Earth Day meets TV Turn-off Week

Earth Day, today, falls during TV-Turnoff Week, which lasts through Saturday. The conjunction of the two is occasion to reflect on how television, the public’s most used source of consumer messages and journalistic information, affects the Earth.

Consider this “starter” list of ten ways TV impacts the environment:

1. With the average American watching roughly 7 hours of TV a day, television sucks up lives that could be put to use working to improve the environment.

2. Because most television is in the business of stimulating consumption, it contributes to the depletion of the Earth’s resources.

3. Television sells its time to highest bidders, and the highest bidders are often corporations that exploit the environment and “green wash” their commercial messages.

4. Even public television (once known as “non-commercial” television) has sold out to these corporate interests. Precious few programs address the environmental crisis, and none that I know of do it in an on-going, systematic way. (I’d love to be proven wrong on this. Nominees?)
5. Television appeals to emotion and not the intellect. Issues of importance, like the survival of the planet, are often ignored as being too difficult to explain.

6. TV networks and cable and broadcast outlets are owned by fewer and fewer media conglomerates. Through overlapping directorates and industry lobbying, they collude to put their own commercial interests (ie. profits) above environmental issues.

7. Television’s alluring fantasy programming distracts the public from “real world” issues, like the degradation of the environment.

8. Through stereotyping, television panders to “enemy making,” which contributes to environmentally destructive wars and conflicts.

9. Major media conglomerates are also major military contractors whose very weapons are environmentally destructive.

10. By fear mongering through its violent programming and through news that exaggerates crime, TV isolates adults and children within their homes, segregating from the outdoors, nature and the environment. See "Mean World Syndrome."

Parents surrendering, then losing kids to "screens"

My friend and fellow media activist Jean Rystrom of Kaiser Permanente is a great source of information about trends in excessive, damaging "screen-time" use among children.

In the last two days, she has sent me and others two telling e-mails. The first is a link to a Wall Street Journal column, "Teenage Zombies," which echoes many concerns I've heard recently from parents. The primary one is that kids are becoming addicted to video games and are isolating themselves from their families and others.

The second lays out the alarming exposure of very young children to screen images, despite the medical community's warnings about the dangers posed, particularly to those under two. Parents, it seems, are turning over responsibility for their children's well-being to television programmers and TV hucksters.

Here's her report, which I have edited slightly:

I'm sending you a four-part series (one a week) of my brief impressions from important medical studies in 2007 pertaining to screen time (you'll be happy to know that I'm leaving out articles which pertain primarily to content as opposed to time). Consider all of the usual caveats: I'm not a researcher, and I "might" be biased.

This first message is simply an update, particularly about younger children. The issue continues to grow in importance and urgency as more opportunities to watch are developed and marketed, and aimed at younger and younger kids. Clearly we continue to have a lot of work to do: raising awareness is still a priority. Most parents are not aware that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all before age 2 (which has more to do with brain development than obesity, although that too is an ever more serious problem).

* 20 percent of children under age 3 have a TV in their bedroom

* 43 percent of children age 3 and 4 have a TV in their bedroom

* Most common reason cited by parents (54 percent): "it frees up other televisions in the house for other family members to watch their own shows"

* 27 percent of 5 and 6 year olds use a computer on a typical day

- Vandewater et al, Pediatrics, May 2007

* By 3 months of age, about 40 percent of children regularly watched television, DVDs, or videos

* The median age for introduction was 9 months

* Average 1 hour per day by age 12 months

* Parent reasons: education, entertainment, and babysitting

- Zimmerman et al, Archive of Pediatric Adolescent Med, May 2007

Jean and I are part of a coalition making a major push in the next two years to ensure that the dangers of early childhood exposure to screens are widely known and addressed in Oregon. Jean represents Kaiser Permanente (see its excellent website on screen time and its impact on kids); I represent Media Think. Other members include the State Health Department, Multnomah County Library, the County Health Department, WIC (Women, Infants and Children), Community Health Partners and the Oregon PTA.

We'll keep you informed of our progress.

TV critic as loathing grammarian

Peter Carlin, the Oregonian's TV critic, wrote a real jaw-dropper Wednesday about TV-Turnoff Week, which is happening now.

I took special interest in the column because I help organize TV-Turnoff locally.

I've encouraged several friends to take a look at the column and give me their reactions.

"Mean-spirited," "off-the-mark," and "tongue in cheek" are responses I have received.

