Humor by John Christmann
Snow Day
The other night my kids entered into an important discussion inspired by thought provoking television programming. An announcer spoke as words scrolled across the bottom of the screen: As Advertised in Golf Magazine! Lively music played and a man danced a tango with his wife.
“What is erectile dysfunction?” my daughter asked.
Her brother tried his best to answer. “I think it’s when an alligator bites someone," he replied
“No, that’s reptile dysfunction.”
“Maybe it’s when a voting machine breaks, like in Florida.”
“No, I think that’s electile dysfunction.”
“Then it must be when pieces are missing from an Erector set."
“Yea, or maybe it’s a broken antenna.” said my daughter.
At which point they started to sing with the TV.
Viva, Viagra they crooned.
And then I turned the TV off.
Just for the record, I don’t play golf. But I do occasionally watch 60 Minutes, which was the program my kids and I were viewing on Sunday evening when I narrowly missed having a discussion I didn’t want to have. I only hope that the advertisers were targeting Mike Wallace and not me. But the whole incident reminded me why I don’t watch television much anymore.
It would be easy to blame my waning interest on relentless advertising. But the fact is, even with hundreds of channels, there is not really all that much to watch. Having been raised in a television generation, filling my brain cells year after year with a steady diet of innocuous theme songs and ridiculous plot lines, I guess I have finally reached the saturation point. I just can’t get excited about television anymore. I have Telectile dysfunction.
But there is a remedy. Very soon the analog television broadcast as we know it will cease to exist. I know this because it was advertised on 60 minutes. The signal will be replaced instead with digital transmission that promises to deliver more channels with greater clarity. It promises to improve my viewing pleasure and the frequency with which I can enjoy TV. It is a lot like Viagra for the airwaves. Viva digital!
As technological events go, the switch from analog to digital is pretty ho hum. Many viewers receive their signals over cable. Many have newer sets that are capable of receiving digital transmissions. And for those that are still using rabbit ears to pluck their favorite channels out of the air, a box that converts analog signals to digital is available to ensure uninterrupted service.
This device is like an iron lung for your television—it hooks up to the back of your TV with a confusing assortment of short cables that are hard to connect. The good news is that you can obtain a forty dollar coupon toward the purchase of a converter box from the government. I think it is part of the rescue plan.
But despite this orchestrated transition to digital, when the cutover day finally comes, many people may arise to turn on their favorite cartoons and see nothing but the unearthly snow of dead airwaves.
Snow used to be a common sight on TV. It wasn’t all that long ago that broadcasters signed off for the night with a rousing display of the American flag flapping to the strains of the Star Spangled Banner. And then, at twelve midnight, the home of the brave abruptly cut to a cold, bleak, black and white speckled void filled with fleeting shadows and the metallic scratch of abrasive static.
I remember being frightened by TV snow when I was very little. To me it was a mysterious world of life without life, and I sometimes watched the empty signal to see if apparitions would appear. Maybe God would talk to me. Or ghosts. Or aliens broadcasting messages from another planet.
And then, sometime in the early morning hours, a test pattern would appear, followed by the ominous tone of the Emergency Broadcast System warning me that my only connection with the living world was through the television set.
In those days, snow on the television could mean only two things, neither of them good. Either the antenna was broken or the world had ended.
As a society we fiddled endlessly with rabbit ears to remove the ghosts of poor reception, often selfishly committing a family member to maintain their finger on the antenna because reception was always better with human touch, even if it might cause genetic mutations. And sometimes our brave fathers would even adjust the large antennas on rain soaked roof tiles amid howling winds and lightning storms.
Despite the obvious dangers, we did little to stop them because we could not bear to miss Marcus Welby, M.D. save the life of a misunderstood man who accidentally impales himself on a roof antenna as he tries to install a television for deprived orphans.
Over the years technical advances strengthened the transmission system so that television broadcast was virtually inescapable to anyone who had access to a television. High power transmission towers sent signals all over the world. Even by the early seventies a broadcast from the moon could be seen right in the comfort of our living rooms.
Twenty years later billions of people around the world could watch a sixteen-year-old doctor named Doogie Howser solve the medical mystery of a misunderstood television repair man who glowed in the dark. And all during this time the tightly modulated signals of high frequency electromagnetic waves catapulted into space at the speed of light bearing our favorite episodes of The Dukes of Hazard for anyone with an antenna large enough to receive them.
Thirty thousand years from now, when we are long buried under ice, highly evolved beings similar to humans will be searching for signs of life in the universe. One day their scientists will detect electromagnetic signals emanating from a star at the fringe of the galaxy. They will develop technology to amplify and decode the mysterious signals.
And then, maybe by accident, an image will appear on a gas filled tube in a remote corner of their laboratory. The scientists will gather around and watch in awe as a bunch of Tennessee hillbillies discover oil and move to a mansion in Beverly. Hills that is, swimming pools, movie stars.
These sentient beings won’t know it, but they will be in for a dose of reality TV like they could never imagine. For sixty years our great civilization will parade before them week after week—with some reruns during the summer months—and chronicle who we are and what we have accomplished.
They will witness talking heads, talking cars, and talking horses. They will follow the adventures of detectives, doctors, lawyers, witches, angels, vampire slayers, and life guards in bikinis. They will worship the lives of great American families like the Adams Family, the Brady Bunch, the Ewings, the Bunkers, the Simpsons, and the Sopranos. Did I forget Beavis and Butt-Head?
And then one day it will all abruptly end. The signals from the planet they have come to know as Earth will end. Their crude receivers will flicker with static. They will go out to their metal antenna farms during lightning storms and fiddle with vast arrays of telescoping rods hoping beyond hope to recover the signal so they can watch the final episode of ER in which Dr. Ross returns to save the life of a misunderstood man who is crushed by a large screen television as he tries to install something called a digital converter.
On that day, thirty thousand years from now, a new civilization, modeled after man, will have nothing to guide them but the empty snow of a world in the Twilight Zone.
Fade to a stark image of the American flag flying motionless on the moon. Bring up voice-over narrative.
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fear and the summit of his knowledge. It is an area we call . . . broadcast television.
Cut to digital.
Authors note: The transition to digital was originally scheduled to take place at midnight on February 17th. Congress recently delayed the transition until June so that no one would miss the last episode of ER.
© 2009 Dadinthebox.com