a built-in DVD-player<\/a>, too! So that<\/i>’s all right.\nAt any rate, YHB shopped, at least vaguely and windowly, for a new television during the late summer and autumn, and I must say that anybody who is waiting for a new television is waiting for a flat screen. If you really, really want a cathode-ray tube, I suspect you have to go to a specialty store, or perhaps an odd lots place will have a bunch left over, or of course you can have our old one. And lots of people probably still have old CRT sets that still work fine. But in the stores? The TVs are all flat.\n
And if you are imagining a household like our own, where perhaps the kids are waiting for their parentals to finally get up to the twenty-first proverbial and get rid of that old square screen, well, that’s probably not the household that Mr. Ranty was talking about, is it? I mean, maybe it is—surely I don’t consider myself and my children absolutely exempt from the curse of Western Materialism. And the fact that we had our old TV for only, let me think, it must have been, hm. Was it the one my mother-in-law gave us in 2004? I think that must be right. And she had only had it for a couple of years at that point, so it was probably a 2002 machine. You know what? It probably says on the back of it, and it’s still sitting on the floor, because it weighs a zillion pounds. Let me look. Yep, 2002. That’s only eight years—not quite nine—out of a three-hundred-dollar piece of home entertainment. So yes, Western Materialism and creature comforts and all.\n
But even in my house, nobody was really waiting for a new flat-screen TV. We were waiting for a set that worked, yes. There was some anticipation that was not very Adventy. But the flat-screen<\/i>ness was not really part of that anticipation; flat screen was a given. It came with a remote control, too!\n
I don’t know what I would put in the place of that phrase, though. If I were to talk about kids and their parents anticipating the material aspects of X-mas, I wouldn’t have any immediate idea of a new-fangled thing to write. An iPad? A Wii? A smartphone? Those seem a bit six-months-ago, but still better than a flat-screen TV. I suppose I would go to one of the big on-line shopping sites and look at what the big item was this week, if I wanted to look totally au courant<\/i>’n’stuff. But then, I would probably take half-an-hour trying to come up with the perfect thing for the sentence, and then give up and delete the whole note. So, probably better to just do the rant and have people like me go this guy is out of touch<\/i> than to have less-obnoxious people go is he ever going to post again?<\/i>\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger actually mocks the out of touchness of a blogger , and the tarnish of a kettle, and the astigmatism of that mote-eye over there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19236,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13466\/revisions\/19236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}