The big television switch is a conspiracy, I tell you

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OK, OK, I get it. Digital television is coming this month.
Enough with the ads, the banners, the screen-crawlers and the infomercials. I am aware. I am prepared. My television is "digital-ready," hooked up to cable, sans antennae. Nothing will change whatsoever when that switch is flipped. I am totally, completely prepa ... uh ... wait. Wait, wait, wait.
Why can I only see part of the screen? There's a good 6 inches of television missing on both sides. Look at this, two people talking to each other and I can't see either one of them.
What's going on here? This wasn't part of the deal. This isn't right at all.
Maybe it's just this channel. Let's try some football. OK, Pro Bowl game, this will work. Let's see, the score is ... not on the screen. Where is the score? Who watches football without a score? Ah, right. Detroit.
What about public broadcasting? Surely PBS will give me a full screen of viewing pleasure. I am a patron, after all -- got the coffee mug and everything. I just need a few relaxing antique appraisals.
Here we go. Oh, that's a lovely piece right there. Now is that English Rococo or Neoclassical? If I could just see the scrollwork on the side, I ... oh. Oh, no. No, no, no.
Food Channel? No. Weather Channel? No. What's on the other channels? No! This has to be some kind of conspiracy. The evil kind.
I knew they were up to something with this whole digital switch. Make sure you're digital-ready, they said. Your rabbit ears won't work after February, they said. Seemed pretty simple, didn't it? But we all see what's going on now.
They're trying to spook us all into buying 52-inch high-definition televisions, and this is just the beginning. Every week they're going to bring those sides in another fraction of an inch until we can't take it anymore. We'll be falling over ourselves for plasma screens and 1080i resolution. The walls will glow in every living room in America.
Maybe they want to stimulate the economy. Maybe they want to unload a burst-bubble surplus of liquid crystal displays. Maybe it's just evil for the sake of evil. But one thing's for sure. It's not gonna work on me.
I watched 10 years of television on a black-and-white set made in a country where Taiwanese people buy cheap electronics. The antenna was mostly tinfoil and the remote was a dowel rod. It had all the UHF channels (14 through 83), and I knew them by heart.
I made the move to color and cable in the same purchase, and it's the only move I care to make. This television mutes, it remembers the last channel, it might even have closed captioning. Most importantly, this television weighs about 600 pounds and there's no way I'm getting it out of here.
So try your hardest, television industry. I will not be wooed with pixels and scan rates, and I will not be intimidated by digital deadlines and a compromised screen ratio. No discount or package deal will change my mind. I'm in this for the principle of the thing.
You can take my margins, but you'll never take my freedom.

(Ben Grabow writes for the young, the urban and the easily amused. Contact him at thinlyread(at)gmail.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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