Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 15, 1993 TAG: 9312160260
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But I was taken aback, as we used to say in Radford, when I found out how much television sets have changed since we bought the one that checked out in the middle of the foreign forecast on the Weather Channel - leaving us in ignorance of the temperature in Naples.
The old set, for example, made you get up every time you wanted to change a
channel. Has this funny dial on the front. One year, the children - as part of their joint effort to modernize us - bought us a VCR, and we got our first remote control.
The old set is the kind that you can hit very hard and get the picture and the sound to come back for a while. The new one doesn't appear to have any real good places to hit.
The old one was playing nicely after a few jabs to the dial area while I waited for my son to come and hook the new one up. Melvyn Douglas and Rosalind Russell young again. Back when everybody had rotary phones. Before recorded voices said things like: ``The doctor is out. If you are terminally ill, press the pound sign. If you have a rotary phone, prayer is advised.''
Getting along here, the new set lets you adjust the color by pressing these button on the remote.
Back when there were giants on Earth and men were men, you crouched behind your set, expecting to be electrocuted any minute, and fiddled with these little plastic knobs to adjust the color.
This never really worked, but it took guts to do it and then listen to\ comments like: ``Well, children, your father has fouled up the color again. You didn't know Ben Cartwright was purple. Right?''
I'm not fooling with these buttons because I don't want to get picked on for coming up with a yellow Murphy Brown.
In the old days, you fought horizontal roll by crouching back there where the air smelled like elecricity and danger and fiddling with these plastic things to get rid of horizontal roll. It's a funny thing. I haven't heard anybody mention horizontal roll in years. Maybe they don't have it anymore.
The new set also has an alarm clock, although the reason for it is unclear to me. I mean, it's been years since I nodded off in front of the set.
I haven't read the alarm instructions yet, but I don't think technology is advanced enough to allow you set it to warn you when ``Ben Hur'' is being shown again.
But, hey, pal, I'll get all of this straightened out and be up and running, as we say in the technology business these days, in no time.
There were people who hooted and slapped their thighs when I tried to program my first VCR. But I did it eventually. Sure, I may have gotten up at 4:30 a.m. after dreaming how to make the old VCR work with the new television set.
So, it's my health. Right?
Still, I'd like a set that you could punch in the dial or kick the side of the cabinet every now and then.
by CNB