If Carlin intended his column to be "tongue in cheek," he failed to signal his intent to this reader.

"Mean-spirited"? "Off-the-mark"?

I'm not so sure.

In fact the intent of the column escapes me. Carlin is hostile about the organizers of TV-Turnoff Week, even as he says he is "in favor of everything TV-Turnoff Week is trying to achieve."

After that sweeping endorsement he proceeds to say he "loathes those guys" who are organizing the event. Actually, many are women, but never mind.

He attributes a motive to "those guys" (and I do take this personally) of trying to establish "their own superiority."

Really?

These "guys" and gals are simply asking folks to assess the role of TV and "screens" in their lives. To what extent are the media addictive, for instance? Are they beneficial? Are they harmful? When and why?

Just how much time is devoted to watching? Is it time well spent?

It doesn't take a superior person to ask those kinds of "check-in" questions. In fact, you'd think that any TV critic worthy of the name would be asking those questions all the time.

But, for some undetermined reason, Carlin is hot in pursuit of "evidence" to prove that we in the media literacy movement are "not really all that smart." He finds it in a phrase and a line from the TV-Turnoff web site. He allows that his discoveries make all of us "come off like jerks."

That's a flaming, Limbaughesque/Imus-like leap, but let's take a look.

He reads condescension into the web site's line "...if you care about your children...you're going to listen to what we have to say." Carlin suggests that the phrasing implies that you, dear reader, don't care about your children if you allow them to watch too much TV.

Hello? The "If you..." device is purely rhetorical and he knows it. Often it implies "and we know you do" as is the case here. Or it may go like this: "If you care about your children (and what parent doesn't?) etc."

Next Carlin is off on a truly bizarre critique of the web writer's use of ellipses. That's right, that little row of pixelated dots. Here he is flat out wrong, not that it matters except he makes so much of it. In the AP Stylebook (Carlin should have one at arm's reach) an acceptable use of an ellipsis is to "indicate a pause or hesitation in speech." And that is exactly how it is used in the example Carlin excoriates.

Utterly fascinating, I know....

Next comes a riff on another line from the TV-Turnoff site: "Empowering people to take control of technology and not letting technology take control of them so they can live healthier lives."

I wouldn't want to live or die by those words. They are a sentence fragment and don't parse, but, frankly, they are perfectly understandable. I hope Carlin isn't suggesting we decide whether writers are jerks or non-jerks, or causes just or unjust, based on grammatical perfection.

Life is too short.

The rest of his critique is mildly funny and does indeed seem to morph unexpectedly into tongue-in-cheek satire.

So where does this leave us?

After cranking my jaw back into position, I actually feel pretty good about Carlin's wild ride. I've often said that those of us in the media literacy movement will know we are making progress when those in the industry show signs of paying attention. Carlin isn't "in the industry" but he clearly is an adjunct to it. As a TV critic, he picks away at television's content, but he avoids critiquing the medium itself.

If no one watched, he'd be out of a job.

Let me shed my superiority complex for a moment and suggest that there's a lot to criticize about the media literacy movement beyond ellipses, sentence fragments and non-parallel constructions.

For example, it concerns me that when we create our own media literacy videos ("Game Over," "Merchants of Cool," "The Ad and the Ego" et al.) we unquestioningly employ the very techniques that we often find worthy of criticism in the mass media.

We also have failed to take our concerns directly to those responsible, the advertising and media industries. Instead, we have assumed that there is no common ground. There may not be, but at least we should open up lines of communication and explore the possibility.

When and if we do, rest assured we will not loathe "those guys" and suggest they are behaving like jerks.

If that attitude somehow makes us superior, so be it.

Where public words go

As a journalist, I'm used to having my name in print. So when I become a named source in a story, as I was today, it's no big deal.

I'm pleased to be quoted accurately and in context.

Today's story was about TV Turnoff Week specifically and media's impact generally. It appeared in the Living Section of The Oregonian. Reporter Abby Haight used one thought of mine that the others she talked to apparently didn't make.

I noted how televisions (and all "screens" really) are powerful tools, and how we must use them constructively, not let them use us destructively.

I'm glad I mentioned that, especially if others didn't, and that she included it.

It was a good story.

I have a quibble. I don't describe myself as a "journalism professor," as she did. Generically I suppose that's what I am, at least some of the time. But in the hierarchical world of academia, the title "professor" implies tenure and academic distinction. I have neither.

