Those 'intellectually lazy' people watch tv because they grew up with it. Yep. Never underestimate the rapidity with which a brand new thing can become an anci

Those 'intellectually lazy' people watch tv because they grew up with it. Yep. Never underestimate the rapidity with which a brand new thing can become an ancient and treasured tradition. And never underestimate the rapidity with which an ancient and treasured tradition can disappear. One of my favorite examples of the latter is billiards. In the first half of the 20th century billiards was one of the most popular spectator sports in the United States. This, mind you, was not pool, a game which was considered shady and low-class -- and still is. This was proper billiards, the kind played on a pocketless table with three balls. [1] The USA harbored some of the most famous, most talented billiards players in the world -- guys like Willie Hoppe and Welker Cochrane -- and as late as the 1940s these guys would tour the country selling out big billards venues. Every town had a billiard parlor. Billiards died. [2] It died hard, within less than a generation. The prevailing explanation is that it was killed by television. TV gave people something good reasons to stay at home or lounge around in bars, instead of devoting hundreds of hours to mastering a rather difficult game that tends to embarrass any new player. (I tried playing three-cushion billiards once. I couldn't score one point without deliberately setting it up for myself. This isn't eight-ball.) Perhaps now it is TV's turn to die. The name TV might live on, but only in the sense that the word billiards lives on in American popular consciousness: As a nickname for a superficially similar game (pool) that had better survival characteristics than the original. --- [1] If you didn't know this you probably didn't understand certain lyrics in The Music Man. Those lyrics are obscure today, but back when the musical came out everyone understood the joke. Indeed, it was barely a joke! [2] In the USA, that is. In certain other countries there are many more billiards players, though I believe their games have different rules.