Talk of the Town - As seen on TV July 03 2003

Get me 3,000 bucks of plasma, STAT



Don’t say there’s anything wrong with the economy. Don’t even think it. I just came from a place where televisions cost $3,000. Even more astonishing, people are buying them.

The sets are flat-panel TVs with plasma screens. A strange word, plasma — especially in that context. But it made sense when I saw the price. You need a blood transfusion after a shock like that.

Still, I need a new TV — because the VCR died. That might not make immediate sense, but what does in a world where conservatives have blown a hole in the Treasury while tax-and-spend liberals advocate thrift?

Anyway, my late video device was 13 years old — a nonagenarian by human standards — when it let out a piteous moan in mid-rewind and gave up the cassette. It wasn’t an easy demise.

The last movie it showed was one of those hip Sundance Film Festival flicks where the dialogue is so throwaway you spend the entire 103 minutes asking your significant other, “What’d they say?” and replaying the lines in a vain attempt to construct intelligible speech.

The VCR is survived by an RCA TV two years its elder, a set so old it can’t be hooked up to any of the DVD players now dominating the market. Hence the need for an entirely new home entertainment center.

I’d heard about flat-screen TVs for the last few years. But the bulky truth is that at least with the cheapo models (by which I mean less than a grand), the flat screen is a mirage of sleekness with a flying wedge of tele-guts protruding five yards out the back. It’s heartening to know that despite all the recent advances in communications technology and design, we can still buy a new TV with the same ungainly lines as the Packard-size floor model my parents had during Lyndon Johnson’s administration.

To get true flatness, you have to go plasmatic. That costs big time. And we all know what happens when you drop serious largesse on any electronic merchandise: deflation.

I remember the first time our family experienced the phenomenon. Thirty years ago, my father bought one of the early electronic calculators on the consumer market. It was the size of a Belgian paving block, cost more per ounce than Bolivian pixie dust, and you could use numbers to make it spell “SHELL OIL” held upside down. A couple of years later? Calculators were falling out of gumball machines for spare change. Then I’d ask, “How much did you spend on that adding machine, Dad?”

I was a rotten kid.

Pop is having his revenge now as the adult me stands in the Appliance Barn, agape at monster plasma screens with invoices requiring a 30-year mortgage. A TV that big, they should let you live with it awhile to see if you’re compatible.

In England, when people plan to buy a bed, they don pajamas in the furniture store and give merchandise the full snooze. Yet in America, where we watch more television than anybody else in the world, you’re expected to go home with a TV you barely know. I’m sorry, but any device I spend that much time with will have to answer these questions:

1) Is it easy to operate? Contempo TVs have boxes and remote controls that require a degree in existential philosophy just to turn the damn thing on.

2) Can it withstand punishment? There’s a presidential election next year. Will the TV set withstand me throwing Spiegel catalogues at it during a long, moronic, lie-filled campaign?

3) Are there programming controls? I want a TV that rejects all transmissions involving anyone named Oprah, people talking about their feelings and commercials starring Carrot Top.

A complicated set of demands, but most of them seemed doable. Plus, that big plasma screen would look sharp in the old den.

“Wait till you get TiVo.”

A salesman materialized beside me. I thought he was talking about Jennifer Lopez’s cousin.

The guy explained: TiVo records your favorite shows and even seeks out similar programs to record them too. Even when the timeslot changes! It’s a service! It’s a DVR!

A DVR? I barely know what a DVD is. Now they’re changing letters?

Who am I kidding? These machines are only as smart as the owners who program them — which means me, which means it will never work. When the cable company gave me a new remote, I felt like an orangutan being handed a Stradivarius and sheet music to “Flight of the Bumble Bee.”

No, I’m going to stick with the old TV. It’s paid for. And with any luck, it’ll burn out before the election.

That way, I only have to throw Spiegel catalogues at the radio.

glen.slattery@creativeloafing.com


Glen Slattery reports a shortage of plasma in Alpharetta.