46 Years of Marriage and Television

by James Wallace Harris, 4/8/24

Susan and I celebrated our 46th wedding anniversary on March 26th. To commemorate the event, I’ve given myself the task of remembering all the TV shows we’ve watched together over the last 46 years. What’s been bugging me since 5:05 AM this morning has been trying to remember all the TV sets we watched all that TV on.

I can visualize the five apartments and two houses where we watched television. I can visualize the six cars we’ve owned over those forty-six years, but I can’t remember what the TV sets looked like from the early decades of our married life together. Obviously, we stared at them for hours a day so why can’t I remember what they looked like? I’ve checked my photos and can’t find any physical documentation. The first TV I can remember buying together was sometime after the year 2000 and it was a 36″ RCA monster of a CRT.

What’s funny is I can vaguely recall the TV stand we had when we first got married, a cheap aluminum affair on wheels. I assume we started off married life with a 19″ set I had owned as a bachelor. I just have no memory of it. I think we eventually bought a 25″ set, but it wasn’t a console. Just no memory whatsoever. I do remember that one of our first big purchases together was a VCR. We paid $800 around 1979. Susie used it to record soap operas to watch after work.

I believe we had cable TV at the beginning of our marriage because I just don’t remember using rabbit ears. And we had HBO before 1981 when MTV began, because I remember HBO playing music videos between movies and I loved them. That’s why I was so excited when MTV came out.

I enjoy challenging my memory with a specific task like this essay. And I’ve found that a fantastic way to trigger memories is to find an external anchor. I think the first show I can remember us watching together was I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theater. Wikipedia confirms that I, Claudius ran in Season 7 1977-1978. Since we met in July of 1977, that means my vague memory might be right.

My next memory is we watched the original All Creatures Great and Small Together. Wikipedia confirms it came out in 1978. However, I thought it came out on Masterpiece Theater, and Wikipedia nixes that idea. I also thought we were big fans of Masterpiece Theater, but Wikipedia reveals Susan, and I didn’t watch another series on that program until 1990 with Jeeves and Wooster. Looking over that Wikipedia page reveals we didn’t become big Masterpiece fans until Season 38 (2008) when they ran all the Jane Austen stories and have seen many of the shows since Masterpiece Theater was renamed Masterpience Classic. We really loved Downton Abbey starting in 2011. However, that might have been me, and not Susan. Thinking about it now, I think Susan was a latecomer to Downton Abby.

It’s funny how memories can be deceiving.

If we weren’t watching hi-brow shows, what else were we watching? I remember we both became addicted to MTV when it came out in 1981. Luckily, Wikipedia has pages for all the American TV seasons starting with 1945. I’ll use it as my memory crutch to recall our married life television viewing together. I’m only trying to remember what we watched together.

The first memory of the 1977-1978 schedule made me recall is Happy Days. Susan and I weren’t fans of that show, but I remember going over to her parents’ house and telling them we were getting married while they were watching Happy Days. (I was left alone with her dad to watch Happy Days while Susan’s mother took her in the back to ask if she had to get married.) The shows from that season that I remember Susan and I loving were Barney Miller and Soap.

For the 1978-1979 season we added Mork & Mindy, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Taxi to our watch list. This makes me remember that Susan and I loved sitcoms when we first got married. Normally, we went out a lot. We loved eating out at cheap places, or going to the mall, or the movies. I don’t think we watched a lot of TV in the early years.

In the 1982-1983 season we added Cheers on Thursday night on NBC. Taxi also moved to that night, and it became the early version of Must See TV on NBC on Thursday nights.

The 1984-1985 season added The Cosby Show to Must See TV night. Family Ties and Night Court also moved that time slot, so we had two hours of sitcoms.

Seinfeld started in the Summer of 1989. We loved that show.

Starting in the 1989-1990 season we added Roseanne to our list of sitcoms we tried to always catch. However, on Thursday nights in 1988, Must See TV was broken up and it got worse in 1989.

