Smushscreen TV

I need to vent a bit on one of my pet peeves: Widescreen TV

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy watching movies in their original size,
without the black "waste of space" above and below. It's the non-wide
media that bothers me. Just as we adapt a widescreen picture to display on a normal-sized TV, we should do the same on a widescreen TV. BUT NOOOO! For some crazy reason, most of the sets I see (usually in public places) are set to stretch the screen to fill left and right. This gives everyone a "smushed" look. What makes it worse is that the owners of these publicly viewed sets, and their patrons, ACCEPT this! What will this do to our culture? Will it affect natural selection to create a race of "Danny DeVitos"? Will we consider 6 foot tall, 185 pound men to be "freaks"? I think the acceptance of this is what bothers me. Similar to the acceptance of badly converted MP3's. Most younger people today don't seem to notice the difference in audio quality between well recorded music, and low bitrate MP3's. I sometimes wish I wasn't so picky about what I hear, but I still stop dead in my tracks when I walk past a pair of speakers the are out-of-phase.

So, those of us who browse the Irish pubs in New York, will continue to watch smushball, and I will sit there trying to resist the temptation to grab the remote and change the settings...... Barkeep! Another Dewar's please... Why does the bottle look shorter and fatter than it did last time?