I am a champion of the notion that almost all television is, for me anyway, unwatchable. I find most programs insulting and degrading to my intellectual sensibilities, and I find most of the musical scores, particularly of commercials, offensively loud. You might call me an intellectual snob for these attitudes, but I challenge you to do the following experiment:

Watch the first four or five minutes of a program on Spike or HDTV or some other themed cable network at a volume level sufficient that you can make out all the dialog, then in the middle of that, mute the volume.

I think you will find that silence as golden as any you have ever heard.

I thought of this today because I was thinking about television from the 1960s and 1970s, and how, for lack of a better word, cheap it was. Watch a 1970s sitcom intro at tv-intros.com and prepare to be amazed by the absolutely sh!tty the production values. Some of these things probably took no more than 30 minutes and a two-man crew with one 16mm camera to produce.

This all got started in my head this morning when I thought of a phrase uttered by one of my childhood science fiction heroes, Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock. In the midst of struggling to recover the Captain during a perilous beam-up, he says, “Cross-circuitiung to A,” followed a few dramatic moments later by, “Cross-circuiting to B.”

When I was 10, that sounded incredibly cool. Now that I am 48, I can’t believe how lame it is. Cross-circuiting to B? Really?