Early Adopter
An Early American Cable Box
Cable came to our house before just about anyone else’s.
It was 1980 and the technology was primitive. So much so that the “remote” control provided by our cable company (MacLeod, I think) was made up of a bank of buttons and a three-position switch tethered to your television with a long cord. The switch selected which of the three channels each button would represent when depressed, providing the techno-shocked and amazed subscriber with access to as many as 37 stations.
I hadn’t thought much about it in the last few years but whilst touring the amazing Henry Ford Museum, I came upon my youth under glass as shown above. My memories of early cable TV:
- A&E, which actually stood for “Arts and Entertainment,” routinely broadcast opera and ballet.
- Nickelodeon, with promo spots showing a roller skating mime hand-cranking an honest-to-god nickelodeon, was so desperate for programming that they actually aired a show made up entirely of a man reading comic books out loud. Slowly the camera would pan across each page of the featured comic-book while the narrator simply read the word balloons. The rest of Nickelodeon’s schedule was made up of warmed-over British kids TV such as:
- The Tomorrow People- Featuring psi-enhanced teenagers, my favorite memory of this show involved a scheme to clone Hitler–who was actually a rat-eating space alien–multiple times. As the cloning creches (which looked suspiciously like old Frigidairs) opened they each revealed a fully formed Adolf complete with his distinctive moustache and Nazi uniform. I suppose the uniform was clonable as well, but how did the cloning cabinets trim the Fuhrer’s facial hair?
- The Third Eye- Made up of several sci-fi miniseries from New Zealand and England, the only part I remember is “Children of the Stones”, in which creepy choral arrangements surrounded dramatic shots of stone-henge like rocks throughout a small town. I think–but am not certain anymore–that people or critters were turning into these stones somehow.
- Danger Mouse- a cartoon in which a secret agent mouse and his hampster side-kick Penfold had ridiculous adventures. Their primary adversary was a toad and his crow side-kick and they lived in the top of one of those crazy British letterboxes.
- TBS was just some UHF channel from Atlanta which was owned by Ted Turner. It somehow ended up as a national cable station chock full of typical UHF programming and local Atlanta advertising.
- Incidentally, Atlanta’s roofers universally refused to visit my house. This was excusable considering the distance they’d have had to travel and the fact that the voice ordering up the free estimate was obviously an 8 year old boy.
- I liked this station because it usually had old Warner Brothers cartoons on.
- Showtime filled in the time between movies with independent short films and nearly pornographic “aerobic exercise” videos.
- I only remember three of the short films. In one, a black fellow–possibly a film student–is attacked and ultimately consumed by a huge mass of unspooled videotape.
- In another, a POV piece, a monstrous woman attempted to use cash in public. In the end she is killed when a lynch mob burns a credit card into her forehead.
- In the last one I remember, we spend five minutes watching a man working in his basement crafting something out of wood while we hear his wife upstairs nagging him non-stop.
BY using very close camera angles the filmmaker hides what the fellow is actually making until the final shot, in which the cuckolded man sets off the finely crafted and massively scaled mouse trap, breaking his own back. 
The aerobic “exercise” videos were preceded by a disclaimer stating that you should consult your physician before attempting to play along.
The viewer would then be treated to several minutes of porno music and tight, slow-panning shots of beautiful women wearing unitards and leg warmers, pumping the floor slowly while coated in a light sheen of sweat.
Usually there was more than one lady, sometimes criss-crossing each other as if playing Twister or working out back-to-back or face-to-face.
Considering the creative camera movements and dramatic lighting, there would be no conceivable way a viewer could emulate the girls and actually get some exercize.
What possible use could these little routines have been? Too bad I was pre-pubescent at the time; I simply found the confounding videos to be a boring and unnecessary delay between repeat airings of “Moonraker”.
- HBO- At first, they were just like Showtime. But it was only a year or so before they brought Fraggles to the American masses. That alone made cable worthwhile to me… ‘Course, I wasn’t paying for it anyway…
- MTV… well, they actually showed music videos, ‘natch. I had no interest, though; I was too young and too square to get into pop music at the time.
Posted in Uncategorized by SafeTinspector on January 9th, 2008 |
9 comments
Whoa, now that’s some serious hardware! At least it brought you Danger Mouse. I love that cartoon. Damn that Baron Silas Greenback and his evil ways! The Fraggles were great too. Although I’d need to see these exercise videos to get a feel for what you’re talking about… otherwise, it’s a mystery.
PS. I tired updating my picture with fish…
Just for you SafeT…
They say bad things come in threes. Well so does quitting masturbating cold turkey, for me anyway. 3 days, 3 weeks, and 3 months. If you can get past these hurdles then you’re well on your way to quitting wanking. Mind you I’ve done them all before and a couple of years later when you’re least expecting it you’ll be drinking home made spirits in an Eastern Block country with people you can’t understand and it’ll seem like a totally sensible thing to take up wanking again. Being an addict is sooo much fun!
So if you’re any type of real tosser, not just the alcohol-fuelled-waste-a-ma
tes- hard-cock-by-awkwardly-bum-sucking-it-while-thinking-you-look-terribly-sophisticated type of tosser, then the first three days of quitting your strong right hand are going to be a whole world of ‘fucked up’.
