Toshiba DR570 DVD Recorder

I bought a Toshiba DR570 DVD Recorder to be my poor man’s DVR.  After theorizing about saving money by giving up cable TV, I quickly learned that I missed having a DVR after living without cable.  I love  having fewer channels, but I do miss the on-screen guide and being able to record one show while I watch another, or to record a show when I’m not home. 

DVD Recorders aren’t popular like the old VCRs once were, but they function in the same way – the media you record on, the DVD, is just different, but the setup and operation is the same.  You have to program the timer to record a future show, or go to the show and hit record to snag what’s showing on screen now.  It’s no where near as convenient as a DVR – but if the DR570 had an electronic programming guide, it would be close.

A DVD recorder works just like the old VHS machines, and the switch to digital TV has affected them too.  You can no longer use old VHS or DVD recorders with analog tuners.  I had a perfectly good Samsung DVD recorder that worked with analog signals and my Comcast DVR, but doesn’t work with over-the-air digital TV – and that’s why I had to buy the DR570 – it has a tuner to receive over the air digital signals.

Because the DR570 has a digital tuner and my Samsung DLP TV has a digital tuner, I can record one show and watch another.  One antenna works for both.  The indoor HDTV antenna plugs into the DR570 DVD Recorder, and then a second coax cable goes from the DR570 to the Samsung TV.  This pass-through arrangement doesn’t interfere with the reception on the TV when the DR570 is off or while recording.  The DVD Recorder has a HDMI output, so switching to it just means pressing the Source button on my TV remote.

There is a picture quality difference between the two tuners which makes me think there might be a lot of variation in the electronics to digital tuning of over-the-air signals.  The DR570 picture seems softer than what I get from the Samsung TV, but quite nice.  The recorded quality varies greatly between the 5 recording modes (1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 hours).  Two hour mode is OK, but one hour mode is so impressive that I try to use it exclusively.  I can accept two hour mode, but four, six and eight hour modes are unacceptable by my picky standards.  Now my wife wouldn’t complain about four hour mode, but at the four hour mode I see  artifacts from fast moving elements of the picture – even people’s lips moving when they are talking, I find this annoying. 

I’ve also learned that turning on progressive mode within the DR570 settings menu greatly improves the recorded results.  One hour mode is as good as a DVD on a high definition TV, but not Blu-Ray quality, about equal to HD DVR output.  The output fills the wide screen HDTV and looks like high definition TV. 

Neither of my two digital TV tuners comes with the over-the-air TV Guide.  My friend Mike just got a new digital HDTV with a TV Guide brand on-screen guide built in.  I wonder why neither of my digital tuners has this feature because it would make living with over-the-air TV so more of a luxury.  It would also make recording a show on a DVD Recorder a snap, like using a DVR.  The David Pogue article I link to above suggests that manufacturers don’t want to compete with the cable TV industry, and this might be true.  The broadcast of a electronic program guide is required by the FCC, but the display of the guide by TV makers is not.  Bummer. 

If free over the air TV came with an electronic program guide that worked with a cheap hard-disk recorder I wouldn’t miss cable TV at all.  A TiVo would be the perfect over-the-air DVR solution, except TiVo wants $12.95 a month for their program guide, which jinxes the deal for me.   Many people make their own TiVo by building a Home Theater PC and using one of the many Internet program guides.  I might do this in the future, but for now want to avoid complexity and cost.  My goal is to stay on the path to simplicity – if you can call our high tech world simple.

The DR570 has turned out to be a good solution as my poor man’s DVR, but if it had come with the TV Guide On Screen feature it would have been fantastic.  DVD disks clutter my TV stand and are annoying to keep up with, but they do the job – I don’t miss my TV shows, and I can record now and watch latter (and skip commercials).   The TV purist in me wishes I’d only watched TV in real time and just let go of the anguish of missing TV shows.  My Zen mind tells me to let go, and let time flow naturally, but I’m still a grasshopper.

DVR +R or –R discs are dirt cheap.  Recording isn’t as convenient as a DVR, but if you don’t do a lot of recording it’s no big deal.  Recording three or four shows from one evening on one disk in four hour mode is possible, but it’s work, and the quality of the results is poor.  An electronic programming guide would reduce the work, but not improve the video quality.  Four-hour quality is OK if you don’t want to miss your shows, but not to save them or show off high definition TV to your low definition TV friends.

