Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
TV Misguide
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2004 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I flipped through TV recently.
The Oreck vacuum guy is badmouthing bagless vacuums (by extension this is a negative ad against Dyson) (extension! ha!) as "unsanitary" since dust comes back into the room when you dump the dirt receptacle into your trash. Infomercials hawk speed-reading software that would not materially increase my reading speed (as far as I can tell from the demo video) and a tri-wheeled Razor-like scooter that slaloms around the street. You don't have to pedal or push, just rock side-to-side to move the "Trikke" forward. How does it work? Handwaving about the conservation of angular momentum. The guy actually said "it's not really important for you or me to understand exactly how it works, just that it does." Gah!
Oprah's new Book is Pearl S. Buck's depressing and very good The Good Earth, which I almost typed as The Good Eats.
I watched about two minutes of Gilmore Girls and Leonard heard it from the next room, where he was reading Nabokov or Iain Pears or some thing, like he's Jeeves or something with those improving books. He asked whether I was watching a talk show. I tried to explain that aficionados of Gilmore Girls love the fast-paced and prolific dialogue, and ended up saying, "It's like The West Wing about life."
