Me, I’m dubious.

Monday, January 7th, 2008


I’m starting to get a lot more Google search results that are, well, a lot like this one—attempts to appear relevant, only we know they’re just faux-sites laden with bottom-feeding ads. I’ve been showing some older folks (yes! Older than me! Hard to believe!) lately how to use their computers, which these days has to include some intensive search engine instruction…and it’s hard to explain to a person who thinks that the whole machine on their desk is ‘some kinda magic’ that a link like this really represents subhuman scum trying to subvert the true ways of the internet.

The ‘you are looking at this’ reminds me of a classic story from my college TV station. I’ll be brief. In the days of live booth announcers, we had versions of our legal ID (“You’re watching WOUB-TV Athens and WOUC-TV Cambridge”, or simply “You’re watching public television.”) in varying lengths, from fifteen seconds down to three. You chose the right one to fill the time. What happens when the duty director calls for a two-second ID? The young woman in the booth intoned, “You’re watching television.”

Indeed!

Continuing my theme of being awash in nostalgia for the old days of television, I came across this wonderful collection of scanned-in photos, meticulously annotated, of television stations and facilities in Atlanta, Columbus, GA, New York, and elsewhere. Wow…the gear, the clothes. There’s even a photo of an actual Vidifont I have sweated over in a noisy tape room on West Peachtree Street. So, I was inspired to clean up my Vidifont brochure pictures a bit. Mmmm…Vidifont, is there nothing it can’t do?