One of the wonderful things about TiVo is that you actually watch less TV. If you eliminate channel surfing from your routine, and you just check the queue of what the machine has recorded for you—based on your explicit instructions to record, say, the beautiful and brilliant and frightening Mary Lahammer every time she tosses those golden locks on TPT—well, then, you watch only what you intend to watch, and you waste less time. You get to watch Mary when it’s convenient for you, and you don’t have to waste your time on commercials (or pledge drives, or Eric Eskola). This gives you more time to read the New York Times, for example.
Then you read Frank Rich, who informs you that the new season of “24” has begun, with two back-to-back nights of double episodes. You check, and discover that your standing orders to TiVo to keep up with “24” whenever and wherever it might air, well, TiVo remembers. So, you have four hours of TV in two days—practically a new personal record! This, of course, is the perfect circuit between high-brow and low-brow: Reading Frank Rich in order to watch Kiefer Sutherland. (This doesn’t hold much water with your wife, by the way.)
We have mixed feelings about the series. It’s emotionally and physically violent, and there are elements of it that are a little like explicit suicide instructions for a depressed nation. (Torture is always justified by noble ends; the most heinous behavior is acceptable because of the urgency of getting the show over in twenty-four hours, through seventeen relentless episodes.) It’s state-of-the-art, cliffhanger TV, and we often find ourselves watching through our fingers.
But there was a very funny moment in the first episode that we wanted to dwell on for just a moment. After the first crisis, there is an emergency debriefing involving a bunch of senior counter-terrorism officers. They are gathered around a conference table. There is a newbie—a funny, fat guy with a lisp—who is clearly just learning the ropes. He is the only one at the table who does not have an open lap-top in front of him. A supervisor scolds him. “Where is your lap-top, Edgar?” He says, “I don’t need it. I’ve memorized everything.” The supervisor scowls, incredulous. “How will you crunch data?” she says. If it weren’t so sad it would be funny, and if it’s not already a cliche, it will be.
For example: Over the holidays, we were comfortably installed at the cabin in northern Wisconsin. We brought the laptop along in case there was an emergency, and in case we were suddenly gripped by an irrational desire to finish some longterm projects gathering virtual dust on the hard drive. We were sitting around the dinner table trying to remember the names of all the James Bond films. We cheated. We plugged in the modem, dialed up AOL, and quickly had all the answers at our fingertips. The conversation continued, and suddenly we were the most informed, interesting, entertaining person in the room.
We realized a long time ago that email and the internet have more or less replaced all of our biological memory banks. In a very short time now, we will not remember our own name or telephone number— it will be on a keychain somewhere. We’re afraid TiVo and Outlook are a lot more reliable than we are.
What were we saying? Begob, where’s my bus? What bus?
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