#362 Monitor Merriment

I got one of those new LED or plasma flat-screen monitors. Cool. And I do mean cool, it puts out 95% less waste heat than the old CRTs with the big picture tube. And I’m told far fewer x-rays as well. Which is probably the other thing that was accelerating the decline of my close vision. I know, I know, when you get older your lenses get hard. Just about the time everything else on your body is achieving hyper-flaccidity. Jowls and drooping eyebrows and those dangly gobs on the back of your arms the flap like turkey wattles when you gesticulate. But really, is it inconceivable to suspect that the electro-magnetic radiation emanating out of your cathode ray monitor tube is affecting your eye health? Remember in the old days of the early TVs, when your mom told you to sit back or you’d ruin your eyes? Early color TVs actually came with a warning notice saying you should sit at least ten feet back. Some early techno-paranoids like my family actually put a line on their living room rug beyond which we kids could not venture. The death zone. So it is kind of ironic that years later here we all are staring for many hours a day at a TV tube not three feet from our face. Hmm. My face does have a more constant shade of tan than it used to. And that portable camera I put on my desk did have pictures that turned out kind of foggy. And now that I think about it that bag of Orville Redenbacher did make a couple of popping noises when I left it on top of my old monitor. In any event, the new one is much easier on the eyes because there’s no flicker. Flicker is what happens when the electrons on old TVs traced a path across the screen to make your brain think it was seeing a complete picture. If you ever took a video of a TV you would have noticed it. Your brain tunes it out. But it’s there. Straining your eyes, straining your brain, and eventually driving you into spree-killing murderous acts of anti–social rage.
Speaking of rage, I saw something interesting the other day. I was driving along and noticed a bus in the lane to my right laboring up the west side hill. He seemed to be going inordinately slow for a transit bus. As I pulled alongside him and glanced up at the driver’s window I saw him pounding on his steering wheel in frustration, a look of what I could only describe as road rage contorting his features. I pulled a little further forward and noticed for the first time the object of this driver’s annoyance, a bicyclist, also laboring up the same steep hill. But, as there was no bike lane, holding up all traffic to his spandex girdled rear. It was then that I drew back vision-wise and beheld the entire tableau. You can’t make this stuff up. The entire side of the bus was painted with a huge ad that said, “Share the Road.” A campaign that seeks to promote automobile driver awareness of the rights of bicyclists. Oops. Hope the bus driver’s boss wasn’t monitoring him.
America, ya gotta love it.