I teach at Portland Community College from term to term. I have no hold on even my part-time employment. The administration can let me go at any time.

"Tenure" is a funny word. It works two ways. It means you are assured a job—that you have a "hold" on it. But often that security means the job has a hold on you. I have found my lack of tenure to be liberating, both for me and those who have hired me. We can both take it or leave it.

My students generally appreciate my efforts, but professorial "distinction" isn't a word that appears on my end-of-term evaluations. Several students have felt a certain "passion" in my teaching. If true, it is a guilty charge I gladly accept.

This all began as thoughts about a story in today's newspaper. It's hard to know what becomes of such stories. To write for mass audiences or allow yourself to be quoted is a leap of faith that you will touch some unseen reader or readers.

On rare occasions a reader will respond, commenting on the impact of something we have written or been quoted as saying. But for the most part, the writer's printed or speaker's quoted words all become part of the swirling mix of ideas that shape our existence.

And we hope for the best.

Kim Osgood wins a TV-B-Gone at Hillsdale Farmers Market

In the run-up to TV Turnoff Week, (April 23-29) I staged a contest in today's Hillsdale Farmers Market. It took the form of an eight-question, multiple-choice quiz. The contestant with the best score won a much-prized TV-B-Gone.

The winner was Kim Osgood, co-owner of Paloma Clothing and well-known Portland artist.

There was some good news and bad news about the other results. I'll get to that after I share the quiz with you. Try your hand at it.

Here it is:

Test your Media Literacy knowledge

1. How much TV does the average American watch each day?

2 hours 3.5 hours 4.5 hours 6 hours

2. What percentage of Americans eat their dinners with the TV on?

30 percent 40 percent 50 percent 60 percent

3. The average child under the age of 3 watches how much TV a day?

1 hour 2 hours 3 hours 4 hours

4. The American Academy of Pediatrics says its OK for a child under the age of two to watch how many hours of TV each day?

0 hours 1 hour 2 hours 3 hours

5. A child’s chance of being overweight increases 6 percent for every….

1 hour increase of average daily TV consumption 2 hours… 3 hours…

6. For every hour increase of average TV watched daily, a child’s chances of developing attention-related problems later increase by….

1 percent 4 percent 5 percent 1 0 percent

7. The average child spends more time watching screens than

being in school sleeping playing outdoors each one of these


8. Assuming that an American’s life expectancy is 80 years how many full years will he or she spend watching TV in a lifetime?

5 years 10 years 12 years 15 years 20 years


OK, now for the good news and that bad news. Perhaps the most important question on the quiz is #4, about the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation for kids under two. The good news is that slightly over two/thirds of the 34 test takers got the answer right: the AAP recommends ZERO screen time for the very little ones.

The bad news, of course, is that 11 quiz takers got it wrong.

The real shocker for a lot of testtakers was that the average American spends 15 FULL years in front of a TV. One young quiz taker, who happened to be 15 years old, was astonished. "That means every moment I've been alive!"

Exactly.

The other answers are: 1. 4.5 hours, 2. 40 percent, 3. 2 hours 5. 1 hour, 6. 10 percent, 7. each one of these (note that it says "screen time," which includes text messaging and video games).

TV-B-Gones have landed!

The 20 discounted TV-B-Gones from inventor Mitch Altman have arrived!

Now who wanted these "Red Electric Specials" at $12 a crack?

The little stealth TV remotes WERE normally $20 on-line, although I see that Mitch is having a TV-B-Gone fire sale on this old model.

Never mind. I've road tested this now "vintage" model and it works just fine. Consider it a classic edition or something....

I find that even if you rarely use the TV-B-Gone to zap the local gym's (or airport's or neighbors') TV monitors, it is a great conversation piece.

Example: After showing off my "Goner," I'm often asked what constitutes the responsible turning off of someone else's TV?

That's a worthy question, but try this counter query: What constitutes the responsible turning ON of the TV, any TV?

We rarely ask.

We should.

So the TV-B-Gone puts the question—a question worth thousands of hours of a life. Cheap at the price.

Final plug (I promise): What a great gift for TV Turnoff Week, which is April 23-29!

Only 38 days left! Are you ready?

Thirty-eight days left? Are you ready to meet what?

Your blank TV screens, of course.

Yes, it's another inspiring TV-B-Gone/TV Turnoff Week post.

