Word: turnoff
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...nonprofit watchdog group, TV-Free America, finds television overload to be problematic, though admittedly they are more concerned with inappropriate child exposure than my personal feelings about my abs. The group has started a national TV-Turnoff Week each April, an effort supported by everyone from the National Academy of Pediatricians to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. (The people who spend the most time watching flashing bare mid-driffs are also the heaviest.) This year over 6.4 million Americans avoided the Box of Existence for seven whole days. I liked a particular phrase on their website...
This week is TV-Turnoff Week, which was created by a nonprofit group called the TV-Turnoff Network--a group that in its eighth year, being generous, is only 1/52 toward its goal. I felt it my responsibility as a journalist to play Russian space monkey for you, and test drive a TV-less week seven days before the real thing starts on April 22. To get the rules straight, I called the TV-Turnoff Network, where spokesman Frank Vespe nixed renting movies, playing videogames and taping this week's shows for later viewing. Reading TV Guide, however...
TUESDAY, DAY 4: Desperate, I investigate the TV-Turnoff Network's suggested coping techniques. One of them is to "learn something new about your grandparents." I call Mama Ann and tell her about my project and how TV-Turnoff Week asked people not to watch television for the week. "That's not nice," she said. When I pressed her for info, she said, "I play canasta. What else? Nothing much. At my age, you want me to find something exciting?" No, but I wasn't letting her go. Finally, eager to get me off the phone, she confessed that...
After a week, I'm not sure what the TV-Turnoff people are trying to prove. It's not like reading is so great. The Top 10 shows are better written than the best-selling books. Fighting the most popular storytelling medium is not only a losing battle and horribly snobbish but unsocial too. The Osbournes and Survivor bring us together and define us as a culture. Hey, better that than Nora Roberts...
...from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, Calif., to be deeply dislocating, in the best sense of the word. Route 111, the main approach to town, veers suddenly off from Interstate 10 to cut a jazzy angle across the desert, unplugging you at last from the freeway grid. Past the turnoff, the six-mile drive into town, with its surreal juxtaposition of ancient mountains and shiny new energy-producing windmills, seems to further separate you from the everyday. And then the big, welcoming surprise: the sharply angled roof of the Tramway Gas Station looming over a low wall at the entrance...