Looking over the schedules reveals something that conflicts with my memory. I thought we were TV addicts and watched all kinds of TV shows. But the schedules showed that for most nights there was nothing that we watched together, and I didn’t watch on my own. That makes me remember how often we went to the movies or rented videos.

I remember one time at Blockbusters they told us we had rented 794 movies. So, thinking about it, maybe Susan and I weren’t the TV fans I thought we were. But on the other hand, we loved buying the TV Guide every week. I’m thinking we might have watched more TV by ourselves, and I certainly don’t remember what Susan watched on her own. I think in the 1980s I vaguely remember Susan liking Murphy Brown and Designing Women. I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation without Susan.

In the Summer of 1990, we both fell in love with Northern Exposure, and I think we followed it faithfully until Joel left the series. I eventually watched all 110 episodes when it was syndicated on A&E, I think.

For the 1991-1992 season we added Home Improvement to our list of shows to watch. However, I believe Susan watched it more than me. Over the years, I think I started watching less TV.

We added Mad About You for the 1992-1993 season. We watched Seinfeld and Mad About You on Thursday together, and then Susan watched L.A. Law.

In the 1993-1994 season, Fraiser joined Must See TV and Wings moved to that night. We tried to always be at home for Mad About You, Wings, Seinfeld, and Frasier on Thursday nights.

The 1994-1995 season was big, because it added Friends and ER to Thursday nights. We now watched NBC from 7 until 10. I believe we stuck with Friends and ER for every episode. We both loved those shows.

We added 3rd Rock from the Sun for the 1995-1996 season. Obviously, by now my research is showing that Susan and I mostly watched sitcoms together. During these years I watched Nova on my own. But I don’t think I watched anything else by myself. I guess I wasn’t a broadcast TV addict like I’ve always thought I was. And I just don’t remember what we might have watched on cable channels.

During the next few years NBC kept monkeying around with Must See TV. I stuck for Friends, Seinfeld, and ER, but skipped on the other shows. I don’t remember if Susan watched the shows in between or not. Will & Grace and That ’70s Show came out in 1998 and we both loved them.

In the year 2000 Survivor premiered, and we followed that show together for over forty seasons. I stopped watching it this year because I didn’t like the new longer format.

In 2003, Susan got a job out of town, and lived in Birmingham, Alabama Sunday through Friday for ten years. She’d come home Friday night and go back Sunday afternoon. Those ten years completely threw us off watching TV together. When she finally transferred back to Memphis in 2013, we ended up each watching our own TVs, she in the living room, me in the den. We had completely adapted to diverse types of shows that each other didn’t like.

For those ten years I watched TV when friends came over. I got hooked on shows like Breaking Bad, The Americans, and Game of Thrones. Susan never did like this kind of television. On my own, I watched The Big Bang Theory. I believe that’s the last broadcast sitcom I’ve liked.

Nowadays, we get together twice a day to watch TV. Before supper, we watch Jeopardy and the NBC Nightly News together. Then from 9pm till 11pm we watch streaming TV series together. We’re currently watching Manhunt on AppleTV+, and We Were the Lucky Ones on Hulu. Before that we watched Feud: Capote and the Swans on Hulu and The New Look on AppleTV+. Sometimes we agree on a movie, but not that often. Before we liked sitcoms together, now we like shows that have a historical setting. Usually, they are limited series on streaming TV networks.

Lately, we’ve taken to one sitcom again, an old one. We watch Leave it to Beaver on Peacock on the nights when there are no new episodes of our other shows. Susan is still heavily addicted to sitcoms. She watches them all day long while she cross stitches.

JWH

How To End Identity Theft

by James Wallace Harris, 3/31/24

The reason we have identity theft is it’s easy to pretend to be someone else with just a credit card number, a password, and a bit of trickery. Because we no longer buy most of what we buy in person, sellers must accept tokens to prove who we are, and it’s easy for others to steal our tokens. We call it identity theft because thieves pretend to be us by using our tokens.