The DR570 cost me $159.95, or ten months of DVR service on Comcast.  I selected this Toshiba unit at Amazon sight unseen because many customers gave it positive reviews.  However, I agree completely with all the complaints about the terrible remote.  The buttons are small, oddly arranged, with hard to see labels.  Engineers working on the next model should overhaul the remote and add TV Guide On Screen.  A killer device would be to add a DVR drive to the mix with a dual digital tuner.  That way you could record to disk for convenience, and burn to DVD when you want to save a show or make sure your friends didn’t miss something cool.  Content creators will be horrified at this idea.  A DVD Recorder/DVR combination designed to work with over-the-air broadcasts and over-the-air TV Guide would probably convince a lot of people they really don’t need  their cable/satellite services.  I have no desire to see these businesses go under, but there’s a lot of people out there that don’t want or need the fire hose blast of hundreds of TV channels.

One nice side-effect of the DVD Recorder is if I record a show and want someone else to watch it, I can just give them the disc.  That’s better than a DVR.  Or I can save it to watch again in the future.  I keep a Sharpie by the TV and mark my discs as I record them and store them on an empty DVD spindle.  The DVD Recorder can use DVD-RW discs if you want to watch, erase and record again, and I have some of those, but I’ve found in my quest for watch less TV, to also try and record less.  The DVR made TV watch too easy, encouraging the bad habit of cramming huge amounts of TV into my life.  Moderation is now my goal.  I like to think before I record any show:  Is it DVD worthy.

 

JWH – 9/26/9

Science Fiction’s Imagined Black Swans

Most people watching a movie or reading a book set in the future would label the story science fiction.  Yet, if you look at the backlog of science fiction stories, which surely must exceed a million by now, has there ever been one that even came close to predicting the future?  Despite silly beliefs about Nostradamus, the future is obviously unpredictable.  The idea of prophecy has been around since the earliest of recorded history – which tells us it’s a well loved belief.  In his book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a full frontal assault on the idea of predicting the future which I think some science fiction fans will find enlightening.  Not only does Taleb feel predicting the future is usually delusional, but he also claims we have an innate mental mechanism that sees connections in ordinary reality where none exist.  He calls that brain function the “narrative fallacy.”

To be clear, science fiction never claims to predict the future.  Science fiction’s primary purpose, like all forms of fiction, is to entertain.  However, for some SF writers and fans, science fiction can be used as a tool to speculate about the future, and for those aficionados, The Black Swan is a book they will want to read.  Personally, I think science fiction is at a turning point – at a cusp – like when a religion turns from revelation to dogma.  Much of the skeptical knowledge that Taleb chronicles in his book has been around for centuries, but I think he produces a new synthesis that should be required reading for anyone who likes to make claims about reality or the future.

A black swan, as proposed by Taleb, is a major event that surprises everyone, usually one that shakes up the status quo, but is quickly rationalized in the public’s mind as an event that should have been foreseen.   9/11 is the perfect example of a black swan.  It’s so obvious after the fact, that terrorists could do massive damage with hijacked airliners that we should have made airplanes hijacker proof long ago.  But we didn’t.  The black swan is the metaphor that Taleb uses as a central focus to show off a lifetime of meditation and research about the problem of predicting the future.

I think all truly ambitious science fiction writers want to imagine a black swan, either getting the jump on a real one, or just conjuring up a fictional black swan that will dazzle the minds of their readers.  Just think, if back in 1898 Martians had really invaded Earth before H. G. Wells wrote his famous novel, what a tremendous black swan that would have been.  Think about Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, and the idea of cold sleep mixed with investments, that would have made a stunning black swan.  Science fiction is all about imaginary black swans.

Taleb’s day job is finance, an industry unlike science fiction, that bets the farm on predicting the future.  When science fiction writers speculate on the future they have nothing to lose but their writing reputations.  However, and this might be a narrative fallacy on my part, science fiction as a general concept also has a reputation to protect.  Sad to say, I feel in the mundane world of the well educated, science fiction has been judged to be no more than a fun toy for children or a literary outlet for nutty thinkers.

