i hate television
(note: mistakenly mixed up my year for The Ring with the release date for Ringu . So, the specifics in the first couple paragraphs here are 4 years off. The point about television ownership still stands, though.) …except, I don’t. I love television. I think television has it’s brain-frying downside, and a lot of people—like several of those in that Rear Window -inspired balcony scene in The Ring —use television to numb their minds, to yank themselves out of their dreary lives, to spy on the rich and famous perhaps, or live vicariously through reality game show contestants, or just to laugh at a good sitcom. In 1998, when The Ring was in theaters, there were 67,011,180 households in this country with cable television, and that was 67.4% of households with TVs… meaning 99,423, 116 (rounded off) households had television in this country alone, according to Nielsen Media Research . According to Infoplease , there were 102,528,000 households total in 1998 (again, in the United States). ...