I have just spent an amazing amount of time collecting the
pieces of a home theater and assembling said pieces, including furniture. The
21st Century can be complicated.
When I was a kid, TVs were delivered from the TV store and
hooked up by the store professionals to antennas on the roof. If you wanted to
turn the TV on, you walked over and turned it on. Ditto if you wanted to change
the channel. The range was from channel 2 to channel 13, although I think one
or two of those were nothing but static all the time. Every channel was static
some of the time. At the end of the broadcast day they played the national
anthem and showed pictures of air force planes presumably protecting the ether
until the next day’s broadcasting began. Screens were small—thirteen inches
would be considered gigantic—and black-and-white. In my recollection, it seemed
as if the repairmen visited often. Those old TVs were collections of vacuum
tubes that always seemed to be blowing up. There would be a burst and you would
smell electronic fire, and for the next few days the set would be out of
commission. TV repairmen were the busiest people in town. Of course, no one had
more than one set, so you couldn’t just go into the other room, whatever that
was, and watch there. And since you couldn’t record shows, if you missed it,
you missed it, until rerun season. But as a rule shows weren’t continuous as
they are now. Every episode stood alone, so you really didn’t miss anything
except that episode, in which nothing earthshattering was likely to happen and
nothing that happened would probably ever be mentioned again. Today every show
is an installment, and miss one episode and you’ll have no idea what’s going
on, but today there’s no reason to miss an episode, and there you are.
I got my first color TV in the 70s when my wife won all 19
inches of it in some kind of office giveaway. She was reluctant to take it, as
it seemed too extravagant. It worked fine and never blew up. It was the set to
which I plugged a Betamax in 1980. We were among the first to have a videotape
recorder. VHS wasn’t even on sale yet. I replaced the Betamax once with a later
model and subsequently replaced it with VHS. I was big on time shifting, and
eventually owned a DVD recorder, although I never got into TiVo. Just didn’t
seem to need it.
In our house, watching TV means watching TV. We don’t do
anything else; we just watch what we’re watching. We watch virtually nothing
that is, as you might say, “on.” It’s all disks or streaming. As a rule, we do
one show a night during the week, which is what, forty minutes? Getting the new
HD big screen setup is intentionally directed at watching more movies. I used
to breathe movies back in the day, but got out of the habit of going to them
during my debate life. Honestly, I don’t think I missed much, because I do
believe that movies have not been on some sort of straight line up if the
measure is pure quality. There’s good ones, of course, but if you miss, say, a
Marvel superhero movie, you’ll probably survive until, two weeks later, the CGI
is recycled into another one. Still, I want to watch more. And I want to watch
them on a fairly big screen. Yes, I do believe in the movie-going experience,
sort of, but not that many movies available around here motivate me to go to a
theater to experience them. I just don’t feel like the bother is worth it. Last
movie we saw on the big screen was Into
the Woods. Have I missed all that much since then? (Sue me: Boyhood put me to sleep, and I doubt if
seeing it a lot bigger would have made it a lot better. Interstellar had the same understanding of black holes as the notorious Disney movie, The Black Hole. I
have Birdman cued up next; I’m
prepared to be disappointed. On the other hand, the TV show True Detective is phenomenal. What can I
say?)
The hardest part of setting up the new system was banging
together the new stand, which is still only 99% finished because the screws in
the last hinge elude me completely. But other than that I’ve got a new cable
box, soundboard, Blu-Ray player, the works. And today I threw away the boxes
and Styrofoam they all came with.
I think I’ll watch The
Honeymooners tonight.
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