Again, I point out that science fiction seldom tries predicting the actual future.  You can judge science fiction with other crystal ball readers but that would be unfair.  However, we can critique science fiction on how creatively it speculates, by how accurate SF writers develop their “if this goes on” stories.  We know Wall Street, backed by armies of specialists and trillions of dollars, usually does a mediocre job for handling future scenarios.  That’s the focus of Taleb’s book, explaining why they do such a abysmal job.  The Black Swan makes it very clear how hard it is to speculate about the future and why.

So how does a field like science fiction composed of self-educated wild idea writers do?  Robert A. Heinlein’s first story, “Life-Line” is about an inventor who builds a machine that predicts how long people will live, illustrating how science fiction sometimes entertains the idea of predicting the future.  Heinlein’s early career was even built around his “Future History” stories.  Reading those stories now in his collection “The Past Through Tomorrow” shows how terrible he did as a pre-cog, but like I keep saying, that’s not the point.  We don’t have rolling roads, the first Moon landing wasn’t financed by a rich man, and people don’t hang out in bars on the Moon or inside space stations.  But men did land on the Moon.

I guessed that there’s been a million science fiction stories, but most short stories and novels usually contain dozens if not hundreds of imagined ideas about the future.  It’s like all these SF writers are firing shotguns at the future, each load a scattershot of ideas, and with the hope that maybe one tiny pellet might hit it’s mark occasionally.  The big black swan success of science fiction was the Apollo landings on the Moon.  Without wild eyed Sci-Fi visionaries it’s doubtful the idea of spending billions to send someone to the Moon would have occurred to the average human.  Now is that a narrative fallacy on my part that I see science fiction giving birth to the Apollo program way back when?

Space travel was the black swan science fiction has been predicting regularly since Jules Verne.  I think we can also give science fiction credit for robots, but what else?  And how many black swans has science fiction missed?  A common complaint against science fiction is it didn’t predict the impact of the computer on society, especially micro computers and the Internet.  A world strangled by terrorism was imagined by John Brunner in Stand on Zanzibar.  Zanzibar is definitely not our world, but reading it you realize that it is possible to get pretty damn close at times.  

With hindsight, we can look backwards and make lame comparisons to all kinds of science fictional ideas and compare them to the present, such as Star Trek communicators and cell phones, or find it amusing that Jules Verne had his first lunar mission blasting off from Florida, of course his astronauts really blasted off, as in a canon shell!

Collective, the majority of science fiction stories have been predicting a black swan for over a hundred years now, and that’s the idea that space travel will transform humanity.  For almost fifty years, the narrative fallacy that I’ve personally pursued is space travel if our destiny.  Now I have to wonder if space civilizations are just stillborn black swans.  Do I just suffer doubt and impatience, or am I feeling the reality of skepticism?

To understand the idea of narrative fallacy imagine you are sleeping near an open window and you hear the bushes rustle.  Paranoid people will automatically think, “Oh my god, it’s a burglar.”  Other people might yell out, “Hey Rusty, is that you?” thinking it might be the neighbor’s cat, or some other pet.  Now it could be a raccoon or other varmint common to the neighborhood.  Some people might even worry it’s a vampire, ghost or evil spirit.  Depending on our personality and past experiences, our brains will instantly provide a narrative for the sound outside.  Few people go, “Why listen to the bushes, what a pleasant sound they make.”

Science fiction writers hear the bushes rustle and write, “The time traveler unfortunately popped into our space-time coordinates that were the same as my big holly bush” or “A tiny flying saucer from Betelgeuse must have crashed landed in the hedge just outside my bedroom window – I’m sure nothing else could have made that sound.”

Another way of looking at the situation, we’re all fiction writers constantly altering our perceived reality with narrative diarrhea, and quite often many of us are science fiction writers extending our speculations into the future, but sadly most of our ideas about reality and unfolding futures are absolutely wrong, if not dangerously delusional.  Sometimes the delusion is harmless, like thinking, “If Ashley will go out with me tonight surely I’ll get laid before the night is over.”  But if you think, “If I bet next week’s paycheck on the game I’ll make enough money to cover a check to Frank for that Mustang he’s selling” then the narrative fallacy could end up hurting you.

What Taleb is telling us in The Black Swan:  “Watch out!  Your thinking can be dangerous!”  A Zen master will have the mental self-control to avoid these all too human habits, but few regular folks do.  Watch the nightly news and try to see how many tragedies occur because people falsely imagined something about reality, or tried to predict the future.

