Your Assignment for This Weekend

Madeline Holler — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:01:00 GMT

Even if you don't get cable TV -- and no judgment if you don't! -- you won't likely be negatively affected by the upcoming digital TV conversion. Why not? Because you're at least minimally tech savvy (you're reading a website, so I'm just assuming ...) and you're television is probably from this millennium.

But know who will be affected? Your grandma, her friends, maybe that old guy who lives one floor down. Anybody who is not familiar with software menus and a little tech talk. Because no matter what those public service announcements say, converting to digital is NOT that simple.

Just plug and go, right? No. Not at all. You plug and then go ... to a menu of options with lots of different terms like "analog" and "digital" and "scanning for channels" and "do you want to quit" and then a bunch of other stuff even you don't know the function of. To even get to the menu of options that I am invisioning many seniors won't understand anyway, you have to know where to find a menu. Also, they'll need to use a remote for the digital box, not the familiar one that came with their now ancient TV.

Everything you hear about the problems with the conversion focus on the $40 coupons now no longer available to offset the cost of the digital box. What doesn't get mentioned are this middle steps, which won't be intuitive to many of the folks affected.

So why am I writing about this on a parenting website? Because grandparents and that old guy are/were/might be parents too. And anyway, we're the sandwich generation -- we take care of kids AND adults. So you need to check and make sure the aging adults you know are all set to go. You need to walk them through it over the phone or spend some very frustrating minutes over at their house, in front of that dinosaur in a wooden cabinet, getting them all set up.

Also, even with the digital box, if they were using an antenna before, they'll need it now more than ever. A lot of the digital signals are in need of boosting, which will cost money and isn't likely to happen. So expect some channels to no longer come in.

Congress has really downplayed this and I think made a mistake by not delaying the conversion. Sure, a lot of people will just bail and get cable. But in this economy, some people can't or won't.

The only thing sadder than an old person who sits around watching TV all day is an old person watching a blank screen all day.

There, I said my piece. Now go do your thing!

Photo: NYTimes.com

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Doris Lessing is cranky, old, fun

Brett Singer — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Sometimes it's nice to point out an article, or in this case a couple of articles, that feature smart women. Especially smart, accomplished women who speak their minds and don't care what anyone thinks.

Doris Lessing, a recent Nobel Prize winning writer, definitely fits the bill. How many people win a Nobel Prize and then say, "If I may be catty, Sweden doesn't have anything else."

Or this gem: "I hear girls saying, 'Oh I'm not going to bring a child into this wicked world,' which means they are going to be pregnant next week."

Both of those quotes are from a recent Time magazine interview she did (link via Gawker). There was also a piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine where she talked about some other topics, mostly her latest work, "Alfred & Emily". The book is described as two novellas: one where she tells her mother's actual life story, then writes another one in which her mother is depicted "as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I." Something about that idea fascinated me. Sort of a "here's her life, and here's what should have happened had she been born into a better situation."

The new book will probably be her last, because, at 88 years young, she has "run out of energy completely." In the Time article she offers some advice to us younger scribes: "Don't assume you'll have it forever. Use it while you've got it, because it'll go; it's sliding away like water down a plug hole."

Now, she also said this about current conditions of Zimbabwe, where she grew up many years ago when it was known as Southern Rhodesia: "It's ruined. Under the whites it was an extremely efficient country. It could grow absolutely anything. We had railways and post offices and roads and water that worked. You can't just put that back overnight." The Gawker commenters rightly slam her for that, although its possible that there is more to what she said, since Zimbabwe is currently a bit of a mess, what with some countries claiming that Mugabe's Presidency is illegitimate. She was also, according to Gawker, "barred from South African and Rhodesia for denouncing apartheid." I'm not trying to excuse what she said, but I don't think it's in the same league as Imus' "Nappy Headed Ho's" riff.

I freely admit that I've never read a Doris Lessing novel, so I have no idea if she's "worthy" of a Nobel Prize or not. But I always appreciate it when someone says what's on her mind, especially someone who has lived a long time and accomplished a great deal. We get to hear plenty of old men talking, both wise and not-so-wise. So let's give the ladies a shot too.

image: nytimes

Strollerderby : old people

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