First, repeated posts on this subject require this rhetorical inoculation—hold still, you won't feel a thing:

Psst, this blog shills for no one—and no thing, including clever stealth TV remotes.

The "Three-Eyed Red One" (see photo) is just trying to level the media playing field with the blog-spatula it's been given.

I mean, think of all those effusive articles glorifying this or that flat-screen TV. The stories never question whether you need pulsating plasma panels planted on your walls in the first place.

Well, a growing legion of us is asking you—and ourselves.

So, as TV-Turnoff week nears on April 23, the excitement mounts.

Only 38 days left! Not too early to ask how you and your family are planning to celebrate. (Remember, tips and benefits are here at this special Kaiser Permanente TVTO site as well as at the TV Turnoff Network site.)

I'm thinking along the lines of a week of Scrabble, backgammon, darts, horseshoe pitching, bicycling, typewriter puttering, garage-door painting, lawn reseeding, ivy pulling...and, of course, blog writing (and, yes, time spent here is "screen time." So call me a hypocrite. At least the mind is engaged—well, mostly.)

Or I might take Henry David's advice and fit in some long walks in the woods. (If you have to ask, "Henry David" who?" you haven't been paying attention. See recent posts.) The "woods" that beckons many Portlanders is Forest Park with its 30-mile-long Wildwood Trail. But there are countless others.

And, as they say, there's more!

Coming here soon will be a blog-review of the just published book, "The Big Turnoff, Confessions of a TV-Addicted Mom trying to raise a TV-Free Kid." The author is Hillsdale author and neighbor Ellen Currey-Wilson. Ellen will discuss her book at Annie Bloom's on April 24. According to the publicity advance, Ellen goes after TV insanity with one of the deepest penetrating knives in the drawer: self-deprecating humor.

Meanwhile, TV-B-Gone inventor Mitch Altman and I have been corresponding again.

Always dangerous.

When I recently put in my bulk order for 20 stealth remotes, I asked about some interesting uses for them. Also, with our TV Turnoff Week celebrations coming up, I wondered about what message he carries to his TV-Turnoff audiences.

Here are his answers:

Different people and organizations have used TV-B-Gone in different ways.

I've used it as a fun excuse to talk in schools about TV and its effects. Adbusters, and Culture Jammers in North America and Europe roamed around in small and large groups turning off TVs in public places, leaving fun literature behind them. Some organizations have used it as raffle prize gifts, pledge gifts, sales for enhancing revenue, making fun videos to promote their work.

TV-B-Gone gives people an opportunity to think about TV and its effects. I think it is important to make these concepts fun, easy and non-threatening, since otherwise people have a tendency to become defensive (just as addicts are often quite defensive when talking about their substance of choice).

In my presentations at schools I introduce myself as an inventor and show them my invention TV-B-Gone, which is a fun way to start. If there's a TV in the room I tell them I'll give them a demo later.

My talks are very personal and autobiographical, talking about being really unhappy and depressed as a kid, bullied and tormented daily, retreating into TV when I got home. I use that as a way in to talk about TV and its effects on me, personally. I ask questions of the kids as we go along to see what thoughts they have on how TV may be effecting them.

Before ending with an inspirational message about choosing well what you do with your time, I ask them their favorite things in the whole world, then talk about inventing, one of my favorite things, giving TV-B-Gone as an example.

Then I ask them what they'll be doing instead of watching TV for the next week. They're usually pretty excited by that point.

Confessions of a TV-B-Goner

Jean Rystrom, who has been active in the TV-Turnoff Effort, writes movingly about her experiences and feelings as a TV-B-Gone owner:

I own a TV-B-Gone. Actually, I have owned two - I gave the first one away to someone who really wanted it and "needed" it right away. I carry it with me in my backpack, always. It's very cool and I love it. It fills me with unholy glee.

That said, I never use it.

Oh, I'm tempted, and not just by public TVs. I'd like to walk around my neighborhood at night, using it to turn off other people's TVs at home! But I don't, because I think what we need most is open discussion. So when I go to the Red Cross to donate blood and the stupid TV is on while I'm waiting for the interview, instead of secretly turning it off, I tell somebody who works there that I don't like having the TV going. And if enough other people say the same thing, then maybe they'll get rid of it.