The trouble is, we can’t live without laying down narratives to explain bits of reality or predicting the future.  If we truly tried to “Be Here Now” and not imaginatively interpret reality we’d have minds like cats.  If we avoided predicting the future, we wouldn’t see global warming coming.  Look what’s happening with extreme conservatives.  They have created a narrative where they equate President Obama to Hitler and they fear the U.S. will follow the same path Germany did in the 1930s.  But in my narrative, Germany was taken over by extremely aggressive conservatives that would go to any length to achieve their agenda. 

By Taleb’s accounting, we’re both wrong.  Simple narratives are always wrong in explaining complex realities, and the future can’t be predicted.  This also explains why most science fiction stories fail to imagine situations in the future that eventually come true.  We can’t predict the future, and simplified analogies like Star Trek communicators are like cells phones fail.  In Star Trek, Captain Kirk would open his communicator and say, “Scotty,” and Scotty would instantly reply, “Yes, Captain” as if poor Scotty had to forever sit with communicator in hand waiting for Jim’s call.  We know how cell phones work, and they don’t work that way.

The challenge to science fiction writers who want to speculate about the future and who have read The Black Swan will be to write a new kind of science fiction, one that is well verse in the predicting pitfalls that Taleb describes, but also write fiction skeptical about false narratives.  Science fiction has as many miracles in its history as ancient religions, and its done no better than ancient prophets at seeing the future.  A black swan savvy science fiction writer will have to thoroughly know and understand the mistakes science fiction has made in the past, and be extra wary of making new mistakes, and yet know the odds are still a million to one that he will fail.

Science, especially cosmology and astronomy is progressing so fast that it’s invalidating science fiction faster than it can be written.  Current knowledge about SETI and extra-solar planets kill off any ideas that older civilizations of intelligent beings exist in the core of the galaxy, or that anything living as we are aware of what life can be, could exist anywhere near the core of galaxies.  Our growing knowledge of radiation in the solar system is quickly changing what we can imagine for manned interplanetary space exploration.

In other words, for every imaginary black swan science fiction throws out, science throws out two real black swans.  Taleb focuses on financial black swans, like the recent housing market crash, black swans with massive impacts that are obvious to most citizens because they affect their reality.  Science produces black swans that are profound to scientists that can understand them, but are silent to the silent majority.  What I have to wonder if science hasn’t already killed the imaginary black swan of science fiction that sees the future of humanity living on other planets in our solar system and beyond.

Few people like raw reality, they prefer it with juicy narratives and futures of dazzling possibilities.  Billions embrace an imaginary black swan created two thousand years ago with the spread of Christianity that radically transformed humanity with the heavy concept of a resurrection.  Taleb deals with real black swans, but I see imaginary ones everywhere.

The black swan I’m waiting for is the one where everyone sees reality like Taleb suggests.  We live in a universe without gods, without afterlife, without narrative meaning.  The universe extends infinitely in all dimensional directions, always has, always will, and we are insignificant in relation to it.  Any purpose we find will be defined by ourselves, and as Taleb points out, that purpose is generally delusional, but other than that, we’re lucky beyond all measures of mathematics to be living in such a fantastic reality.  One of my favorite narrative delusions is science fiction can help us imagine reality and the future, like history and science give the illusion of how and why things have been working since the Big Bang.

If I fully embraced Taleb’s Black Swan thesis, I’d have to give up science fiction and live like a Zen Master.  That wouldn’t give me much to blog about.  My mental makeup is more like Robert Wright and his book The Evolution of God – I see purpose in reality, not spiritual evolution maybe, but I can’t wonder about the patterns in reality.  It appears that reality is evolving from chaos to order, but that might be my delusional narrative – it’s easy to see patterns in the infinite foam of reality.  I don’t think all of reality was created for the purpose of producing homo sapiens, but I can’t help wondering if our species is the first to wake up in the infinite foam of multiverse reality.  To me, science fiction’s real purpose is to be the natural philosophy that answers that question.

I’ve written about realistic science fiction before, and people who have read those essays probably think I’m becoming a harpy.  But some science fiction writers love the challenge of writing narratives about real reality and imagining possibilities for the future, and some readers love to read those stories.  That game only gets harder and more challenging, and but then it’s so much more fun.

