveys the same meaning in fewer words.