She Who Must Be Obeyed and I are sitting quietly watching the Rose Bowl parade. I offered her a trip out to take in a movie or sales but she is content to rest for the day (and so am I).

Nostalgia Alert! Read no further if you don’t care for this sort of thing!

When I was a kid, we would sometimes get to see the Rose Bowl parade on our little monochrome TV (what you Colonists call “black and white”). We would get as close as we could to our fifteen inch TV and ooh and aah as the floats went by. We had to turn away when the dancers came on because dad was opposed to dancing, but we came back as soon as we could. As we watched, we would always say “I bet it’s pretty in color!” We said the same thing when we caught a bit of a Jacques Cousteau special as he pointed out dozens of black and white fish swimming over the endless variety of black and white coral below.

An aside: if you think watching a game of cricket is mindnumbingly boring (and it is. Sweet Lord, it is), imagine watching it in black and white. Why would we do that? Because back in the day, the BBC ran only two channels. None of them were on all day or all night. Often, you would find a test pattern on BBC1 and a test pattern on ITV (the only independent channel at the time) but BBC2 would be playing a cricket match showing the English team getting creamed by some Caribbean nation with a population under 500.

We didn’t make the comment about color in order to get our dad to get a color TV because 1) he was a Scot and there was not going to be another TV and 2) we had only seen color TV once or twice in our grubby little lives and never imagined it might become available to regular people. We’d heard rumors that my grandparents had a color TV and we couldn’t wait to see it. What glories and wonders would spring from such a treasure?

As it turned out, the first color TV show I got to see was “Big Valley.” We’d seen it many times in Scotland but now we’d get to see it in America and in color(you would be surprised how many American shows played in the UK. Some still do but it seems the tide has turned and now America just wants to copy UK and Australian shows). My grandparents had moved into a small town in southern Ohio full of Welshmen, Melungeons, and a sprinkling of ex-pat Scots. We crowded into their tiny front room while the adults were preparing the lunch meal and turned on the telly… only to be rather disappointed. Sure, the color was blotchy and people were greenish, but it was more profound than that. We had learned something — our imaginations were far more vivid than anything TV could show us.

Have you ever been reading a book and thought “This isn’t all that good”? Do you understand what that means??? It means the story in your head is better than the one in the book. Ever been disappointed at lame writing or a silly plot twist in a TV show or movie? That means you have a better one inside you. Write it. Tell it around the campfire. Spend time with it. I often wonder how many beautiful symphonies, how many classics of literature, and how many stupendous works of art will never be created because people contented themselves with watching TV or surfing the net rather than allowing their own imaginations free reign.
Could it be that the Information Age is strangling art?

Personally, I love gadgets and don’t want to live without them. I don’t want to go back to the days of Jim Rockford when the erstwhile detective had to drive around to find a pay phone and then some change to feed it. I like my Blackberry and my flat screen TVs, but I would be a fool not to notice that something was lost along the way.

I’d write more but the Bowl Games are on. And they’re in color. Oooooo……..aaaaaaaaaahhhhh……