Monday, December 06, 2004
"Ex luce ad sanitatem"
by Tom Bozzo
In probable contrast to my dual-income-no-kids brother in Wilmington, who I expect would have watched the rout in high-def on his new plasma TV, I saw not even one snap. With the revelation making the rounds that parenting is hard work with offsetting benefits -- e.g., as John has smoothed over some of his two-year-oldness lately by well-timed dropping of the L-bomb -- I'll note that for me a major lifestyle concession of parenting has been giving up weekend afternoon naps set to televised sports, extending a somewhat longer program of post-single years Tubaldetox.
John actually shows relatively little interest in TV other than Sesame Street, and even his voracious appetite for Elmo has some limits. This is far from the worst possible thing, though my concern is more the marketing blitz that would be directed to him than the possibility he might be exposed to a bit of locker room fantasy.
Indeed, yesterday's Christmas tree acquisition and lighting (independently carried out to Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas), with some additional distraction from the new toys courtesy of CA-Santa Claus, was enough to give us an astonishing Tube-free day yesterday, from wakeup to his bedtime, at least.
So while I'm as inclined to drool over sleek HDTVs as much as the next guy, and marketers usually could make some hay off the correlations between my brother and me on major purchases, I expect we'll stay for some time in the far tails of the Tubally challenged: no HDTV, no DVR as long as our VCR (almost as old as Vineland) clings to existence and Congress allows ad-skipping, no programming beyond our six over-the-air channels (much as we might like to see The Daily Show). It's crazy but it works for us!
Attendance at John's 3:30 parent-child swimming class yesterday was unusually light for some reason. The watercooler conversation for the morning reflected a sharp divide in sentiment between my native and nonnative [Wisconsinite] colleagues, the former of whom were all but hanging their heads in the manner of the recurring A Charlie Brown Christmas reference in last night's brilliant installment of Arrested Development.
In probable contrast to my dual-income-no-kids brother in Wilmington, who I expect would have watched the rout in high-def on his new plasma TV, I saw not even one snap. With the revelation making the rounds that parenting is hard work with offsetting benefits -- e.g., as John has smoothed over some of his two-year-oldness lately by well-timed dropping of the L-bomb -- I'll note that for me a major lifestyle concession of parenting has been giving up weekend afternoon naps set to televised sports, extending a somewhat longer program of post-single years Tubaldetox.
John actually shows relatively little interest in TV other than Sesame Street, and even his voracious appetite for Elmo has some limits. This is far from the worst possible thing, though my concern is more the marketing blitz that would be directed to him than the possibility he might be exposed to a bit of locker room fantasy.
Indeed, yesterday's Christmas tree acquisition and lighting (independently carried out to Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas), with some additional distraction from the new toys courtesy of CA-Santa Claus, was enough to give us an astonishing Tube-free day yesterday, from wakeup to his bedtime, at least.
So while I'm as inclined to drool over sleek HDTVs as much as the next guy, and marketers usually could make some hay off the correlations between my brother and me on major purchases, I expect we'll stay for some time in the far tails of the Tubally challenged: no HDTV, no DVR as long as our VCR (almost as old as Vineland) clings to existence and Congress allows ad-skipping, no programming beyond our six over-the-air channels (much as we might like to see The Daily Show). It's crazy but it works for us!
