Watching

Good morning -- Sailing racers -- You might be staging great races, but with no U.S. boat, Americans aren't watching the America's Cup.

MOST PARENTS realize that watching television is not the most healthy activity for their children. But the American Academy of Pediatrics may have startled them nonetheless with its recent recommendation that children under age 2 watch no television at all.The organization also recommended that parents keep logs for their pediatricians of the nature and amount of programming their older children watch.Scientific evidence to support the claims was scant, and the warning may be overblown. But the exaggeration helped make the point: Children need mental and physical activity, and watching television is the epitome of passivity.

In the hit movie "The Truman Show," Truman Burbank discovers that he has been on television without knowing it for 30 years, with thousands of television cameras capturing his life and broadcasting it to an audience of millions.The premise is absurd, of course. Surely a person would know if his every moment was being watched by video cameras.Or would he?Let's take a day in the life of an average commuter.You pull out of your driveway in the morning and set off to work. A highway patrol cruiser falls in behind you. You're not speeding; you haven't broken any traffic laws.

From his second-floor office, Hank Kaestner watches the traffic fly past Hunt Valley. There are Canada geese and cormorants, ospreys and owls, even a few bald eagles. The aerial show never stops, and Kaestner, an executive with McCormick & Co., keeps careful track of the birds, recording each new breed he sees at work.Mixing spices and species does him good, he says."People have such stress in their jobs," says Kaestner, of Timonium. "Nature is one of the few medicines available for free."

THE SAD IRONY about young children watching television and videos is that they are the members of society who need that diversion least. Their expansive imagination and natural enthusiasm for the present render home screen entertainment unnecessary. Listen to 10-year-old Paddy Clark, protagonist in Roddy Doyle's evocative novel about childhood. He pretends the dining table is a fort and, from under there, surveys his world:''I saw things. . . . The sun was full of dust, huge chunks of it. It made me want to stop breathing.

A witty friend once commented that Strindberg was Ibsen on speed. I thought of that when watching -- rather, trying to watch -- Peter Jackson's "The Frighteners," with Michael J. Fox. "The Frighteners" is "Ghostbusters" on speed.A major headache in search of a large and bottomless bottle of Tylenol, "The Frighteners" takes "Ghostbusters' " subject of ghostly apparitions played for grisly laughs, and blows it through a cyclotron enlarger, transfers it to video and hits the fast-forward button.

Some years ago, when I taught journalism at one of our local universities -- I won't say which one, except that it was located on York Road in the heart of Towson -- I would hand out a questionnaire on the first day of class, asking my future Joseph Pulitzers and Barbara Walterses what they wanted to do for a living when they graduated.Almost none wished to be a newspaper reporter. They hadn't read a newspaper, so why would they want to write for one? What they mostly wanted, at this grand moment of youthful idealism and energy in their lives, was to carve out a career:a)

HAVRE de GRACE -- Kids don't like to take showers after gym class any more, the newspapers reported recently, because taking their clothes off makes them feel so, well, naked.In an earlier era, how they felt would have been considered irrelevant. Group nudity was as much a part of school life as it was of basic military training. You exercised and presumably perspired. Then you showered, hoping that no one snapped a wet towel at you. After that you changed.If you tried to get out without a shower, your classmates would make loud derogatory noises and hold their noses.

MY CHILDREN were sitting motionless. For a moment, I thought they had turned to stone for the rude things they say to each other -- as I have often predicted they would -- but then I realized they were watching cartoons.Not cartoons du jour, such as "X-Men" or "Aladdin," but the antique ones. Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. Tom and Jerry. Yogi and Boo-Boo. The Jetsons. Popeye. Roadrunner. The ones we watched as kids.These cartoons looked so good on the TV screen -- not gray and grainy the way I remembered them -- that I thought Ted Turner had purchased them all, colorized them, remixed the sound and added long-lost footage.

