On the day of his birthday, James Lileks beams back a photograph from Hell: a television set above a urinal in a hotel men's room, echoing the infamous moment in Robocop with the stock ticker in the executive W.C.

I'm not sure if I've seen TV sets in any commercial men's rooms I've been in (and I’d like to think I’d remember seeing something like that), but God knows they're everywhere else. Kaiser has had them in their doctors’ waiting rooms for several years now, and more recently, during a major remodeling, my local supermarket installed small sets at every checkout station, and a large plasma model above the produce aisle, all mostly beaming out CBS programming.

The local Bank of America branch has TV sets--with the sound on, as I recall--blaring CNN while you wait for the next teller. And of course, as any one who flies has noticed, all TV sets in all American airport waiting areas must be tuned as well to CNN. It's. The. Law.

Of course, CBS and CNN are each getting killed in their own way at the moment in the ratings: Katie Couric is third amongst evening news anchors; and Fox News cleans CNN's clock nightly. I wonder how much, if any, the presence of their Ingsoc-style telescreens contributes to their ratings? And would CNN and CBS have even lower ratings without a captive audience that's forced to watch them?

One of my local gas stations (the Gulf station, I believe) has recently installed TV screens above the meters and credit card swipes in the pumps. No long form programming here, it'a all commercials, which begin once the credit card is swiped. What’s strange is that almost all of the ads actually discourage gasoline use: they seem to be an endless stream of Toyota Prius commercials, mass transit, and other environmentally-themed ads. Bu then, to me, the whole idea of having to watch commercials while pumping gas is pretty strange. Especially when half the drivers leave their 190-db chest-pounding subwoofer-equipped car stereos blasting away while filling up.

But the timing of this recent rush to bring a whole new meaning to public broadcasting is a bit bizarre itself. It comes just as television is massively losing ground to the Internet. Happily, between laptops, PDAs, iPods, iPhones, and even handheld videogames, a growing number of people have access to digital information and entertainment that they've chosen to interact with, rather than 80-year old brodcast networks.

The annoyance of a public TV set in this day of personal media seems to greatly outweigh its benefits. Beyond the added advertising revenue, is it the relative low cost of a thin LCD-style TV set makes them inviting for retail businesses to install? Is it a sense of nostalgia for a medium that's pretty much peaked? Because maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall reading about supermarkets installing radios in the checkout counters to pump out broadcasts of Benny Goodman and his orchestra live from the Fontainebleau just as television was reaching its zenith (so to speak) in the mid-1950s.