I had an experience a year ago in a San Diego hotel breakfast room/lobby where the humongous TV was always on with the insipid unending morning "news" show, and it's the only noise. During a brief period in which I was the only one there, I went up and turned the TV off. When the next group of people came in (and the TV was off), they started talking to each other! I met a figure skater from Vancouver, and another family with kids with whom I exchanged some food ideas. It was a perfect short story version of how TV inhibits community. If I'd really had courage, I'd have gone up and turned the TV off while other people were present.

So, having the discussion is one way to run a revolution. Maybe just having the TVs mysteriously turned off is an equally useful way of running the same revolution. Maybe that's worth some discussion too. Maybe someone will convince me that I should use mine.

Curses! Albertson's screens zap-proof

The manager of our local Albertson's can sleep a little easier now knowing that TV-B-Gones won't work on those intrusive screens flickering over the checkout lines.

Damn!

The bad news came from San Francisco, known to thousands—if not hundreds—as the world headquarters of TV-B-Gone, the handy, surreptitious pocket remote that zaps off intrusive TVs.

Mitch Altman, the inventor of TV-B-Gone, e-mails that the gadget works only on TVs with remote controls. That means screens on gasoline pumps are impervious too.

While I was writing Mitch, I asked whether he had hooked up with the annual TV-Turnoff Week, which is coming up on April 23. Seemed like a perfect fit.

Turns out Mitch is a huge TVTO fan. He writes: "We're having a big kick-off event here in SF with TV Turnoff Network (now called "The Center for Screentime Awareness"). I'll be talking at a bunch of schools again this year, too."

Here in Southwest Portland, I'm about to make my organizing calls to the Wilson High School Cluster schools. Other Portland TV Turnoff-istas are organizing school health clinics. The public library branches and the parks bureau have events planned.

Kaiser-Permanente, a big TVTO backer, has just begun offering free kits to download at a special web site. I've seen them and they are great!

In the meanwhile, I'm thinking of ordering a few TV-B-Gones for kids to have some fun with. Mitch graciously has offered me a bulk rate.

Imagine a whole Halloween-like "Zap for Life" TVTO week. Instead of "Trick or Treat (with junk food no less)" this would offer "Zap and Jump (or run or bike or play catch)"

Mitch notes that TV-B-Gone and TVTO have the same goal: Discovering (or rediscovering) the joys of turning off the TV and taking back your time...like from four to six hours a day!

Thoreau's thoughts on television...

Well, OK, not exactly. That was just to get your attention for another Thoreau reference.

Thoreau preceded TVs by a century, of course, but he did offer choice words about the mass media obsession of his day—newspapers. Substitute "Fox News" or your favorite news media addiction for "newspapers" in the following. His point hits you square in the eyes.

"I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need to read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?"

And this: "I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire—thinner than the paper on which it is printed—then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them."

Amen!

"Screens" redefine human experience

For the past three years I have helped organize TV Turnoff Week activities in Southwest Portland as part of my involvement with the Northwest Media Literacy Center.

During that time, though, our concerns have extended beyond television—so much so that the national TV Turnoff organization has changed its name to “The Center for Screen-Time Awareness.”

Our society is now at the point where we are subjected to screens literally from cradle to grave. No one has actually started to market casket screens for the departed but anything is possible, especially if there’s a buck to be made.

Last year I stopped shopping at Albertson’s when the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway store hung screens over the check-out lines. “Enough with the screens already,” I wrote “corporate.” A PR functionary wrote back that it was all an experiment and, anyway, I was the only person to complain.

I responded that I had other choices for where to spend my money, and in the future I would shop where I wasn’t treated as just another captive in a media demographic to be exploited. Moreover, I wrote, I would urge others to do the same. (You can complain to Albertson’s by calling 1-877-932-7948.)

Within the last few days three “screen” stories have appeared like separate dots in the mediascape. Connecting them is an exercise in screen-time awareness.

Two were from today’s newspapers. The first, on the front page of The Oregonian, reported on young teen “Party Boys” performing dancing so obscene that it drove girls subjected to it to tears and led to arrests for sexual abuse. The grotesque behavior by the McMinnville boys was modeled on a scene in the movie “Jackass.”

After the boys were arrested, one of their fathers complained that the arrests and incarcerations in the juvenile home were unnecessary. “I could have handled it myself. He listens to me,” said the father, who, like millions of other parents, obviously didn’t have a clue.

