retrotech

I grew up with black-and-white TV.

That doesn't mean I'm now collecting social security -- just that my family was slower to move to color than everyone else. And then when the main TV in the apartment was a color set (a very small color set), I still watched a portable old black-and-white because I wanted to watch "Brady Bunch" or "Gilligan's Island" while the grownups had something more grownup on the main set.

Also: we never had cable, and the broadcast reception on the upper west side of Manhattan was terrible. This means that much of my childhood television "viewing" was really more of an audio experience. Sometimes we'd go up to the Catskill Mountains, where cableless television was a purely audio experience at best. I don't think I've ever seen the stage production of Peter Pan, but I have a strong memory of listening to the play while I stared into the television snow trying to make out the general shape of what was going on. (Sort of like scrambled porn 10 or 15 years later.)



Then I went to summer camp in Maine, on an island with no electric power. For a kid who watched as much TV as I did, that was a real challenge. The kids who had been there longer showed me that you could tune in to the audio portion of NBC TV around 88 FM on the radio. The main reason I remember the once-infamous flop sitcom "Hello, Larry" is because I spent a summer listening to it every week on a battery-powered transistor radio.

Apparently 88FM is just above VHF channel 6, which means that the TV audio bleeds over into the FM radio dial. We didn't have channel 6 in New York, so I never knew. There is a channel 6 in Philadelphia. NBC again. I had a girlfriend in college who listened to "Jeopardy" on the radio.

When the web was young, bandwidth meant you couldn't put the latest games online very easily. Arcade games from the 1970s and '80s -- Asteroids, Pong, Pacman -- all made a comeback. Retro chic.

With www.Bleenks.com, I can watch pirated American television from China. (Most of the pirated American television in the United States has already been removed.) We don't pay for cable TV, but we do pay for decent broadband. I was hoping it would make web video a convenient reality. So far, it's like Pacman, Pong, and Asteroids.

Here it is the 21st century and I'm once again listening to TV that I can't see very well. But I do mark it as progress. "My Name Is Earl" is much better than "Hello, Larry" -- even audio-only.