So here’s what you do… oh no, this isn’t ‘help you quit’ tutorial this is a ‘conciliatory pat on the back, oh you poor bastard don’t put yourself through those three days unless you really want to succeed at not wanking’ sort of thing… So here’s what you do…
Don’t plan a day to quit wanking, screw that, that’s seriously way too much pressure, those first 3 days are bad enough without adding days of anticipation to them. Just know you’re about too quit and buy your dirty, filthy magazine one at a time, don’t buy another dirty, filthy magazine until the last one is finished (wanking your last cock on the way to get another dirty, filthy magazine is totally allowed). If you masturbate the last of a dirty, filthy magazine just before you’re going to bed for the night, congratulations, you’ve won the crappiest lottery of all, tomorrow you’re giving up masturbating. Hey, that’s what you wanted right?
Now, for the first three days you can expect to spend about 40mins of every hour feeling shit, but at least it’s an infinitely variable and often indescribable type of shit. Everything from body aches to complete mental distraction. If you really want to avoid these feelings there’s pretty much only three ways to stop them; The easiest, masturbate an orgasm; no? Sleep!; You have to be awake? Try shooting yourself in the face with a hand gun. That’s about it. Otherwise you’ll just have to get used to feeling like crap.
The only other thing to do is eat lollies and/or citrus fruits. For me it’s little pink musk lollies or Dutch salted liquorice, distinctive strong flavours. But remember they’re not masturbating, they wont stop you feeling like crap, and you’ll look completely gay while shovelling pink sweets into your mouth while feeling sick from all the sugar. But at least it’s a distraction. Talking of distraction, limit your social interaction. You’ll be no good to anyone. Especially with all your inane stupid comments about how much you really want a wank. Really, shut up and stay home. And get Drunk!
Oh yes, you absolutely must do this for the first three days. No excuses. The moment you get home in the evening crack open a beer, pour a wine, a snifter of port, or a shot of whatever. Nine hundred and ninety nine times out of a thousand the moment you start drinking you’ll have an orgasm. Why put yourself though three days of agony if you’re just going to fuck it up with the first beer. No. If you really want to give up masturbating, you must absolutely do it drunk. If you can’t do it drunk you’ll be back to wanking in a matter of weeks.
So that’s it. ‘Enjoy’ your first three days dopamine free. After that, you’ll be much more ‘with it’, you may even be presentable in public, and you’ll only feel like crap for about 5 minutes out of every hour when you get a craving. They’re pretty easy to distract yourself from, have another pink lolly ya gaywad!
That’ll last for about 3 weeks. The 3rd week’s the killer, there’s nothing quite like the low but ever present pain of dopamine being ripped out of your muscle mass by an addicted body, but then you’ll be dopamine free. Then you’ve only got about 3 months of psychological cravings… little events that trigger a craving. Like eating a meal. Most people have a wank after a meal and for three months you’ll probably feel like one after every meal. It’s psychological! As in, it’s something your brain invented based on your actions and it doesn’t really exist except in your head. Really, who wants to give in to a craving that doesn’t really exist? If you’re that type of person you may as well have shot yourself in the face during the first three days.
After that, you’ll actually be a reformed tosser. And then all you’ve really got to worry about is drinking home made spirits in an Eastern Block country.
Hah! You didn’t follow my instructions to the letter. FAIL!
Your instructions were flawed!
No, Rich, reality is flawed.
That cable box looks substantial, like it was made out of pig iron. A switcher forged during the Iron Age!
My parents never had cable - they ended up getting satellite finally within the past eight years, so unless I visited a friends’ or Gran’s place in Alabama, I never knew cable. Therefore, my cable anecdotes are limited to:
1) I remember every day round 5 o’clock, WXON channel 20 would show their station logo and announce that they would be switching their broadcasting to cable programming for the rest of the day. Then, if you were one of the lucky households with an iron age cable box, you’d be blessed with repeat showings of ‘Moonraker’, or ‘My Bodyguard’, starring Chris Makepeace.
2) Back in gradeschool, we had a secret Santa thing one year, and Beth Wischman was mine. She got me a Rubik’s cube that sported the ON tv logo on each of the white squares, along with a phone number, as her dad was apparently head of the local ON tv offices. Obviously I wish I still had that Rubik’s cube.
Hope you are happy. All that work. Now it’s ruined by fish playing poker. Forshame SafeT!
I’ve been thinking about that short film “mousetrap” for years and years after seeing it as a little kid on Showtime. Scared the shit out of me, especially because it would be on around 4Pm sometimes.
Anyways, amazingly, here is a link to a clip of it, as found on Youtube. “The Contraption”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HesJqf9Wa70
I did not know we were so forward thinking back then. I just wanted a clear picture and more choice. When your Grandpa and Gramma were living in Lima Ohio in the late 1960’s they had cable TV, which was wonderful, I thought, because of the clarity. As I remember, it only showed what we now think of as ‘local’ stations, but apparently, the geography of the area made clear TV signals hard to come by, hence the Cable TV solution.
Having experienced this phenomena, I then followed the progress of Cable TV in news magazines and TV, for the next several years, waiting for Cable TV to reach where I was living, I could not wait! (You know I have always been a gadget freak anyway. I remember Aunt Pat laughing at me because instead of a regular manual face brush, I had purchased a battery operated one.)
To think something that was so new and magical back in 1980 is now resting in a museum, really makes me realize how far technology has progressed and how ‘old’ I am.
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