Teevee

This may surprise you, but I can't wait for the Bachelorette wedding. Those two are so cute. I'm not going to watch it or anything.

Though the DirecTV commercials with the DVR warning screen are tasteless and awful, they do highlight perhaps the quintessential First World Problem of the early 2010's- the overflowing DVR. How the hell did this become a stressful thing? Do we really need to have so much stuff ready to watch at any one time?

Here's my observation, and correct me if I'm wrong. I believe that if you have so many episodes of something on your DVR that they're beginning to drop off, you're never going to watch the show.

And speaking of dropping off, what is the deal with the phrase, "Dropping like flies?" Someone told me last week that so many students were getting sick that they were dropping like flies. As the designated flycatcher around here, I can assure you that flies have a limited action vocabulary. They fly and when they're not flying they are standing on something, usually a window. I've not seen them drop, but I've not seen students drop either, so I guess it is the same.

Back to TV. I'll tell you my mom's favorite story about my TV watching when I was a kid. When I was around 8, I was limited in how much TV I could watch. Not sure why then in particular, but I was told that on school nights I could watch only 1/2 hour of TV. I accepted the news with grace and dignity (I assume, I don't remember this), and then came back a few minutes later with a piece of paper and reported to my mother: "Okay, I'll watch 8 minutes of Bugs Bunny, 5 minutes of Sandy Becker (a local fave), 10 minutes of the Flintstones and 7 minutes of Yogi Bear." My mom always thought that was very funny, but little did she know how well I had anticipated the modern ADD world in which we live in.

We got our first color TV in 1967. I remember clearly because we got it in time to watch the very first Super Bowl. It was a 13-inch GE Portacolor, the first portable color TV. Portable was important then, because most people only had 1 TV. Having a second one you could relocate was a luxury.

That TV figured prominently in my most frightening TV-watching experience. We brought the portable TV up to our new country home. My parents went out to a friend's house, leaving me and my friend, Charlie Broadwin, also Brooklyn born and bred, alone in this isolated, unfamiliar house in the woods. We started watching a movie called The Beast with Five Fingers, where Peter Lorre hallucinates that a severed hand is chasing him and is trying to strangle him. Near the climax of the movie, Lorre is sitting in a room, paralyzed by fear; he hears a distant thump, a creak outside the room, a shutter blows in the wind and bangs against the window, a lute mounted on the wall has one of its strings suddenly break, he quivers with fright. And then, perfectly in rhythm with the scene, the handle on the top of the portable TV, by which you carried the TV from room to room, the handle tipped over from its upright position and fell against the top of the TV with a loud bang, and Charlie and I both suddenly levitated about 3 feet, straight up, and ran out of the room. My most memorable TV-watching experience.