Semi-bad news for some of our more wound-up football fan friends. I’d rather you hear it from me than off the streets.
A standard TV set you and I have turns the video signal it receives into beams of tiny particles called electrons. It shoots these beams of electrons at the back of the screen through a picture tube. (No idea how, but it does. It’s science.)
Then, the beams “paint” the pixels on the screen in a series of rows to form the picture. And that’s what we see.
So when we watch something — say football, for instance — we are not really seeing the actual cornerback for Dallas or the center for the Saints or the LSU wide receiver. We are seeing rows of electrons painted pretty colors that look exactly like the players or fans or officials or the insurance duck or Flo from Progressive.
So really and truly, when we holler at the TV set, when we tell the wide receiver how stupid he is for dropping the pass or the linebacker what a dimwit he is for not “wrapping up” and making the tackle, when we’re screaming for the Grim-Faced Owner shown in his luxury suite to fire the coach already and hire anything smarter, like maybe a cantaloupe, none of those people can hear us.
We are yelling at colored dots that can’t hear. They are pretty dots, way better than the dots we used to see on the Philco back before we knew how much it costs to get a new radiator or a vacuum cleaner, but they are still just high-quality dots.
Lipstick on a pig.
Deaf dots, is what they are. Stone deaf dots.
As Vince Vaughn’s character says while playing Madden in The Break-Up, what we’re seeing are “little digital guys with the big hearts.”
And I do love them so.
This doesn’t stop me from hollering at one every now and then. Or at the announcer or the official or the coach. After all, we fans are all just trying to help, right? We’re all for peace on earth — right up until the white hat whistles us for holding on consecutive plays. (Insert scream here.)
We are heading at a furious pace into Prime Hollering Season, and here’s why: there are 43 college football bowl games during the next three weeks. I know: joy and all that.
The first one is the Bahamas Bowl Friday, Dec. 16, just a week from tomorrow night. The finale is Monday, Jan. 9, when a national champ will be crowned at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. Because of personal mental sickness and a lack of discipline, I will watch as much of every bowl game as is reasonably possible.
Sometimes if things get boring, I will holler at the TV dots to make myself laugh, knowing the TV dots can’t hear. Or holler back.
BowlFest is one of my favorite times of year. People who say there are “too many bowl games” make me want to say there are “too many people.” Those same people never say there are too many soap operas or too many Mannix re-runs; they just don’t watch them. Just don’t watch the games, dude. But let kids who want to play have fun, let the retired guy who volunteers to take up tickets or work parking at the game have fun, and let student-athletes enjoy a few free days in Honolulu or San Diego or Shreveport or Mobile, places they might never go to again.
Instead of hollering at our TV sets and the colored electrons that somehow look like Joe Burrow or Deion Sanders, we should be hollering at you.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu
