Quote for the Day

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Continuing the We Didn't Start the Fire roll call . . . 

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray

South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television

North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom

Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye

Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen

Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

Today: Television

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Song reference:

By 1950 TV was becoming widespread and was the most popular form of advertising. So many advertisers left radio for television that Variety described it in 1950 as "the greatest exhibition of mass hysteria in biz annals."

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In looking up quotes about television I was struck by how many were negative or condescending, displaying what my history teacher used to refer to as “intellectual snobbery”. We choose what we want to watch and we have the power to turn it off or change channels.  Now please excuse me while I watch My Kitchen Rules . . . 

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Btw, I loved this image from The Simpsons, when Homer revisited the old family home with his father . . . 

It may be a bit harder to work out from the above still/  It shows Homer's shadow from the 1950's TV set burned on the wall.

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Some quotes:

Television: A medium - so called because it is neither rare nor well done. 

- Ernie Kovacs

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home. 

- David Frost

They say that ninety percent of TV is junk. But, ninety percent of everything is junk. 

- Gene Roddenberry

Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all. 

- Fred Allen

I could have been a doctor, but there were too many good shows on TV. 

- Jason Love

How can you put on a meaningful drama when, every fifteen minutes, proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? 

- Rod Serling

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other. 

- Ann Landers

I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. 

- Groucho Marx

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. 

- Orson Welles

Theatre is life. Cinema is art. Television is furniture. 

- Author Unknown

I have come to the feeling about television the way I do about hamburgers: I eat a lot of hamburgers and I don't remember a single one of them. 

- John Barrow, 1973