WASHINGTON -- Although a majority of Americans say that they closely follow the daily turns of the O. J. Simpson trial, the number of people across the nation watching television news shows or reading newspapers continues to decline, according to a new poll to be released today by a media monitoring group.The Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press estimated -- based on its survey results -- that about 40 million people, or about 24 percent of the adult public, are watching "all or most" of the daily, live Simpson coverage and that about 59 percent "watched, read or heard" about the trial coverage.

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. - -As the undefeated Ravens measure themselves against the New England Patriots today, it's difficult to do the same with their starting quarterbacks. The Patriots' Tom Brady has won three Super Bowls, and the Ravens' Joe Flacco hasn't played three seasons. Flacco prefers casually walking through the front door of Bonefish Grill, and Brady tries to avoid paparazzi when whisking his Brazilian supermodel wife to the trendiest restaurants in Boston. Brady kicks back in limousines, and Flacco turns down the dealership when it wants to pick up his car for an oil change.

Celebrating that we got through the summer without any sunburn on our notebook (though the SPF 30 did smear the ink) with the Labor Day weekend edition of sports media notes: * You might just think of Versus as that channel that carries the NHL, fishing, sports-related movies and other stuff you don't watch, but it is up to 23 college football games this season (four more than last year), starting with tomorrow's New Mexico-Texas Christian matchup at 6 p.m. Versus also will carry the 125th edition of "The Game," Yale at Harvard on Nov. 22. It's a rivalry so fierce, spectators are required to check their trust funds at the gate.

Baseball Home Run Derby 7 p.m. [ESPN]: This is the two-hour version of "going, going gone" from the All-Star festivities at Yankee Stadium. OK, so we know who won (and in case you don't, we won't spoil the surprise), but it's still a hoot watching - and no deep counts.

Because of Magic Johnson, my all-time favorite athlete, my basketball allegiances have always been simple: Lakers purple and gold. This made for an uncomfortable partnership after Magic retired. Cheering for Anthony Peeler, Cedric Ceballos and Nick Van Exel during the lean years was not particularly uplifting and required a lot of feigned enthusiasm with little or no payoff. But when Kobe Bryant arrived, I felt like I had finally found a Laker I could embrace again. We were similar in age, we were both hungry to prove ourselves, and I loved Kobe's mini-afro and the ice water in his veins.

I don't know how things are in your house, but it might get a little tense around the TV tonight. And when I say a "little" tense, I mean the way the Gaza Strip gets a little tense. Here's the problem: at 8:30, you have the Ravens-Steelers on Monday Night Football, which is the biggest game since the dawn of civilization, to hear some people tell it. At the same time, on another channel, you have Dancing With the Stars, which is a huge hit this season and has much of America inexplicably riveted by the sight of Jane Seymour doing the foxtrot (when she's not coming down with food poisoning)

We're into the third week of the new fall TV season, and here's what is clear about the ratings: nothing. What is clear is what's causing all this unclearness. That'd be digital video recorders - aka DVRs - which allow viewers to record easily, not to mention pause and replay live TV. Americans are adapting to DVRs faster than any TV technology ever. Last fall, when the season started, 8.5 percent of homes had DVRs. Now, that's 19.5 percent and skyrocketing, and the one thing everyone in the industry is sure about is that way more people are recording shows and watching them later.

Good morning -- Sailing racers -- You might be staging great races, but with no U.S. boat, Americans aren't watching the America's Cup.

Good morning -- Gary Sheffield -- Buy a ticket if you like standing there watching so much.

It's official: Baltimoreans can't get enough of Barry Levinson, John Waters and David Simon. That's right, we love our hometown boys. According to Netflix, which tracks its rentals by the area of the country in which there's the heaviest demand, Baltimoreans are a receptive audience for one of their own - especially when they tell stories set and shot here. Among films especially popular here, Levinson's Liberty Heights and Avalon top the list, followed by Seasons 1 and 2 (in a combined boxed set)

Good morning -- NHL -- Your All-Star Game was last night? We were watching American Idol.