Last night while I was watching a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) interview of Charlie Rose talking with Tony Judt I thought, "Man, I love television." They say it's a passive, brain-draining activity, but every cell in my body felt stimulated by the conversation I was listening to.
Rose's interview with Judt came on the heels of last week watching his hour-long interview with Christopher Hitchens. Judt recently died of Lou Gehrig's disease; Hitchens has just been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.
Morbid? Perhaps. But, the poignancy of these conversations about history, politics, life and death is difficult to ignore.
My favorite description of the nature of television actually comes from "The Simpsons". Bart and Lisa need to do a science project for school so they steal the guts of the television and place a cat where the picture tube once was. Grandpa sits down to watch t.v. and begins clicking the remote. He says, "Two hundred fifty channels, nothing but cats."
And that's the way t.v. is most of the time, echoing Newton Minow's (the first FCC chairman) comment that television is "a vast wasteland". So it is. Enter the DVR or Tivo. Like manna from the desert, what a device to solve the problems of television viewing. Pick the programs you want; have them stored for viewing when you want to do it. It separates the wheat from the chaff and leaves you with your own personal frosting on the cake. (Nothing like mixing a metaphor-- better than cocktail time.)
Face it, sometimes the yada yada yada on MSNBC does become numbing. Rattigan sounds like Matthews. Ed Schultz gets a little too hyper; Keith goes over the top and Rachel repeats a lot of what you've already heard. And, just how outrageous can The Daily Show and The Colbert Report get to keep your attention?
Yawn (at times). That's when reading a book or turning to your special crib on DVR is essential. What would be even better is to combine the internet with television where you can purchase just the programs you want, shuttle them into your recorder, and dump the cable or satellite fees.
It's coming. Everything that rises must converge. Two hundred fifty cats reduced to a couple of calicoes and one grinning Cheshire. I'm all in.