Who Does Without TV?

[Stearmen]

View attachment 34074

1954 RCA Victor. Salvaged from the town dump in 1986, I installed a new picture tube and replaced the capacitors, and I've been using it ever since. I've also got a 7-inch TV from 1948 in my office for watching the ball game.

PS Lizzie, love the pump organ! My Grandmother would have played some great tunes for you.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have a tiny little converter box attached to the cable feeding into a VCR, and the VCR is connected to the TV using a coax to 300 ohm adapter. I get cable for the Red Sox, TCM, the weather channel, and a few other things -- we have no over the air TV here at all since the end of NTSC.

I don't have an internet connection capable of streaming dependably, and I don't bother with Netflix or any of those things. I see all the current movies I want to see at work, on a 25-foot screen, so I don't see any point of rentals or downloads, and if I just want to watch random old stuff I turn to TCM. And I still have four big Rubbermaid bins full of VHS tapes that work just fine, full of stuff I've taped and saved over the years. So let technology march, I'm all set thanks.

The pump organ can still wheeze out a tune, but it needs to have the bellows patched to really work well. One of many things on my future project list.

 

[Stearmen]

I have a tiny little converter box attached to the cable feeding into a VCR, and the VCR is connected to the TV using a coax to 300 ohm adapter. I get cable for the Red Sox, TCM, the weather channel, and a few other things -- we have no over the air TV here at all since the end of NTSC.

I don't have an internet connection capable of streaming dependably, and I don't bother with Netflix or any of those things. I see all the current movies I want to see at work, on a 25-foot screen, so I don't see any point of rentals or downloads, and if I just want to watch random old stuff I turn to TCM. And I still have four big Rubbermaid bins full of VHS tapes that work just fine, full of stuff I've taped and saved over the years. So let technology march, I'm all set thanks.

The pump organ can still wheeze out a tune, but it needs to have the bellows patched to really work well. One of many things on my future project list.

Thanks! From what I understand, we get quite a few over the air channels. I am planing on buying an antenna just to see.

 

[Harp]

I've also got a 7-inch TV from 1948 in my office for watching the ball game.

Baseball radio broadcasts are hard to beat though. WBBM 78*AM today featured the Cubs vs White Sox crosstown series.
Unfortunately, Sox pitcher Sale struck out fifteen Cubs; including Schwabs and Kegan, tying the series. Lost a double sawbuck too.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I wish the Bosox had better radio broadcasters -- Castiglione's been around longer than Ned Martin was, but he's nowhere near as good. And they need to ditch the rock-music bumpers and over-pumped over-compressed crowd noise.

Orsillo and Remy on TV are a continuous clown show, but then so far as this season is concerned so are the Sox. Bah.

 

[Fading Fast]

Baseball radio broadcasts are hard to beat though. WBBM 78*AM today featured the Cubs vs White Sox crosstown series.
Unfortunately, Sox pitcher Sale struck out fifteen Cubs; including Schwabs and Kegan, tying the series. Lost a double sawbuck too.

There is something - the cadence, the pace, the historical tie, the long car ride with the game on as a kid - that just makes baseball on the radio a special joy. I have been working on something (fixing a broken whatever), listening to the game and, then, finished my task and gone on to watch the end of the game on TV. You would think it would feel great to see it, but it always feels flat to me to do that. Somehow the game looses something when I do that. So, I'll admit this, I usually stay with the radio even if I don't have to if I've started the game on the radio. That said, if I am just starting a game and can, I'll watch it on TV.

 

[Juanito]

How do you get along without TV?

Just fine--too busy to watch TV and there's nothing on. The funny thing is that I distinctly remember the last time I had and watched TV; I was a junior in college and it was November 8, 1988, the Presidential Election.

 

[GHT]

I hate all so-called reality tv with a passion..... network programmrs love it as it's cheap - no scriptwriters to pay, no actors to pay.... and always a plentiful supply of new idiots ready to be exploited. Sometimes I think folks would queue up to sexually abuse a giraffe if they thought it would get them on tv.

