Television

From RationalWiki

Television was a band headed by Tom Verlaine in the mid to late seventies. Apocryphally, they helped to build the stage at CBGB's, and shared billings there with many seminal punk/new wave/art rock bands such as Blondie, Talking Heads, The Ramones, and Patti Smith Group (to name but a few). Their two albums from long ago, Marquee Moon and Television were technically proficient and ground-breaking, enough so that they still get airplay on college radio stations to this day.

[edit] Alternate usages

The band's name was appropriated for a communications technology that describes a system of sending moving images and associated sounds (typically one-way) over long distances, originally without wires (although more and more today the old fashioned "wireless" systems are being replaced with hard-wired connections called "cable TV").

The word is also used for the receiving device involved in this system. These receivers, which act as display units, have evolved from primitive nineteenth century cathode ray tubes to various twenty-first century "thin screen" technologies such as liquid crystal diodes and plasma devices. Woo! These devices are also used to reproduce pre-recorded materials that are owned, rented, or stolen by the viewer.

This "television" system is typically used to pacify and direct the urges of the masses into consumerist behavior, thus reducing their attention to any monstrous crimes that may be being perpetrated upon them by the wealthy multinational corporations that control the world's economies and governments.

Before the widespread use of digital cable, television channels began in the VHF band, on channel 2, because channel 1 was reserved for the government to watch you.. Young whippersnappers like you don't know how good you have it now. Back in my day you had to get up off the couch to turn the blasted thing to another station. There was ABC on channel 2, CBS on channel 6, NBC on channel 8, and PBS on channel 10.^[1] That was it. If you were really lucky you lived in a place^[2] where you could pick up 4 or 5 different TV markets with a huge antenna tower and a rotor - so you had your choice of 20 or more stations but if the President of the United States decided to give a speech you were screwed anyway. If you were really unlucky, you lived in a place^[3] where the only stations you could get were both the same network - ABC - one of them on channel 13 in another state that didn't come in too good, the other a local station on channel 40 that didn't sign on until 11 in the morning. And let's not even discuss UHF bands. Tuning in to them was like cracking a safe.