I hardly watch TV

 “I hardly watch TV at all,” I said to an old friend.
I had to reset my DVR after a power-failure.
I had it do a channel-scan: 61 channels, 20 of which are non-digital.
I get them over cable, the cheapest and most basic video-service.
(I also do cable Internet.)
I remember when there were only three channels: ABC, CBS, and NBC. And they all broadcast over-the-air.
Our house in Erlton (“EARL-tin;” as in “Earl”), like all houses back then, had an antenna on the roof, then a double antenna-wire down inside our house to our TV.
Then we got a fourth channel. It was educational-TV out of Wilmington, DE, Channel-12. ABC out of Philadelphia was WFIL, Channel-6, CBS was WCAU, Channel-10, and NBC was WPTZ, soon replaced by something else I can’t remember the call-letters of, Channel-3.
I come from the Howdy-Doody and Lone Ranger generation.
“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver!’”
Our first TV was a giant heat-box by RCA (Radio-Corporation-of-America) that was black-and-white.
My mother once worked at the RCA plant in Camden, NJ, assembling radios.
RCA went defunct in 1986.
When that TV finally died, shortly after my family moved to northern DE in December of 1957, my father refused to replace it.
He declared TV was Of-the-Devil, a waste.
I remember my 11th-grade English-teacher, an avowed Christian like my father, unable to understand I couldn’t watch “Julius Caesar” like his other students.
Color-TV began in the late ‘50s, but I felt it wasn’t worth it.
In fact, I didn’t buy a color-TV until the ‘80s, a Sony Trinitron. —Remember Trinitron?
For years my wife-and-I had no TV at all. Our first TV was a black-and-white Sears portable from the early ‘70s. I remember watching the Watergate hearings on it, and Nixon’s audio-tapes.
Bespectacled John Dean wiggling, and Sen. Sam Ervin, upraised index-finger wagging, reciting Galatians 6: 7-9 “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap!”
I still have that TV. It’s downstairs in my basement. It got its signal from rabbit-ears, over-the-air TV.
So I guess I inherited my father’s values concerning TV; I feel it’s a waste. About all I do is record the news, which I watch on delay while eating dinner.
I’m not the least bit interested in “Dancing With the Tarts,” “American Idol,” and other bits of trash.
Nor am I interested in some overly-buxom floozie explaining why her boobs are so big.
I have no interest in droll Dr. Phil, or Dr. Oz. And “Oprah” turns me off — as does fulminating on “The View.”
The cardio machines at the YMCA are cardio-theaters. They have an integral TV-set. I shut ‘em off.
But unlike my father I don’t fervently study the Bible.
What I do is monkey with this computer, and sling words.
Every once-in-a-while this ‘pyooter lobs some stinking hairball at me, which I get to figure out.
And just about every morning I’m slinging together one of these blogs while I eat my cereal. —Which is what I’m doing right now.
I end up killing time writing these blogs, and have no time for TV.
My TV reflects my values. It’s just the cheapest flat-screen I could find, maybe 14 inches wide, not some gigantic 48-inch “plasma-baby.”
Where my money is, is this here computer.
And its peripherals.
My gigantic scanner cost over $2,000.
My printer is also gigantic; it can print photo-quality up to 17 inches wide.
I also have a lot of money tied up in software, Photoshop-Elements, plus optical-recognition software, for example.
How many people have optical-character-recognition (OCR) software? I might need it. Those David P. Morgan articles in “Trains of the 1960s” are from OCR scans.
This laptop itself, an Apple MacBook Pro bought reconditioned by Apple, not new, set me back about 1,700 smackaroos.
I think my TV cost about $250.
My brother-from-Boston is incensed. He can’t understand why I don’t have a 48-inch plasma-baby to watch “Junkyard Dogs,” Howard Stern, and the Bachelorette.

• “Erlton” is the small suburb of Philadelphia in south Jersey where I lived until I was 13. Erlton was founded in the ‘30s, named after its developer, whose name was Earl. Erlton was north of Haddonfield, an old Revolutionary town.
• I work out in the Canandaigua YMCA Exercise-Gym, appropriately named the “Wellness-Center,” usually three days per week, about two-three hours per visit. (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city to the east nearby where I live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” It’s about 14 miles east. —I live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield, southeast of Rochester.)
• “Plasma-babies” are what my brother-from-Boston calls all high-definition wide/flat-screen TVs. Other technologies beside plasma are available, but he calls them all “plasma-babies.”