Free to watch all of Ken Burn's Jazz, New York, and Baseball series by episode?
Perhaps the La Scala Collection of opera?
BBC Planet Earth series?
When I was young, we had a small 12" black and white TV in the front hall foyer. A great fern in a basket was hung above it. The round table it sat upon was painted green and had a small shelf beneath burdened with Scientific American and Nat'l Geographic. Sunday's were extra special if The Wonderful World of Disney was playing a special with Jacques Cousteau, or similar, as we were allowed to carry our dinner plates into the front room to feed our young bellies and minds at the same time.
When The Wizard of Oz would air once a year we were allowed to watch that too. Being a B&W set our parents always reminded us when Dorothy landed in OZ the movie turned to color. They continued the non-color commentary with the non-yellow brick road and of course the horse of a non-different color. Those freakin' flyin' monkeys always scared the crap out of me. And while we might start the beginning of the movie slack jawed and three feet in front of the small screen, by the time they were on scene we were on the opposite side of the room and shoving for cover behind my dad's arm chair. To this day I still duck for cover every time I see a freakin' flyin' monkey, "da noive."
The moon landing, on the other hand, was in black and white because..well, the moon is black and white too. "Get up" they said, "you'll want to see this." So we did, slack jawed from three feet away, not realizing what we were really watching was the Earth becoming flat again. And the splash downs, and the parades, and the funerals of presidents with boots mounted backwards in stirrups on a black horse.
Mom watered the fern twice a week. Sometimes with a great stainless steel mixing bowl balanced atop the tv to catch the overflow, sometimes not. She'd sit in the dining room reading or working on her PhD when we'd tune into the Smother's Brothers, or Laugh In on those occasions when our homework was completed in a timely manner. TV reception gradually degraded over time as the watering successfully eroded away the inner workings of that poor television despite great feats of gymnastics accomplished while trying to coax the tuner and antenna into making sense out of the online snow (think the green number flow from the Matrix, only in black and white and much tinier print.)
One day the TV was DOA, and the word became print. I don't recall mourning the loss and don't recall a replacement for many years. When there was one it wasn't much bigger but was in color. And so was Oz, and so was that horse, but those freakin' monkeys hadn't changed a bit. When the towers came down that was on TV too, and the world became flatter still.
Freedom isn't in the technologies we use or avoid. Freedom is how we use those technologies and the liberties they afford.
