WATCHING RAIN ON TELEVISION

I was watching rain on television the other day like a modern person, you can still just slip into that mode sometimes without thinking. At first I didn't realize the bizarrity of the fact, but then it hit me: I was watching rain on television to find out whether it was raining outside. 

It was raining outside, but only on TV. The TV rain was falling on some other outside that was standing in, as it were, for what could actually happen here, i.e., rain. And then where would we be, we ask ourselves in silence,  we've got to get some umbrellas or something, we've got to act, look at what might occur, and right where we are! Water falling from the sky on us walking along!

Fortunately, as I've indicated, the weather on TV is almost always somewhere else, raining on some other unfortunate city, because if it's raining here, then of course, like most news, it's not news, because then everybody knows it's raining, especially since a lot of folks are right out in it already, what can you do, word gets around, people bring the info home with them, which makes it primarily pointless to get your weather from a weatherperson indoors on tv.

It used to be that if for some reason we couldn't turn our heads to look out a window, we just opened a door and stuck a hand outside, but the days of hands outside are long gone. And good riddance, many unweathered smart alecks say, though I often miss the old ways and time they took to make things come true...

DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL

As earlier readers of these humble chronicles may recall - if they’re still coming back now and then after all this time - each year in Spring when the leaves open they close off my access to satellite television, leaving me only with standard J-tv, which I don't really watch, apart from quick news and weather, otherwise more like peer at and shake my head in amazement maybe an hour a month, just to see if anything has changed in 30 years.

Then in autumn, when the leaves fall in sufficient quantity they restore my satellite signal, which rises from zero over the days till it hits a nice clear high and I can see the bitter faces of Bull O’Really and friends once again. No doubt many of you share that pleasure year round. You have my sympathies. Yes, once again I can wade in the shallows of Samsara that tv seems to represent so well, compared to the mere "vast wasteland" it was back in the 60s.

I'm so old I remember original US tv back in the 50s, when there were actual plays on live at prime time, like Requiem for a Heavyweight, and individuals of deep integrity like Edward R Murrow, programs like the Firestone Classical Music hour, Hall-of-Fame stuff like The Twilight Zone and so on, back when the tv bigwigs were still trying to learn what people liked and hadn’t yet found the moneyed monsters in the basement.

This year, however, in a new act of mercy I cannot yet fathom, all the leaves have fallen but my signal from the sky remains at zero. Somebody up there is perhaps trying to spare me the rigors of the Dark Sea. All I'd have to do is tweak this or patch that, maybe reconnect a wire or two, to bring the basement back into my life, but at some point I became aware of a growing reluctance to lift a finger to resurrect the creatures that come in the day and the night to devour with their manic hunger all of my life they can get.

I know that may be a bit extreme, but when I go outside, the contrast between that dark window and the broad, bright reality of Pure Land Mountain is profound, rich with a joy that will never fit in a tube.

SPEAKING OF RAYS OF LIGHT

And speaking of rays of light, thanks to broadband I just finished watching - for the first time since the 60s - an episode from one of my all-time favorite tv series, The Avengers, right here on my computer, on that new tv mirror site with the logical listings.

Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) is just as hot as I remember her being in my more freely fevered years. (I'm more coherently fevered now.) Later - in the late 70s - I used to steal lemons from Diana's tree in front of her mountain house on Ibiza (just across the road from Terry Thomas' estate), which we used to walk by every time we went over the mountain into town. Diana was never there (very busy lady), so her lemons would have gone to waste. Needless to say they were excellent-- come to think of it, also grown from rays of light...

[Update Oct 20: And the day after I put up the above link: "TV-Links.co.uk Raided, Owner Arrested."]
Ah, well, in time the stream shall prevail...

AS TO AMERICA'S LUNCH

I'm certainly not at the cutting edge of all this, but ever since I got my new high-speed laptop I've been able to watch great full-screen movies on demand (e.g., The Big Lebowski), documentaries (The Last Waltz), classic tv series (Frasier, Spin City, Fawlty Towers) even recent movies (The Bourne Ultimatum) for free on my computer (though a smaller image still gives a better picture). Don't know how long all that will last before the big media lawyers swarm into Japan, but a big change is here. I don't need conventional tv or satellite anymore, or to rent DVDs; much vidtech is about to fall by the wayside in large quantities, I expect. In re which, from an interesting article linked to, below the excerpt therefrom:

"The U.S. is getting its lunch eaten. As SaveTheInternet points out, they [the Japanese] get access that is often 30x faster than the U.S. As a result they are experiencing innovation -- and enjoying applications that Americans simply don't have access to."

Why Japan is Eating America's Lunch on Broadband