Basically what my TV looks like, except mine doesn't have the sweet modern paneling.
GateHouse — You win, World, I will buy a large, shiny new television.
I have to. I am at The Electronics Store (I can’t say the name of it, but it rhymes with Schmest Schmly) right now with my nerd friend – that I have just employed the singular will be a font of great hilarity to those who know me – Morgan, who rules the Information Technology fellowship at my office and is a Certified Mac Specialist Avatar Force Ghost Warlock, or some such multi-syllabic gumbo. I am not sure how one rises to such a rarefied strata, or how many elves one has to kill to get there, but I do know this: I can call Morgan and be three words into describing my little problem, and he can, from the foreboding, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-soaked recesses of his personally upgraded memory, almost always solve it without bothering to look up from his heavily salted fast-food meal.
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Me: “So the server isn’t letting me…”
Morgan: (chewing) “Reboot the system profile double right-click on update the preferences and please remove your mouse pad from that peanut butter can I get back to my Beef N’ Cheddar now thanks.”
(This all said, I am nervous about making fun of Morgan, who once proved he can assume full and complete control of my computer from Idaho, so I will now suck up via the following narrative.)
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- Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – Television, The Drug Of The Nation.mp3
- Bruce Springsteen – TV Movie.mp3
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Anyway, I’m at the store with Morgan (well, I’m not technically there there, I’m on my couch but for the purposes of narrative structure imagine I am standing dwarfed by a Death Star-style wall of flatscreen televisions, all tuned to the same clip of some blonde country singer flipping her hair and singing about something obvious).
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I am here because I am in need of a New Television, something that truly distresses me, because around the group here I am a little bit known as The Dimwit Who Doesn’t Have Cable Because He’s Probably Some Indigestible Long-Haired Hippie Wanker Who’s Trying To Prove A Point Or Something. Which is totally not true. I have short hair.
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In HD, Tiki's teeth give off such a luminous shine that they cannot be looked at directly.
I require this TV for the extremely logical reason that there are cabinets in the new place already, and the TV needs to fit in these cabinets, and the television I currently own, which is the size of an American bison and weighs twice as much, will destroy them. The current TV was purchased in 2000 and is by modern standards something that would be made fun of by the Amish, though, luckily, not online. There was a night Morgan brought his PlayStation 3 over and brief panic gripped the room while we tried to figure out how to make my Precambrian television could even handle such primal gaming force. (It did. There was much rejoicing.) Besides, everything’s in widescreen now anyway, and we’re totally missing like half the picture. This is even the case on PBS. Have you ever tried to watch like 60% of “Martha Speaks?” YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SHE IS TALKING ABOUT.
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So Morgan, along with everyone else who knows of my irritating TV situation, is laughing and gloating and snickering and snuffling about how I have to get a big-shot widescreen TV now, so that I, like they, can enjoy Tiki Barber’s glistening head-sweat in glorious High Definition. (Sorry, this is why I don’t write while football is on, although just this moment I am absorbing a commercial for some sort of monster new LED TV which promises to offer me football in “hyper-real,” which I think means that the Pittsburgh Steelers will, at some point, sweat directly on me, and also that Ben Roethlisberger has access to a wormhole.)
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So I don’t know what I’m looking for here; some sort of 1080ps and there’s some HDMI cables that are of the utmost concern and apparently if I do not purchase a Blu-Ray player to accompany this monster I might as well just step into oncoming traffic until I am all dead. It is all very overwhelming, and as the narrative is nearing its end I can jump back out of the past and report that I didn’t buy one after all, because I couldn’t decide on anything, and Morgan wanted to go to Arby’s.
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But I will, one day soon, so that I can truly absorb the end of the second “Transformers” movie in heretofore unimagined splendor, clarity so spectacular that I can see, almost down to the pixel, which parts of the movie suck (it’s all of them, spoiler alert). Note that I am joking about a grownup movie here as though there’s the slightest chance this television will be employed to screen anything other than “Toy Story” movies for the next two years. The cool thing, though: On the new TV, the films will star Ben Roethlisberger.