In the old days we had to show up in person to buy what we wanted. The seller was only concerned with the validity of the money. Their concern was counterfeit money, not counterfeit people. Credit cards introduced two problems. They could represent fake money from fake people. That was when the credit card only made an impression on a piece of paper. With electronic validation of funds sellers knew they could get their money, but they couldn’t prove from whom. This was the beginning of modern identity theft.

Thieves had to physically pretend to be someone else when buying in person, but the merchants’ requirements for proving identity weren’t hard to forge. It became even easier on the internet.

To stop identity theft will require perfect identification of a person. And we can’t reply on driver’s licenses, photo IDs, passwords, electronic keys, or other kinds of proofs of identity that can be forged. We need to prove the person is exactly who they are.

Can you prove who you say you are? Even if you had a birth certificate and every piece of printed identity you acquired over your whole lifetime, can you really prove who you are? Who are we really? Identity is an abstract concept. We need to make it physical.

Our bodies are who we are. We can give it any number, password, or electronic key to point to that body, but that won’t stop identity theft.

What the government needs to do is establish identity by having a person visit an agency that establishes physical identity. They record your face, voice, fingerprints, palm print, eye print, DNA, etc. and enter that into a database. Then whenever you need to prove your identity, either in person or online, those identifiers need to be measured again and the results compared to the database.

When validating your identity, it will be vital that no recordings of those biometric factors will be allowed. What’s needed is a machine that sends information back to the database in real time. The database needs to be able to connect to the validation machine and know it’s receiving live data only.

Imagine buying something at a store or at home. You’d have to have an identity validation device. It will include a video camera and a bunch of biometric sensors. You use the device to measure who you are. Since all transactions will also be recorded, I can’t imagine many thieves even wanting themselves measured so closely.

Our phones can do face and fingerprint identification, and it would probably be easy to add voice and eye print recognition. But phones compare input from sensors to previously stored recorded data on the phone. That’s not good enough. The recorded data of your physical identity needs to be in a national identity bank that’s guarded better than banks for money.

The national identity bank needs to be able to take control of remote sensors and verify live input against your recorded identity in the identity bank. If thieves somehow stole recordings of all your biometrics they could pretend to be you, so the key is to create identity recognition machines that can’t input recorded data and prove the data its sending back to the national identity bank is from live sensors.

Think of it this way. The old saying, “Seeing is proof.” That essentially meant you had to see with your own sensors (eyes) to believe. The identity bank will have billions of eyes that work in real time.

Of course, if such an identity system were created it would solve all kinds of problems, but it would also create others. For spending money, voting, buying airline tickets, going through customs, or doing anything where identity is crucial it would be a plus. But for people who want to stay anonymous, or not be tracked, or fool the system, or be somewhere illegally, it will be a negative. In a police state, with universal security cameras and AIs, such a national identity bank will be absolute power that corrupts absolutely.

But aren’t we moving towards such a system anyway? We’re required to get RealID driver licenses. Security cameras are becoming as universal as cockroaches. As we add more biometric sensors to our devices, merchants are bound to start using them. Banks and credit card companies are going to get tired of being responsible for refunding stolen money. They will demand more identity recognition tools. If banks and credit card companies didn’t refund stolen money and we had to cover our own losses, we’d start demanding them too.

I’m not sure we can avoid this future because most people will want it. My guess, is most people favor security over privacy.

JWH

What Method of Cursive Handwriting Was I Taught in 1959-1960?

by James Wallace Harris

I’ve been wanting to write by hand again, using cursive handwriting. For decades now, whenever I’ve had to write anything by hand, I printed it with block letters. It’s terribly slow. I keep trying to switch back to cursive so I can write faster and fluidly. However, the muscle memory of whatever cursive technique I was taught is faulty, causing frequent crashes in my penmanship. Such bumps in my inky road cause me to switch back to printing.

