Crosswalks to Nowhere

As mentioned in this blog post, we got rid of cable TV in our house about 5 months ago. I figured this was a good time to give a status report.

What have we missed? Not much. We're not inclined to watch shows like "Jersey Shore," and most of our former favorite channels-- Food Network, A&E, Discovery-- seemed to have become home to mean-spirited, cheaply produced "reality" shows. From what I've seen and heard since dropping cable, this trend hasn't changed.

During the holidays we missed some movie marathons from TCM and the like, but that just made us look for alternatives at Netflix or on the local Chicago over-the-air channels.

As I mentioned, we started plowing through our Netflix queue, and we've caught up on a bunch of movies we've been meaning to watch. I've also discovered some TV shows that I missed the first time around (thanks mostly to MeToo), and I can now eloquently spout 20-year-old pop culture phrases like "Resistance is Futile" and know what they mean. I can now both annoy and astonish my co-workers with my "new" TV discoveries: yes, I will admit publicly that until a couple months ago I never saw a single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

From a technical standpoint, the video and audio on our TVs is near-perfect. We have a later-model analog/CRT TV, and the signal that comes out of our converter box is great. Despite my tendency to collect gadgets, I still don't see a need to upgrade to an HDTV yet.

All that said, we're not completely "off the wire." While we don't have cable TV in the house, we now have access to Internet video thanks to the Sony BDP-S370 Blu-Ray player I bought a couple weeks ago. This unit has built-in internet video streaming, including Netflix, Amazon, and a whole bunch of other services. This means that you connect the player to your home network, and anything that shows up as "Watch Instantly" in your Netflix queue can be streamed through the player right to the TV at no additional charge past your monthly Netflix subscription. You can also "rent" movies (and recent TV episodes) through Amazon and have them delivered directly to your player at that moment. I'll post a detailed review of the Sony player and the available services in an upcoming blog post.

So far, we've saved about $400 overall by not having cable TV, and we don't miss it. And frankly, I feel a little more smug about not supporting programs where the hosts encourage people to drop 80-lb wedding cakes or show Just How Much Better Off You Are Than These Losers Who Can't Seem to Run a Household.

Of course, we still have network TV for that.

Among the negatives I recently had digitized at ScanCafe, I discovered the results of a former hobby of mine: photographing TV screens.

When I first discovered 35mm photography (using my dad's Kodak Retina IIa fold-out camera) I got interested in all the things you could do by messing around with the shutter speed and aperture. While visiting a camera store I found a publication from Kodak called "Photographing Television Images" and I decided to give it a try, as it brought together my newfound hobby of photography with my already-embedded Radio/TV hobby.

The photo above is one of my very first attempts at shooting a TV screen: this is an image taken in 1976 of WCIU-TV's "Stock Market Observer" program. This show was a precursor to services like CNBC, and created a whole generation of financial market-watching geeks. This was shot on Ektachrome slide film. (To see more of what the show looked like, click this link to a clip on the Fuzzy Memories site.)

This is WCIU's test pattern, taken earlier the same day. The station's transmitter was on the top of the Board of Trade Building, and their signal was weaker than most of the other Chicago TV stations at the time. These were the days when stations would go off the air during the night, and WCIU would come on around 8:00 am each day.

Here are two more shots of the Stock Market Observer, this time from 1990. The improved TV signal, graphics, and interesting Dow Jones Industrial Average are all noteworthy. The lady in the photo is Linda Marshall, the previous generation's Maria Bartiromo.

These were also shot on Ektachrome, this time with a Pentax K1000. I went through a phase where I was processing my own transparency film, and these were part of that collection.

Back to January, 1976: NBC just introduced their new logo (which turned out to be already in use by a public TV network in Nebraska), and they were splashing it everywhere. This photo was taken using Kodak Verichrome print film in the Retina IIa, and as you can see the colors on the negative didn't hold up well over the years. That "N" is supposed to be red and blue, and the "5" should be white. (I chose to present these the way they were scanned rather then correcting them with PhotoShop.)

In the summer of 1976, WCFC came on the air as an all-Christian-programming station. This was the first new TV station in Chicago in many years, and now there was a stop as you spun your UHF dial from WFLD (channel 32) to WSNS (channel 44). This is one of their first test patterns and program cards for their locally-produced nightly show Chicago. This was shot on Tri-X film with the Retina IIa.

In 1983, another new station came on the air: the City Colleges of Chicago started WYCC on channel 20, and I caught these early test patterns. The camera was a Pentax K1000 and the film was 400-speed Kodacolor.

One of the neat things about growing up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago was that we could swing the antenna on the roof to the north and if conditions were right, we could pick up Milwaukee TV stations. This is another 1976 photo, showing a title card for WTMJ's local morning news segment during the Today show.

It's interesting to see these after so many years.

What do you do when you have a brick wall that sucks all the light out of a room? You paint it, of course.

We moved into our house three years ago, and one entire wall of the family room was made up of awesome 1970s-era dark brick. Despite white walls and carpeting, it was always like sitting in a cave whenever we were in the family room. We'd been talking for years about what to do with it, and we finally got out the rollers and brushes.

This is actually a video of our priming the brick, but you get the idea. You're looking at two and a half hours' worth of work compressed into 120 seconds.

I'll post details on the project in a future blog posting. In the meantime, enjoy!

This was a shot taken from I-94 heading south near Kenosha, WI at Highway 50.

The McDonald's in the background was a hangout for us in high school and college.

The photo was taken in November, 1981. The camera was a Kodak Retina IIa, the film was Fujicolor 400 that was at least 6 months past its expiration date.