television

Personality begins where comparison leaves off. Be unique. Be memorable. Be confident. Be proud.

[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs__hatever__ust so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.

How you feel after watching something indicates not what you watched but where you are at.

Poverty is a great educator. Having no boundaries and refusing to be ignored, it mostly teaches hopelessness. But not always. Politics is also a great educator. Mostly it teaches, I am afraid, cynicism. But not always. Television is a great educator as well. Mostly it teaches consumerism. But not always. It is the "not always" that keeps the romantic spirit alive in those who write about schooling. The faith is that despite some of the more debilitating teachings of culture itself, something can be done in school that will alter the lenses through which one sees the world; which is to say, that nontrivial schooling can provide a point of view from which what IS can be seen clearly, what WAS as a living present, and what WILL BE as filled with possibility

Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

. . . [E]very single writer I met likened writing for television to one thing--laying track for an incoming speeding train. The story is the track and you gotta keep laying it down because of the train. That train is production. You keep writing, you keep laying track down, no matter what, because the train of production is coming toward you--no matter what. Every eight days, the crew needs to being to prepare a new episode--find locations, build sets, design costumes, find props, plan shots. And every eight days after that, the crew needs to film a new episode. Every eight days. Eight days to prep. Eight days to shoot. Eight days, eight days, eight days, eight days. Which means every eight days, that crew needs a brand-new script. And my job is to damn well provide them with one. Every. Eight. Days. That train of production is a'coming. Every eight days that crew on that soundstage better have something to shoot. Because the worst thing you can do is halt or derail production and cost the studio hundreds of thousands of dollars while everyone waits. That is how you go from being a TV writer to being a failed TV writer.

Stop listening to the TV tell you about America the beautiful . . . get up and be America the beautiful.

People want to be told what to do so badly that they'll listen to anyone.[Written by Andre and Maria Jacquemetton]

If those who cause destruction have come to be __ewsworthy_, and those who heal the devastation of that destruction have come to be less than __oteworthy_, has our thirst to be entertained become the truly destructive thing?

You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg - that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined,that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'.

Celebrity mentality sometimes misguides us to make wrong choices. That__ why T.V screens sometimes lie to us!

Advertisement shouldn__ look like information, it should look like a promise.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy.

Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.

I used to want to be a cop for a brief time, a detective, solving crimes and upholding the law, ever since I stated watching crime shows in junior high. But being a cop, contrary to what many believe, isn't like the films or television shows that we see every day. If you're the cop who has to have the grim duty of telling a parent that their child was killed, or who loses their friend on a dangerous case, or who has to interview victims of horrible crimes, somehow I imagine that you just want to quit forever on some days.

The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.

The Mauna Kea night shift was an 18 hour night in wintertime at the 13,796 feet summit (before sunset to after sunrise) with insufficient time for adequate sleep before the next night shift. Night shift was between 5 and 8 nights long and we slept at 9,200 feet. We sat at a desk staring at four large computer monitors and a large cathode ray tube television. I would also use my Wi-Fi laptop computer. I would have extreme fatigue by the end of every night shift and have chapped lips which I now associate with exposure to the artificial light from the computer screens. A good day of sleep between shifts was rare and starting the next shift fatigued was normal.