What's up with all the TVs?

Everywhere you go you are assaulted by televisions. In the waiting lounge at the airport...televisions. At the athletic club...televisions (and usually duelling televisions set to different stations at max volume.) In a bar or restaurant...televisions.

I'll give you the sports bar or the themed restaurant. You expect to have twenty TVs cracking out every baseball/football/basketball game airing at that moment and perhaps even some of the fringe "sports" like poker. (When did poker exactly become a sport?)

But to walk into a high-end restaurant and find TVs sprinkled around to compete with decent conversation and a bit of, God forbid, silence.

There's a thread of thought that you can't go anywhere on this planet and not hear something. In other words, no true silence. There is no Bose noise cancelling, Get Smart cone-of-silence, noise-free zone anywhere.

But the electronic noise is overwhelming. Cellphones with their seemingly infinite number of rings that include Justin Timberlake songs, hand-held video games chirping, beeping, exploding away, those friggin' aforementioned TVs, the pulsing rap music escaping from the open windows of a pimped-out Honda civic, and the white noise hum of music leaking out from the iPod headphones.

Increasingly you have to plan to escape the noise of the modern day.

I like to choose my noise. Moving water on a stream. The woods at the beginning of the day with the first drumming of grouse, a woodpecker, the gobble of a turkey. Elk bugling in the fall. Wind soughing through the trees. The crackling of a fire and the din of millions of tree frogs. Rain on a tin roof.