JWH – 9/20/9   

The Return of the Fab Four

So far I’ve purchased four of the remastered Beatles albums:  Beatles For Sale, Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.   The sound quality is amazing.  It reminds me of Super Audio CD (SACD) quality.   I can’t help but wonder what the remastered content would have sounded like on a real SACD disc, which has a sampling rate of 2822.4 kHz compared to 44.1 kHz for the CD, and the storage capacity of 7.95 GB versus the CD’s 700 MB.  Theoretically the difference should be a 7 on the Richter scale, but the reality of blind tests have shown most people can’t tell the difference, and this may be true of the new releases.  I can tell the difference, and I expect anyone who tries, should be able to hear significant differences clearly with the new productions.

To me, comparing the old CDs and the new, the remastered albums sound phenomenal.  The new sound is so clean, so bright that the musical instruments stand out with vastly more texture, and the Beatles’ voices have a richness that makes the old CDs seem faded and muddled.  However, the average person might go, “Ho-hum, what’s the big deal!”  So far reviewers haven’t said that, but I’m expecting some buyers to respond that way.

Evidently, a CD technically provides all the dynamic range that most people can hear.  To hear the difference between the first generation of Beatles CDs and the new remastered CDs, you’ll need to play them on a good stereo at home or in the car, and you’ll need to pay attention.  If music is just the soundtrack of your life played in the background while you bop through your routines, save your money and wait for the MP3 releases.  The new CDs come with colorful booklets, containing far more Beatles photos than the original albums, plus a good bit more background story for the album, but far less content than I was expecting, and each comes with a QuickTime “mini-documentary” – but I was disappointed here too, because “mini” is the apt description. (Here’s a portion of the mini-documentary from Beatles for Sale.)  I guess if they had included a longer film they would have had to cut down on the sonic quality of the music.  I own the wonderful Beatles Anthology so I was expecting the new on-disc documentaries to surpass that standard, whereas they appear to crib from it.

These are A+++ productions, but I was still wanting more from the extras.  I guess it’s bitchy of me to expect so much.  I was hoping each album would come with the definitive documentary, essay and photos that would totally capture for all time each album’s moment in history.  I just can’t get enough Beatles info at the moment.

Because the release of the remastered CDs and Beatles Rock Band are such a media event, I’m finding lots of wonderful reads – check them out:

JWH – 9/10/9

Mind Over Matter

When the day is fine, and you hate it to end, don’t you wish you could exert mind over matter, and extend it a few more hours?  Or when your energy is spent, and pain defines your limits, and you feel time is running out – don’t you wish for a way out?  Now, I don’t mean a final exit kind of thing.  Nor the easy solution of popping a pain pill to buy a few hours release.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about those moments when you ask God for help, if you’re a believer, or wish for a helpful God when you are not, and you hear silence, don’t you secretly want to believe in the power of positive thinking?

I don’t believe in magic, so I’m not expecting to twitch my nose like Samantha and rearrange reality.  And since I don’t believe an omnipotent being is listening to our prayers ready to intercede with a helping hand, I’m not talking about supernatural powers.  And I’m not even talking about the power of thought where people believe with right thinking riches will come their way.  No, I’m exploring the subtle effect of the placebo, or why some people don’t get sick during flu epidemics, or why that only 1 person in 20 can lose weight and keep it off, or why some kids learn so much more in the same class as others.

We all know people who overcame extreme odds and won.  We all know about the power of the placebo effect.  We’ve all read fantasy stories where the good witch tells us we had the power all along to go home but didn’t believe it.  Somewhere between the grim reality of fate and the magic of Harry Potter is a realm where the mind has influence.  I’d love to know where the limits of the mind lie.  How come some people can run five day African desert marathons and other healthy people take the elevator to avoid a single flight of stairs?

I’ve always defined my limits by health.  I’ve always felt I had unlimited potential as long as I was healthy.  As soon as I get sick in any way I feel like I’m running up against a concrete wall.  Now that I’m getting older I feel the constraint of many more barriers.  For several years I was constrained by a heart arrhythmia but I finally had a surgical procedure and now I’m better, except that I’ve now got arthritis in a back vertebrae, and maybe a pinched nerve, and pain keeps me from doing more.  Physical therapy is the best my doctors can offer me at this time, but the pain and limitations I live with are ones I wish I could overcome with mind over matter.  I’d like to believe that meditation and yoga could cure my back and leg problems, but is that just being naive?

