neurotwitch

tv time

We’re tv junkies. We have a tv in our bedroom, the guest room, our living room, and our office. We have just about everything cable has to offer except the porn channels (though we’d dump the forty or fifty sports channels in a heartbeat if we could). We’re faithful viewers of many shows (though it’s getting harder and harder to figure out when they’re on these days) even when a show has jumped the shark (except for Nightline. The new format, frankly, sucks the substance right out of it, so we don’t pay attention to it much any more except when Martin Bashir is on).

So, we decided a while ago, when the tv in the living room finally went, we’d get a bigger one. That tv is one I bought more than a dozen years ago, and the picture was starting to get a little weird, so we knew it was just a matter of time.

By bigger, we initially discussed a 36-inch tv. But we saw one, and decided it was too big and decided to get a 32-inch one instead to replace the 25-inch Zenith.

The Zenith finally died. Off we went to Circuit City, where Stanley scoped out a 32-inch Magnavox on sale for $268 plus tax. Not a hi-definition tv or a flat panel or any of those fancy new formats. Nope, you don’t get enough bang for your buck to justify the cost of those tvs and I think the picture on most of them isn’t very good. We’ll wait a few years for one of those, when the price hits the sanitysphere and the quality improves considerably.

We wanted the Magnavox because they have a sound feature that keeps the commercials, particularly the local commercials, at the same volume as the show. It irritates me to no end when the commercials blare out at the decibel levels found on a runway during take-off, particularly since the tv volume is already loud because I’m so deaf.

The Magnavox is so BIG. We’re overwhelmed by the size of it. We live in a 200-year-old house with small rooms, and the telly now dominates the east side of the house. It’s amazing what just seven diagonal inches adds to the size of the screen. We agree that we should’ve gone with the 27-inch screen—that would’ve been plenty. But it was so much trouble setting up this tv that we’ll keep it. Though we agree that we have to figure out some way to, I don’t know, ameliorate the impact of its size somehow. Maybe if we lower it or something, or move things around a bit—I don’t know.

I really LIKE having such a big screen—it will be great when we watch DVDs. But it’s so big ... it didn’t seem so big in the store.

<< Back to main