Seven Sons

Years ago when a co-worker discovered that we didn’t have a television at home, he exclaimed, “What?! Who’s going to raise your kids?” He was being facetious, but his surprise at the fact was genuine. That’s one of the two reactions I get when I admit that we are a TV-free household – surprise and a amazed shaking of the head as if we had uninstalled our bathrooms and relied on an outhouse or something. The second possible reaction is, “Wow, that’s great…” in the sort of voice that finishes the sentence silently, “…but I could never do that.”

I don’t brag about it or try to proselytize the idea. When someone asks if I saw some show the other night, or if I follow some drama series, a simple “no” is truthful and sufficient. But on occasion I have to add the detail that I couldn’t watch the shows even if I wanted to – usually if someone is asking if I’ll be watching a game they know I am excited about, or if the conversation turns to how much TV to let one’s kids watch, or when folks are standing around comparing the size, quantity and technology of their sets at home.

It is often assumed that we ditched the TV when we started having kids, but the action predates our oldest child. It wasn’t a moral stand or a tough financial decision. I had moved the TV from the living room in order to use it as a second screen for editing videos on the computer. Three months later my wife was paying the cable bill and realized that the TV was still hooked to the computer instead of the coax in the wall. So she cancelled the service. It is possible that we didn’t miss it during that time because the set, inherited from her grandmother, was small, ugly and out of focus. Soon after cancelling the cable service we sent the set to the electronics graveyard at the local dump.

On 9/11/2001 we felt we needed to stay tuned in during the day so we broke out a tiny, 9-inch TV/VCR combo that we remembered we had on a shelf somewhere. It has since become known as the “disaster TV” and it came out of the closet for things like Hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian Tsunami and two sets of Southern Californian wild fires. Last year we bought a digital converter box so that we could still use the disaster TV when necessary.

It is tempting to proudly ascribe some of the positive attributes of our kids to the lack of television; they have great attention spans, learned to read early and well, have very developed imaginations and story-telling ability, and the only commercial product they beg for is Lego. I realize, of course, that there is no correlation with the TV free household, but sometimes watching at other kids who are well-known ravenous TV watchers unable to focus on anything for more than 90 seconds or get whiny about the latest toy fad, and one naturally starts to wonder.

Watching TV at home can be fun, informational, and a good way to unwind and get your brain off of the day at work. But lately some colleagues and friends have started exploring out loud the idea of cutting back on TV watching, and prompted me to come up with a list of things you would and would not miss about your television if you unplugged it for 3 months as an experiment. This isn’t a challenge I am putting out to the world, but if these lists prompt you to think about tuning out, or at least think about the value you place on the money you send to the cable or satellite company every month, then the lists are worth it. I’ll mention up front that, for reasons I can’t explain, getting rid of your television doesn’t seem to give you any extra time in the day to do other things. I’ll also mention that this is a kind of golden age for trying this experiment, with so many shows that you might choose to watch available online and myriad devices for moving video from your PC to your big screen.

What you would miss about television:

• Live sports
• Skipping commercials with the DVR
• The occasional babysitter when you need the kids fully distracted for 30 minutes
• The chance to gossip about Idol the next day
• Nightly national news
• “Your shows” that haven’t made it to Hulu yet – Anthony Bourdain and The Pacific come to mind.
• Channel surfing and landing on an amazing documentary on Discovery or History Channel

What you would not miss about television:

• Ads that play at 120% of the volume of the show you are trying to watch
• The coma induced by millions of flashing pixels, a remote control and a comfortable couch
• Nightly local news (I mean, has there ever been a valuable local news show?)
• Arguments about what to watch live and what to Tivo
• Threats and yelling when the kids won’t shut it off to do homework/go outside/eat dinner
• Your game console – that would still work

I’d be happy to hear if I missed anything, either in my lists or in my whole big picture view of the value of television.

