At FDA, TVs now turned to Fox News and can't be switched

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

34. Lucky me, I am not sensitive to that high pitched tone.

You absolutely get my sympathy for that.

I will assure you, that even without that sensibility, the prevalence of TVs is beyond odious.

I always carry a book (sometimes two) with me, just in case I need to wait for a while, I'll have something to read. I do get it that not everyone is a reader, but that's not a reason to have television sets everywhere. If you don't read, bring your crocheting or your whittling with you, or engage in conversation with others. DON'T spend all your waking hours glued to the correctly named idiot box.

As a related aside, I honestly believe that Sesame Street is one of the worst things that ever happened to early childhood education. Yeah, so it taught numbers and the alphabet. Big fucking deal. It also strongly encouraged a very short attention span, which is one of the banes of modern life.

I NEVER turned on Sesame Street for my kids. I strictly limited what and how much TV they could watch, perhaps more so than was needed. But guess what? They both wound up with a much longer attention span than most of their peers.

Oh, and when my oldest was in kindergarten, I recall the teachers commenting that they'd NEVER had kids doing karate moves on each other until the Ninja Mutant Turtles (if I even have the name correct) came out. The teachers were crazed by that fad.

TV absolutely has its good points. But it has at least as many bad ones, and people need to be a heck of a lot more sensitive to both.

I know people who have the TV on all the time, sometimes because they can't bear to be without sound in their home (really, what's with that?) and other times because someone in residence will be watching whatever. As noted above, I don't own a TV, and when I visit certain people (my sister comes to mind here) I'm driven quite crazy by the fact the TV is on almost all the time. It wouldn't be so bad if it were possible to get away from the TV, but the layout of her house -- and the layout of most homes -- is such that it's not possible to be out of sound of the TV. And it's not whether or not I want to watch a particular network or show. She's not one to watch Fox, but it's the constant presence of the TV that is so awful.

Really. Turn it off once in a while. It will do you good.

Oh, and I am actually at least as well informed as anyone I know without TV. Hmmmm. I wonder why that's the case?