My friend Leigh Ann lent me The Art of Cursive Penmanship by Michael R. Sull after I mentioned to her that I wanted to learn handwriting again. Leigh Ann said most older people were taught the Palmer Method of penmanship, which was common in schools until the 1950s. In his book, Sull adapted a consensus of hand movements used in teaching the various forms of the Palmer Method and calls his version American Cursive. However, when he started using it, I realized I hadn’t learned to write certain letters that way, especially the upper-case F Q R and Z or the lower-case z. Here’s an example from Wikipedia.

I have a vague memory of learning cursive writing in school. I think it was in the third grade, which would have been the 1959-1960 school year for me. I completely have no memory of learning to write Qs and Zs this way. Now it’s possible that I’ve just forgotten. I’m forgetting words all the time nowadays, so why not forget some letters too?

According to Wikipedia, the Palmer Method might have been phased out by then and the new teaching method was called the Zaner-Bloser Method. It looks like this:

The differences are very slight. I think the big differences were in the teaching methods, especially how the hand and fingers were positioned and held. I believe each successive method aimed to make it easier for students to write by hand. It’s funny that most of us have forgotten this.

These are still the strange Qs and Zs. And I can’t make myself write zoo in cursive, either with a capital or lower case. It’s like my hand has no memory of writing Zs. Nor can I write anything with a capital Q. I do use that lower-case q.

Wikipedia says the Zaner-Bloser Method began to decline after the D’Nealian Method was introduced in 1978. It looks like this:

What’s weird is all the letters look about the same from method to method. It appears the physical method of writing them differs. I’ve also read that teaching penmanship varied depending on the teacher. I wonder if I had a weird teacher that didn’t like the Qs and Zs and created his/her own? (I went to three different third grade schools, in two states, and had a man, and two women teachers.)

What I’ve been learning this afternoon is my memory, especially my muscle memory, balks at writing some of these letters in the way they are being taught in their specific method. That suggests that the teacher taught me differently, or my teacher wasn’t paying close attention to me developing wayward habits. Do we all put our own spin on lettering? Is that why we have such a tough time reading each other’s cursive handwriting?

The reason I want to learn to write by hand again, using cursive, is because I want to write quickly and smoothly with a pen and have the results be easily readable. I’m not going for beautiful handwriting. I just want to develop a comfortable way to write with pen and paper. I keep reading that using pen and paper is better for my mind and memory than using a computer. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I will assume it is until proven false.

I also have back trouble if I sit at the computer for too long, so I’m hoping to learn to write with pen and notebook while in my La-Z-Boy.

What I’ve decided to do is practice handwriting by studying these techniques in a general sense to see if I can figure out the smoothest way to cursively move from one letter to another. I want my writing to flow so I don’t have to think about it. If I could handwrite without letters crashing together, I think I would be satisfied.

I doubt I need to study a whole book, but I do need to do a lot of practice until I can figure out how my pen should move from one letter to the next depending on all the combinations. Michael R. Sull has people copy poems and other kinds of writing, and I think that’s a promising idea.

I do find it fascinating I was taught something around 1959/1960 that became muscle memory, and it should be a clue to which writing method I was taught.

JWH

Growing Old with Television

by James Wallace Harris

Don’t you think it rather absurd that we’re conscious beings who have emerged into this fantastic reality for no reason that we can confirm and yet spend so much of our lives watching television and computer screens, which are essentially fake realities? Or look at it another way. They say when you die your whole life flashes in front of you in an instant. How will we feel when we see that a large fraction of our life was staring at a screen?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t watch TV or play on a computer, but I’m just asking if it isn’t weird when the universe around us is so far out that we should? Or maybe television is the most far-out thing this reality has produced?

I belong to the first generation brought up on television, and now we’re the generation that will spend our waning years going out watching TV. I’m 72 and can remember 69 years of screen addiction. Was it worth it? Or was it a lifetime devoted to a false idol?

