Is the city now using "trench warfare" to renovate the East Village, one collapsing building at a time? I didn't see that in the rezone plan. [EVG]
If you're one of the few of us who still don't have cable or digital, if you're still enjoying your clunky old analog, your TV might go blank today. Am I the only one who resents this edict? [yahoo]
What happens to those parking meters once they're taken away? I asked a DOT guy this morning and he said: "They go to Queens." Queens is getting Manhattan's hand-me-down meters. But probably not any from the East Village. Ours are incorrigible, irredeemable, too resistant to renovation. "These ones with all the stickers and graffiti," the guy told me, go in the trash. It's just not worth it to scrape and repaint them.
"...wouldn't it be great to see a bunch of angry West Village cranks getting in the way of paparazzi at the Waverly Inn?" Yes! [NYM]
"Walking Sisters" given their walking papers, as a convent is shuttered in Brooklyn after 146 years of helping the helpless. Women like these once kept urban communities functioning. (With apologies, I think of Mary Tyler Moore's hardy, social worker nun opposite Elvis in "Change of Habit.") [NYT]
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a.k.a. The Book of Lamentations:
a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct
- Jeremiah Moss
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I didn't read the article yet...but let me guess what is happening to the Walking Sisters church...Condo?
ReplyDelete[And Change of Habit was a fine film....]
I am totally with you on the TV chanageover. Why would they change the broadcast standard to HD when the kind of people who give a crap are the kind of people who already have cable anyway? I have rabbit ears on top of my TV. I have never once thought to myself that it would be great if I could see the actors' pores better.
ReplyDeleteRelated to this site in that the changeover can probably be traced back to some political wheeling and dealing that benefits a deep-pocketed campaign donor.
So, they're going to change their broadcasting to a standard that prevents televisions without an expensive gadget or not connected to a cable service from receiving their signal. Who the hell is THAT going to inconvenience?
ReplyDeleteWith all the crap they bombard us with on television (mindless programming and even worse commercials), they should be paying US to watch!!
And what provisions have been made for what will be the largest mass-disposal of "obselete" tv sets in history? That's a lot of lead, mercury and other toxic shit that'll hit the land-fills or be burned!!
The desperation on the part of broadcasters to get us to accept HD shuld make it obvious that this change is to THEIR benefit, not ours.
I plan to keep the tv I now have -- I have thousands of DVDs and VCR tapes and will continue to watch the intelligent entertainment I currently enjoy.
Anyone willing to pay $60+ per month for the priviledge of receiving the HD version of the garbage we've been getting "for free" on tv is a fool....
db and chris, thanks for the comments. i'm posting something probably tomorrow on this very subject. who needs to see pores?
ReplyDeleteThank you for bringing up the Digital TV transition. I smelled a rat the moment I first heard about it and the more I've read up the more I've realized it's just another sad instance of government colluding with big business that you can add to the myriad ones that preceded it. I personally am not affected by this since I have cable anyways but my heart goes out to all the working and poor people still getting OTA signals who are having their arms twisted into buying either cable, a fancy new television, or at very least some expensive converter device just so they can continue to watch television.
ReplyDeleteI still have yet to hear a compelling reason as to why this transition is necessary. Nobody's picture is going to be significantly better unless they have an expensive new HDTV to enjoy digital cable on in the first place, and contrary to what the government and cable companies have been spouting the transition actually REDUCES the amount of channels analog viewers can receive. There are no gray areas with digital over-the-air broadcasts like there are with analog ones. With an analog signal you can pick up several channels, some better than others, while digital simply grabs a signal and attempts to perfect it to crystal clarity. Sometimes it does this and makes the few channels you receive come in better than before, but this is almost always at the cost of losing the signal completely from all the other channels it can't get a good hold on. Doesn't sound like a very good trade-off to me, especially considering people who have analog TV probably aren't particularly interested in high-definition picture quality to begin with.
ALL the transition will do is make people analog viewing so unenjoyable that people will submit and buy cable, padding the pockets of big business once more. Of course some folks will have an opposite reaction and give up on TV altogether but the big companies weren't getting any cash from them to begin with, anyways. Oh, and if anybody here owns a portable television you may as well throw it out the window as it will be rendered 100% useless come February.
Once again "progress" has been redefined from useful, necessary change to fixing things that aren't broken to begin with.