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April 29, 2003
mark thomas The television in my kitchen stopped working yesterday. That television had been turned on, usually with the sound turned down, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since the day I bought it almost 2 years ago. Washing dishes or doing anything in the kitchen became slightly less mundane with a television sitting over the sink. While stirring a pot of pasta I'd fill those slanting recesses of my attention span with silent soap operas, game shows, news broadcasts, baseball games, and any of the surprisingly finite variety of things that pass through a television screen. Until the novelty wore off, that little moving picture made the activity of washing dishes feel a tiny bit more productive than before. Late at night I'd stare at the “Caroline Rhea Show” and wonder what she was laughing at – in fact, I have that thought while watching that show with the sound on. Or in the morning I'd watch the crazed flagellations of “The Price is Right” contestants and play my favorite surrealist game, which is to imagine what space aliens would think if they saw our world but could not understand what anyone was saying. Masters of this game become successful comedians. I briefly considered putting a second television in the kitchen, so that when I turned to go to the living room (where the big television is) I would not have to endure one full second of television-less time that occurs when turning around. I actually did purchase the extra television - a 2-1/2 inch LED set of the type you'd take to a sporting event or on a camping trip - but I never set it up to fill that space in the kitchen. I would need another adapter for the little TV, and despite having several large bags filled with AC and DC adapters that I've studiously collected since I was in the single digits of my years, I still have no adapter for this particular device. Perhaps when I’m done writing this I will go purchase one. Now that this little window of mental engagement is shut off, I temporarily appreciate the peace of mind that simply washing dishes can offer. Any kind of physical activity is an opportunity for a mental flossing. It might be more meaningful if I was not, in this 4th month of the year 2003, experiencing the closest thing to tranquility that I can remember. I don’t seem have enough mental litter to sweep away right now, so chances are I will replace the broken TV with a $9.99 set I saw at Walgreen’s the other day. The television that stopped working has a 5 inch screen. It is a no-name, $19.99 black and white television and AM/FM radio purchased at a Genovese on 8th Avenue in midtown. While this set has lost its picture, the sound has become interesting. Television and radio broadcasts intermingle. Yesterday I could hear stray phrases and words from the CBS 2 News at 5:00. The news would get overrun by automated weather reports from NOAA. Then NOAA would get shouted down by an unidentified broadcaster carrying on somewhere else down the wires. The weather reports are delivered by robot voices which sound reasonably human. For short periods of listening the issue of the voices' non-humanness does not concern me. Nor am I concerned with the robot voices of automated voicemail attendants, GPS guides heard in some automobiles, or these new robotic voices on the NYC subways that announce the current and next station stops. In fact concern is the wrong word. Saying that robots “concern” me implies that I would, after prolonged exposure, start to resent these presences. This is untrue. I choose the word concern hoping the casual reader would connect to this essay with their own feeling of disdain for the idea of savvy robots communicating significant information in subtle, even suave ways. I assume individuals would at first feel threatened by this targeted drainage of live human contact from the day. Protests to the contrary, if you are anything like me I think you would soon feel enchanted by the robots, and charmed by the lack of what is later determined to have been an unnecessary assertion of personality. Subway conductors announcing station stops with gusto, sarcasm, or comicality are revealed by the precision and functionality of the robots to have performed unnecessary flourishes - similar to the way a barroom drunk dramatically assumes a spread-eagle position and faces the ceiling while simply relieving himself at a urinal.
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