I always see my limits in terms of biology.  Sleep, energy, disease, age, etc.  Some people define their limits by success, wealth or power.  Others fight habits and impulses that enslave their behavior.  I suppose the young are obsessed with the limits of friendship, possessions, love and sex.  I’m guessing that it is mentally universal that people want to believe they can think their way out of their problems. 

Okay, there are always those people that look for outside intervention, either from God or luck.  I am not concerned with those folks, those who just wait around for providence, fairy godmothers and lady luck.  And yes, I do believe that some people are luckier than others, but isn’t that statistical?  It is possible to flip a coin and get heads 10 times in a row.  Of course, luck can also be proper preparation.

So far in life, I have been lucky, and I’ve gotten past every obstacle of health that has come my way.  I know I’m lucky because I’ve known  so many people that have suffered tragically from birth defects, accidents, disease or horrible degenerative conditions that befall the human body.  Death comes to us all, so our bodies must ultimately fail in some way, we just don’t know how and when.

Now that I’m getting older, each pain, bizarre twinge, weakness, ill feeling makes me wonder if I’ve suddenly received an early warning signal to my doomed fate.  When is a headache due to constipation or an approaching brain tumor?  The last few months I’ve been experiencing numbness in my legs, which makes it even harder to sleep through the night.  Pain in my back, which is under control at the moment, has already forced me to sleep part of the night in bed and part in a chair.  Moving to the chair at 2:30 am feels great to my back that has stiffened up in the bed, but now the chair makes my legs go numb.

If only I could overcome these problems with will power.  I wish through focused thought, by the power mind over matter, that I could heal my body.  The other day I was arguing with a friend who is a professor of counseling psychology whether biology or culture creates most of our behavior.  I was on the side of biology, since I’m a computer programmer, I can understand the idea of biological programming.   My friend argued strongly against that idea.  I asked why.  She said always blaming biology is like making excuses.  Of course, physical health can’t be equated to psychological behavior.  Or can it?

New Age mumbo-jumbo preachers claim realty is all mental.  That’s a seductive philosophy.  It’s wonderful to think we can escape all the evils of life by willing them away.  But how far can such a belief system take us?  Is it our fault if a stray bullet slams into our gut because we allowed ourselves to walk in a slightly bad part of town?  Is my back hurting because I let myself get overweight?  Because the grim reaper eventually harvests us all, does that mean we all mentally accept death in some form?  Do those New Agers go to their death wondering where they made their mental mistake.

We’d like to think that clean living, exercise and a good diet will keep away the doctor.  I know people who never work out and eat whatever they want and never have any trouble with their bodies.  Is that genes or powerful minds at work?

The trouble is, I’m probably wrong in hoping the mind has some degree of influence.  Science shows over and over again this is a cause and effect universe, and that there is an explanation for everything, even though that explanation might not be known to us at the moment.  The New Agers latched onto the spooky world of quantum physics hoping for a gateway to a mystical universe from our purely mechanical reality, but so far atom smashing has revealed none.

In this world, avoiding cavities is only found through the knowledge of dental hygiene and not wishful thinking.  But there’s still that damn placebo effect to deal with.  The placebo effect has even been proven to work for years.  How is the brain tricked?  I wish I knew.

JWH – 9/8/9

The Future of Television

I hate to say this, but television has been a major part of my life.  I like to picture myself as a well-read bookworm, but on average I’ve spent more time glued to the boob tube than flipping pages.  And I’m quite sure I’ve spent more time being totally attentive to the television than I have been to my friends, or even my wife and family.  But hey, my wife has no reason to get in a snit when she reads this remark because she watches three times more television than I do.  I should be jealous.

Television is mental masturbation.  Television is a great date for the lonely.  Television makes a boring life exciting.  Television can bring people together, like how American Idol gets so many people talking to each other during their nine to five days, but on the other hand, 200 cable channels tends to isolate us all into tiny special interest groups.  However, television at it’s best, can be artistic and create memorable characters that are featured prominently in our mind’s album of cherished memories.

Think about it.  How many stories can you tell about your family and friends each year at the Christmas dinner table?  And how many stories can you tell about your favorite video friends and family.  I can remember more about Dobie Gillis or Joel Fleischman than many of my cousins.  It’s sad, but true.

