Anti-TV sentiment seems to be one of the memes bubbling to the top recently. I thought about what TV outliers we are while at my parents' fully-media-equipped house, and returned to see Halley and Doc commenting on similar themes.

At our house, we have no cable TV. Actually it turns out that we could have it -- we have a cable modem, and the TV feed apparently can't be turned off by the cable company -- but I spent an hour looking through the full cable TV listings and didn't see anything worth watching besides Dick Van Dyke re-runs. We have a 19-inch screen TV (my logic: a small screen wouldn't be such an all-absorbing brain hoover). Our kids get zero to one hour of TV a day, just before dinner because it's a way to veg out as blood sugar levels drop as we get dinner ready. Some of my co-workers are incredulous that I don't watch TV. I'm incredulous at the national watching stats: three hours of real TV watching per person per day on the average. This is from Todd Gitlin's new book Media Unlimited -- a quick read, worthwhile mostly for the stats and other quotes, which I'll try to excerpt here later. Surprisingly, the French stats are higher at 3.5 hours a day - encroyable!