#1072 Unexpected Aspect

The scary thing is how something takes over and you’re not even aware of it. Suddenly it becomes the status quo while your cultural back is turned. Steadily, stealthily, the thing creeps into the everyday, slowly donning the attributes of familiarity. Then you wake up and go, “Hey, wait a minute. When did that happen?”
By then, of course, it’s too late. I remember the movie Total Recall, back in 1990, when the Arnold wasn’t the governator. They had these really cool TVs that were totally futuristic. They could show aquariums or outdoor vistas and you could hang them flat on the wall.
It all seemed so farfetched. The panels were cool, but it turns out they weren’t the shape of things to come after all.
The other day I was thinking of getting a now ordinary flat panel TV. I almost bought it, but I stopped and said to myself, “I better measure my hole first.”
I went home and looked at the hole I’d once had constructed into my wall over the fireplace when I built my house, and the first thing I noticed? The hole is square. Its aspect ratio is wrong for the new TV. The new TV is a short wide rectangle.
But what really got me was that the first thought in my mind was the “aspect ratio” is all wrong. I never heard the term aspect ratio a few years ago. Certainly not at the time of the Total Recall movie. The ratio of height to width was a concern completely unheard of. Oh sure, we had to deal with letterboxing fairly early, as movies from the big screen had to be converted to home viewing on VHS. But again, we never heard the term aspect ratio. Now we use it all the time as we touch and flip our touch and flip phones every which way to change the configuration of our virtual keyboards.
But it was certainly never discussed by my builder 10 years ago. No, he was caught up in bull-nose corners and orange peel texturing.
And I was the one left with a square hole and nothing around to stick in it.
America, ya gotta love it.