Stupid Dead TV…

So:

We were hanging around tonight, nothing out of the ordinary. Annette and I and Will had previously enjoyed the movie Fun with Dick and Jane(which Annette and I thought was better than we had anticipated, though I think Will thought it was boring). After that, I was kind of channel-surfing around, looking for something to watch, when the television just stopped working. I mean just freakin’ died, like in the middle of the space from one channel to the next.

I’m standing there going “What the fuck is going on here?”

Annette was staring at her laptop and trying to get a picture to show up on her web page and thus is engrossed in Dreamweaver and such. “Why won’t this work?”

I go over and fix her problem with a few keystrokes and then point to the broken television, as if to make it clear to her that this is the real problem in the room. I am quite sure she was not convinced.

Anyway, I thought it was the weirdest thing. Previously, the problems I’ve had with televisions presented themselves gradually. You know, the color starts to get strange, the picture isn’t shaped quite right, it loses its vertical/horizontal hold, etc.. etc., etc. But this thing just stopped working, somewhere between one of the HBO channels and the Comcast “On Demand” selections. Poof. No more TV. Just like that.

Well, one thing that is comforting is that this, this, and this review(s) suggest, it would appear that the TV we bought is/was a piece of poo. Of course, it might be an issue that TVs aren’t built the way that they used to be built.

Anyway, it looks like Will and I are going to do some TV shopping tomorrow. I suppose what I should do is read some reviews and such (which I have done a bit, and, generally speaking, it would appear that Sony and Samsung are the way to go) and buy the best TV for the money. But what I am also tempted and indeed likely to do is simply buy the cheapest TV we can get that meets our needs. As I type this, I am half-watching a 12 or so inch TV that we bought about three or four years ago for less than $50 (I distinctly recall we bought it and a DVD player for less than $80) that has nothing wrong with it. Someday, I’d like to buy a big screen and/or projection TV set-up, but that wouldn’t make any sense in the house where we live right now. So the combonation of these two things make me think to just get non-name brand cheapo TV and be done with it.

But it ain’t gonna be a Phillips, I’ll tell you that….