When I was young, television shows were probably the most common topic of discussion I had with other people, and now that I’m old, that’s become true again. Whenever I get together with people, or talk with them on the phone, we generally always compare what television shows we’ve been watching, and which ones we recommend. Is that true for you and your friends?

Over the years I have found several ways to mark, rule, and remember time. Who was I living with, where was I living (state, city, street, house), what grade or job was I in, who was president, what songs were popular, what books I read, where I went to school or work, and of course, what was popular on TV.

Television has become a time machine because we can now watch shows from any period of our lives. The same is true with music and books, but television has more details that connect us with our past. If I watch an old show from the 1950s it reminds me of what the clothes, cars, houses, furniture, and people looked like back then.

Television is also transgenerational. The other night on Survivor, a few of the young contestants talked about how they loved to watch The Andy Griffith Show. I must wonder if that’s where they get their mental conception of the 1960s. I know I’m getting a mental image of the Nazi occupation of Paris from The New Look on Apple+ TV.

This makes me realize that I have several modes for evaluating reality. I assume the best mode is direct experience. Just above my monitor is a picture window, and outside that window is a tree. Books and magazines give me another view of nature via words. I’ve learned a lot about trees from them. But then, I’ve seen the most variety of trees and landscapes with trees on television. I’ve lived in many states, north, south, east, and west. But I’ve seen more places on TV.

TV is like our sixth sense. However, it can be a sense that looks out on reality like we do with our eyes, or it looks at make believe fantasies, like we do with our inner vision and daydreams.

I probably spend 4-5 hours a day watching TV. During my working years, I believe that number was less. In my childhood I think it was more. I’ve always wondered what life would have been like if I never watched television. I think it would have been more real but duller. I try to imagine what life was like in the 19th century, say as a farmer or factory worker. News about the world at large would come through newspapers and magazines, and it would be much delayed in time.

Now that I’m getting old and wanting to do less, I thought I would be watching more television. We think of television as a babysitter for children, but isn’t that also true for us old folks? However, I’m losing my ability to watch TV for some reason. I can only watch TV series and movies if I’m watching them with other people. Watching them by myself makes me restless. I can watch short things like YouTube videos by myself, but I’m even getting restless watching that stuff too.

I had planned to catch up on a lot of television shows and movies in retirement, but that’s not working out. I’m wondering if this is happening to other people. Does the novelty of television ever wear off?

JWH

I Gleaned Two Useful Bits of Wisdom from YouTube This Morning

by James Wallace Harris, 3/18/24

The first insight applies to internet addiction. I constantly check several apps on my iPhone all day, and regularly browse YouTube on my television. It’s gotten to be a terrible habit, even though it’s so satisfying.

The first video made an analogy to rats and internet use. If you provide a button to a caged rat that when pressed provides a food pellet, the rat will eat its fill and then stop pressing the button. But if you set the button to randomly provide a food pellet the rat will constantly push the button. The analogy is we constantly check the internet hoping to get a reward, but because we don’t always find something rewarding, we keep checking. I believe that describes my internet habit.

I’m going to take his advice and set a limited time to enjoy browsing. But for the other times I’ll only use the internet when I know I want something specific.

The second piece of advice is about To-Do lists. The guy on the video said if your To-List is too long, you’ll avoid using it. And that’s true for me. I use the same To-Do list app he uses, Todoist. So, I went and rescheduled most of my tasks for the future, and just left five on the main page. I might even reduce it to three. Or even one. I want to try extremely hard and get more things done, even if it’s only one thing a day.

It’s ironic that I found these two insights that are perfect for me by browsing. I think it’s important to do some internet browsing, but I was like a rat in a cage always pushing the button hoping that I’d get a reward. There’s just not that many truly significant rewards to be had on the internet every day.

I hope I can apply these two insights and stick to using them. I might even add them to my habit tracker. Since I started using it, I’ve been doing seven core habits for 151 days straight.

JWH