The worst of it is how many great stage actors end up out of work here in London because the producers have cast some reality tv moppet because that's what'll sell tickets. Call me elitist if you like, but frankly the sort of folks who only go to the theatre to see 'him off the tv' don't deserve quality theatre. Just such a shame that it ruins it for the rest of us too....

Well said Edward, the sort of dross that passes for entertainment is unbelievable, talk about lowest common denominator TV. As Edward said previously, here in the UK we have to pay a television licence fee, it finances the BBC. For the first 20 years of our marriage my wife and I were into ballroom dancing in a big way. Almost every day was spent dancing/training/rehearsing/travelling/competing/teaching, it left little time for TV or much else, except reading, which we did avidly, whilst waiting to compete. We didn't have a television set in those days and the downside of not having a television set was that the authority who collected the licence fee simple wouldn't believe that anyone could go without a television. We were forever being hounded, threats of court action, threats of bailiffs, you name it they threatened it.
Nowadays we do have a TV, that sits in a cabinet, which you close the doors on, once you finished viewing. You might think that with our love of dancing that we would be hooked on the reality show: Strictly Come Dancing, or Dancing with the Stars as it's known elsewhere. Not at all, the shrieks, screams and cheering from the TV audience is as much a turn off as is those who present the show. We have a television now but when I watch re-runs of Morse, see him play a classical record, (Morse famously doesn't have a TV set) pour himself a whisky, mull over the clues to the particular case that he's working on, and generally crack it, I do get a pang of how that was us years ago, but then again, TV is ok as long as it doesn't dominate your life.

 

[Hercule]

There is something - the cadence, the pace, the historical tie, the long car ride with the game on as a kid - that just makes baseball on the radio a special joy.

My dad would watch the Red Sox on tv with no sound and listen to it on the radio at the same time.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I've got my old tube-tv, bougt in May of 2000. It's just still there, because it's not dead. 99% used on watching VHS-cassettes or DVD with my favorite movies. That's it.

But, it have got Black-Matrix-screen (great contrast!!).

 

[EstherWeis]

We have a TV, but it never found it's way out of the basement and into our living room.
I haven't missed it once in the last 5 years, and if it on at a family/friends house it annoys me more with all the commercials and bad programs.
If there is something we want to see we just watch it via internet on our computer.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Youtube kill the TV-stars.

 

[Stearmen]

Youtube kill the TV-stars.

 

[highway66blues]

No television here.
No cable,satalite, Netflix or such.
No web either.

Just radio & laptop.

 

[GHT]

It's hard to decide if TV makes morons out of everyone, or if it mirrors those viewers who really are morons to begin with.

 

[Trenchfriend]

In my opinion, you can really see, how nearly 60 years of tv-brainwash have acted to the germans.

But now, we got the next generation of totally brainwash, the SMOMBIES.

 

[Fading Fast]

No television here.
No cable,satalite, Netflix or such.
No web either.

Just radio & laptop.

How are you on Fedora if you don't have connection to the web (or do you mean something other than the Internet when you say "no web...")?

 

[Pompidou]

I only use Netflix, since I, for all intents and purposes, live at my coffee shop 24/7, and business cable is about 250 a month. My laptop has a Netflix account. That said, my cafe acquired a 1958 Philco television which would be a dream to have working, even if only to play off-copyright silent movies from the dawn of film. I tried plugging it in, and later, unplugged, was poking around with the junk inside, and got nowhere. It probably needs a whole new picture tube, with my luck. Karma owes me nothing on that TV, since I later learned it spared me a hell of a shock from its antiquated capacitor. It's just decor now. Cafe looks like a flea market.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's hard to decide if TV makes morons out of everyone, or if it mirrors those viewers who really are morons to begin with.

"The next generation of Americans will have eyes the size of basketballs, and no brains at all."
-- Fred Allen, speaking about television, 1950.

 

[Jim Green]

I'm assuming you are talking about broadcast or cable TV. I have NETFLIX but I should add an antenna


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