(A pal is running a caption-this-picture contest from the State of the Union address last night.  Any suggestions?)

I made a point of staying away from Willow last night. I wanted to have a clear head for the President’s remarks, and although I think I succeeded, I did not come away from the address with much at all.

Increase the minimum wage to nine bucks and hour? OK- I suppose that is something. Of course, it just means that business will pass the increased costs on to the consumers, or lay off some people to make the business model work. Who does it affect? Mostly the small business guys I used to hear so much about.

Then there was a bold call for universal pre-school. I have no idea how that would be paid for- that end of things never seems to come up in the soaring rhetoric. Mr. Obama called on us to do the things that we know works- yet nothing seems to be working at the moment. My heart goes out to him.

The other hot-button topics were addressed, but there was nothing specific about them, except the usual “pass the bill” nonsense. What bill? Which one?

Then the much-anticipated Marco Rubio rebuttal afterwards. I could not make much out of that, except I suppose we should do something to fix immigration. Apparently the last thirty or forty years of policy have cleared failed to do anything except change the local demographics.

I turned off the flat screen with a sigh. On the upside, no specific threat except to continue to govern by regulation. On the downside, obviously a lot more regulation is coming, none of it debated, just issued. The EPA is going to have a grand time with us. Crap.

Anyway, I still use broadcast TV for sporting events, or breaking news like the State of the Onion. But I have realized that increasingly I am my own network.

I have been meaning to write a story about the nature of television, and how we watch it.

We Geezers in Detroit grew up in the era of four channels (one more than most Americans, since we had CKLW broadcasting from Canada to the south) and then a bold technological innovation: we got that ghostly UHF channel series- I only vaguely remember black and white movies on black and white Channel 50. Crappy reception.

We are pretty comfortable with the idea that television was our calendar. We knew what was on, when it was on, and what day of the week it was because of what was on after the local news. The whole 500 channel thing just makes me dizzy these days. Half a thousand channels, and nothing on. It is completely disassociated from what day of the week, or time of the day.

Based on a recommendation from my boys, I upgraded the flat-screen to an internet-aware Panasonic. I could have got a similarly aware DVD player, but this seemed more logical. BTW, I think my old Comcast box had an advanced digital recorder that I never bothered to figure out- I have been hostile to recording shows since I had a TiVo and discovered instead of one of my favorite series, it had recorded about fifty hours of the home shopping network.

What I actually discovered is that I have left the five or six channels I used to watch almost completely. When I read a review of a decent show, regardless of network (and they are really micro networks up there in the spectrum), I turn on the TV, not the FiOS or Comcast box, go to Amazon or Netflix, and purchase an episode “on spec,” so to speak. If it looks like it is worth my time, I sign up for a season pass, and each week or when a new episode is aired, it is added to my queue for a nominal fee. I have Hulu Plus, too, which I should learn more about, but which provides free episodes though not as many as Netflix/Amazon.

So far, I have season one of Downton Abbey, the excellent “Elementary,” (Dr. Watson is Lucy Lu) the wildly different but completely entertaining “Sherlock.” I had all the “Fringe” shows up to the finale, and would watch them two or three times to get all the plot details. Last Friday I “worked from home” and had a couple glasses of wine at the end of the day rather than go out to Willow.

I wound up watching half the season of “Longmire,” a modern western based on the Walt Longmire mysteries by Craig Johnson. Also, season one of the BBC’s “Doctor Who,” a multi-generation tradition in the UK who has a series of Doctors throughout the history of the series (sort of like Basil Rathbone as the definitive Sherlock of his generation with Nigel Bruce as the eternal Dr. Watson), as are the two guys playing him now, and the woman and guy playing the good doctor).

On my son’s recommendation I picked up the first (and only two, so far) of “The Americans,” a fascinating and funny account of a deep-cover KGB family living in Fairfax, VA, in the 1980s, right around the corner from where the Ex and I lived at the same time. I thought the pilot was a hoot- the series is on the Fx Network, which normally I could not find with both hands.

I have several seasons of “Weeds” on DVD and the same with Madmen, which I never got started on, and think I will take all the old DVDs down to the farm where crappy Internet speed makes disc media the preferred solution. It is another technology that is slowly passing away, like the rotary phone or floppy discs.

I know it is futile, but if I start to ignore the news, is there any chance it will just go away?

Just asking.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com