I’m a pretty good Google search user. I know a lot of the tricks and keywords, and I know how to access the special searches (for music, for source code, etc).  Mostly I have just learned how to phrase a search to get a high probability of success. But every once in a while I spend a few minutes looking for something specific, and fail. For example, I haven’t been able to find:

1. The name of something when all I can remember about it is what the thing does and the letter it starts with. The other day I was trying to find a kind of floor jack that starts with the letter “s.” Google couldn’t help. I still don’t know what it is.

Photo credit: Bill the stick maker

2. A video of the greyhounds catching the mechanical rabbit. It came up in a conversation one day, and someone said, “I’ll bet there is a video on that on the web.” Turns out there isn’t, or else Google just can’t find it.

3. How much electricity I am using at any given moment in my house. No, wait! They are working on a Google device that can do that! But that leads me to…

4. How much water I am using at any given moment in my house.

A simple electrical circuit

5. The history behind why electrical current is indicated by the letter i on a circuit diagram. This came up in a conversation years ago, pre-Google, because a colleague swore that current should be represented by the letter c. He had a textbook from the 1920’s that proved his point, and he further claimed that because his source was older than mine (a more recent textbook), his answer was superior. I went to the library, found a citation using the letter i from a 19th century textbook, and proudly presented it to him the next day. I can’t seem to find any similar sources or a history of the symbol selection on the web using Google. And yes I did find the answer at WikiHow or Yahoo Answers or something but I think those answers are crap.

I’ll challenge readers to find any of these things, or to report the Google search failures you have had.

Wieden + Kennedy are earning every cent from Nike.

And Tiger should tip them.

If you need an example of how to make lemonade, look no further.

I know I shouldn’t wear it like a badge of honor, but today when I heard his name on the radio, I realized with some smugness that I must have been one of the few people in the entire nation who thought it was pronounced like “caine” instead of like “con-yay”.

So the media, being handed a scientific breakthrough story, are falling over themselves to call this thing the missing link. But since evolution is a slow, incremental, and continuous process that really isn’t a great term for the primate skeleton that was unvieled this week. My favorite comment on this story so far has to be one by user DeafDumbBlind on slashdot… “Great, 2 more gaps created in our fossil records.”

If you’ve made the host break down laughing, I think you’ve won already.

God, I love it.

“3/27/2009, 6:23am: Never mind about the eggplants. Probably should find another hobby. Thankfully, a man in my retired position can afford to do that.

3/31/2009, 11:44am: Painting landscapes now. I did one of the Smoky Mountains. Not-half bad.

3/31/2009, 1:39pm: Improved Smoky Mountain painting by putting Brian Urlacher in it. He’s milking a cow.”

Okay, I don’t know anything about beauty contests, and the only difference between Miss USA and Miss America that I can determine is the latter includes a talent contest of dubious value and somehow involves Donald Trump. But a Wilmington girl has won the former, and unlike Miss California she’s not a bigot (as far as we know, anyway), and…whatever, here’s the swimsuit shot:

OK, I know I’m not supposed to eat Chilean Sea Bass, or use plastic grocery bags, or leave the water running while I brush my teeth. I buy a lot of organic, drive a Prius, and even use sink and laundry water in the garden. But how could I possibly have known that buying seedless mandarins, the ones that are grown locally and organically, the ones the kids love so much and are easy to peel and go by the genius brand name “Cuties,” are threatening the livelihood of beekeepers? And why hasn’t someone told me that my favorite soft toilet tissue is destroying old growth forests? Next you’ll tell me that my laptop is made by indentured labor in China, or my compost pile is attracting West Nile Virus mosquitoes. Sigh. I guess I need to subscribe to more blogs.

Update: Check the comments below regarding TechCrunch being “full of shit.”

Damn. I liked this service. But if it turns out that Last.fm actually did hand out data then I’m out of there like shit through a goose. Not because I listened to an illegal copy of U2’s latest piece. Actually, I haven’t thought about U2 since Auchtung Baby. I didn’t even realize Bono was still alive.

I’d bag on Last.fm on principal. The principal being that the RIAA needs to find a business model that isn’t based on the same business model they started with in 1952.