The New York Times business section today ran a story about how the Albertson’s experience has metastasized to malls, Wal-Marts and even shopping carts and gas pumps—any place drawing mass “audiences.” One mother is quoted as saying that that screens in malls captivate her children. “If it’s showing a preview of a movie they want to see, I can’t get them away from it.”

“…can’t get them away from it”? Welcome to parenting in the 21st Century. Who’s in charge here?

Finally, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 43 percent of babies under the age of one are watching TV, and that programmers at Disney and Sesame Street are actively targeting them. Media marketeers are told by their researchers that brand-awareness and bonding is possible before infants even learn to talk.

As reported in the Washington Post, there is an entire 24-hour network aimed at babies. It’s called “BabyFirstTV,” and it blatantly counters the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics that children younger than two should watch no—that’s zero—TV.

Any expert in child development will tell you that the very young need the warm sensory interaction they get from parents. They also need to freely explore three-dimensional space in order to connect with the real world.

Hour upon hour of ubiquitous screen time is literally redefining, and confining, what it means to be human. It is blocking us from seeing and experiencing the world as it is.

Screen-time awareness, indeed! We absolutely must get a grip on our media consumption. We must consciously limit screen time and critically assess the time we and our children spend with media.

Finally, I have submitted media literacy legislation to State Senator Ginny Burdick and State Representatives Mary Nolan and Larry Galizio. It calls on schools to teach media literacy to our children.

I urge you and your friends to write these three lawmakers to support the legislation.

Turning back the clock saves time

Here's to Christina Wall, the 32-year-old University of Michigan graduate student who is learning about the past by abandoning today's technology for that of 1949.

I was seven at the time and have vague recollections of the world that Wall has been sampling.

Like most families—and Christina—we didn't have a TV. I spent a lot of time outdoors in our northern Illinois town. Kicking tawny leaves in on crisp autumn days, trekking through knee-deep snow, getting soaked in spring's slush, playing pick-up on languid July days, and, in September, nimbly traipsing to school along the rail ties of the little-used trunk line behind our house.

No one told us to stay inside for our safety. The world wasn't seen as dangerous—except for the Communists, whom we had either "contained" or "exposed."

Reading Sunday's article about Wall, I was taken with, but not surprised by, one of her findings. Life without a TV, cell phone and computer has given her more time. "It's amazing. I literally feel like I have 40 hours in a day," she tells the reporter.

Forty hours may be a bit much, but try 30. By not being sucked into "screen time," she has regained six to eight hours each day. That works out to between three and four months each year.

You don't have to go retro to have the same feeling. I picked up at least three hours a day when I lowered my cable service to "basic" a couple of years ago. (I also saved about $30 a month.)

(A confession: The Red Electric doesn't exactly write itself each day; but I consider it time well spent. Kind of like kicking words instead of leaves.)

And then there is the liberating, even transforming, feeling you get by participating in TV Turn-off Week, which is coming up April 23 to 29.

One other part of Wall's experience (oddly enough chronicled on her web site) drew my attention. She's using a typewriter, but not just any typewriter. The photograph shows her with an Olivetti Lettera 32. She probably doesn't know it, but it was one of the best in its day. The only problem is that "its day" started in 1964, the year Olivetti introduced it. That's 15 years after Wall's targeted time. Still, the Lettera 32 is a great choice. I have a typewriter collection, and the Lettera 32 is among my favorites (see photo).

Oh, and that phone she is shown using is a Western Electric 500, which started production in 1954. In 1949, she likely would have been using a solid Western Electric 302, called a "Lucy" because of its prominent role on "I Love Lucy."

I have one of those too (seen here). It's mostly for old time's sake...and to listen to the dialer mechanically and methodically ratchet through the numbers.

A local link for little ones and their moms

Hillsdale neighbor Heather Hawkins has put up a helpful website for moms of pre-schoolers in Southwest Portland. It's called readysetmom and lists helpful tips and timely events.

A chance encounter with Heather at the Southwest Community Center this morning led us to talking about TV Turnoff Week, which is April 23 to 29. Last year several of us were able to raise its visibility in Southwest by putting up a student-painted "Jigsaw" sign in Hillsdale.

Anyway, Heather has alerted her readers to my plans for TV Turnoff participation in the Wilson High School Cluster schools this year. Let me know if your family or your child's school is interested in participating as I have organizing materials available. An organizer's CD loaded with information costs $10, but one free copy is available for each cluster school.

You can also get more information at TVTurnoff.org.