Friday 17 November 2017

November 17, 2017 Chautauqua


Beth's Ponderings

   When my sister and I were younger, our house was hit by lightning one night.  The lightning hit our TV aerial and travelled along the wiring, into the house...an outlet cover was blown across the room, but the most freaky part of the whole thing was that the lightning went  horizontally into our metal TV stand just above all the LPs storied on the bottom shelf before it changed direction sharply and went straight up into the TV. 

   As a consequence of getting zapped, our colour TV became a black & white TV, except if we watched black and white movies - which always appeared in bright vivid colour.  Other than the quirk of the coloured vs black and white, and the odd loud snap and crackle when you least expected it (and the house was totally silent otherwise), the TV was fine so we didn’t get a new one, until it finally did bite the dust.

   After literally YEARS of watching the TV, and knowing that if we saw black and white it was really in colour, and visa versa, you’d think we wouldn’t have been surprised when we were able to watch shows and movies the way they were meant to be. 

   The first time we popped in the old John Wayne classic “Angel and the Badman” (VHS) to watch on our brand new TV we were sure that the TV, or the VCR, or both, were broken as the movie we were viewing was definitely black and white, and not in colour as it had always been every other time we viewed it. (It has since been updated in colour and newer releases on DVD are almost all in colour).

   We even scrutinized the video case in sheer disbelief to discover that the version we had was in fact a black and white movie.  As we sat there watching the movie we could remember the colour of each and every outfit and item of scenery, as well as the vivid blue of the sky! 


   Even though we had known in our minds that what we had been viewing before had been altered as it was being seen on a (for all intents and purposes broken) TV, that had been our “reality” for so long that when we saw it through a new lens (TV), it took a while to adjust.

Beth 


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