Analog television

It's rather like the old telephone network that my friend Evan Doorbell celebrates. The technical quality of this antiquated technology is sometimes udder crap, but that's what makes it so interesting. Not to mention that it represents a living, if barely tenacious, lifeline to an earlier, simpler time. Do you realize that our soon to be euthanized analog color TV standard has been in place since the early 1950s, and represents basically a color overlay atop an even older standard? When you strip the Dolby 5.1 stereo surround sound, color, digital subcarriers, closed-captioning, and all that junk, you're watching the same basic black and white signal that flickered to life on 5-inch round picture tubes in the days before Pearl Harbor. I have images of the RCA Indian Head test pattern accompanied by a 1kHz test tone at 3:00 in the morning. No more. TV post-2009 looks more like full-screen YouTube. Sterile. You can hear a pin drop. And no fuzzy, distant stations between channels to fascinate geeky kids on early Saturday mornings. (Not that there's anything unique anymore on Saturday mornings that said kids couldn't get any other time and day of the week.) Digital signals are either there or they aren't, or they're frozen in an ugly mosaic of stuck pixels. Uck. Plasma TVs are pretty neat, though, if you watch them from a distance. And even if you don't, you don't have to worry about what my mom used to call "radiation" frying your sensitive little brain right where it sits, like an egg in the microwave.