Television is changing, and pundits are worried about the future of television, like a recent article in Time Magazine, “Jay Leno Is the Future of TV.  Seriously.”   NBC finds creating five new shows for the final hour of primetime so expense that it’s giving the whole Monday to Friday week in that time slot to Jay Leno.  I find that rather sad, because that’s five possible shows that won’t live in our future memories.  That’s five cast of characters that the lonely of America in 2009-2010 won’t get to fall in love with.  That’s five chances NBC is giving up at creating a memorable show that will go down in TV history.

Strangely enough, NBC and myself have both chosen to go retro this new Fall Season.  They see the new Jay Leno show as an old fashion variety show, and I would applaud that if it’s true, but if it’s just a new timeslot for Jay Walking, I’m going to be greatly disappointed.  I’ve never really cared that much for the late night talk shows – famous people aren’t famously interesting.  Celebrities are only fascinating when they play great characters.  ER or Law & Order are vastly more valuable to popular culture than pretty faces pitching their latest projects.  Hell, I’d even prefer watching Lipstick Jungle or Medium to seeing a soon to be forgotten movie star struggle to be personally captivating between “Let’s take a break” interruptions of late night televised chit-chats.

Me, I’m going retro by ditching cable TV and my DVR.  I’ll have to watch my favorite shows when they are on and with all their glorious commercials.  Who knows, maybe high definition has improved the ads.  My new working hypothesis that I’m testing, is real time is the way God intended people to watch television.  Okay, I am going to cheat some, and watch TV like the Devil, time-shifted on DVD.  If there’s nothing to watch in primetime real time, I’m going to whip out Netflix and watch TV shows from once upon a time.  What will happen if NBC and the other networks give up on producing dramas and comedies?  I won’t have anything to watch in future years on Netflix.

When it comes to television I love nothing better than a new show that gets me excited for next week’s episode.  The 2009-2010 television lineup shows little promise to being a promising TV season, but I’ve got The Big Bang Theory and Lost to look forward to each week.  The most appealing new shows that I will tune into to see on the opening weeks are Cougar Town, FlashForward, The Forgotten and The Good Wife.  I don’t know if any of these shows will be DVD worthy in the future, but I’ve got to hope.  Shows like Northern Exposure, Star Trek and Lost were wonderfully unexpected surprises.  And once in a decade, we’ll get a show like Freaks and Geeks, and feel like Frank Capra directed Clarence the Angel to bless us with something special.

Television, like Rodney Dangerfield, gets no respect, especially in the world of Art.  Future scholars will pen vast academic libraries about the novels and films of the twentieth century, and shelves of books on music.  But how much intellectual cud chewing will be spent on TV?

If you scan the grid on your cable TV, and contemplate each listing you see, ask whether or not it will get the DVD treatment, or even be repeated even once in future years?  Most of the shows on television are like the shows from the early days of TV, when stations televised just about any kind of crap to fill the time slot and sell commercials.  For every half-hour of Leave it to Beaver there’d be eons of time spent on fishing, wrestling, talent parties, or local hopefuls hoping the road to stardom begins by talking to hand-puppets.  Do you see any of those shows on DVD for sale at Target?

Television really is a vast wasteland, and we’re all thirsty travelers hoping to find an hour of video oasis.  TV is really only worth watching if it’s also worthy of reprinting on DVD.   Anything not DVD-worthy is either news, sports, games, reality, talk and other ephemeral broadcasts that will be forgotten soon after the next show starts.  And because of the zillion cable channels, with their divided audiences and tiny revenue, it gets harder and harder for future television producers to afford to create memorable, DVD-worthy shows.  The best TV shows created today are from HBO and ShowTime, networks that have the gold filled purses to be patrons of TV Art.

The future of television appears to be the Home and Garden Network, or The Food Network, or even The Comedy Channel and The Cartoon Network.  If these new venues for the American mind ever produce a hit that shows up on Netflix I might give them a try, but I don’t think it’s likely.  And I don’t expect everyone to be like me.  There are hordes of people turning away from cable TV, but I doubt it’s a popular groundswell.  I wish it would be.  If all the money, time and talent spent on producing 200+ channels of television were spent on just 12 networks, television would be written about as much as renaissance Florence.

JWH – 9/7/9