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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us April 27, 2005 Games over TV this week Family game nights draw locals who join in for National Turn-off TV week By Jennifer Squires Ashland Daily Tidings Jennifer Womack didn’t know Monday marked the beginning of National TV Turn-off Week, it just happened she hadn’t turned on her little TV set in a week and a half. Merry Vediner laughs as she challenges husband, Mike Vediner, left, and Miles Barnes to a game of Blokus Monday night at Ashland’s Fun Again Games. Denise Baratta | Ashland Daily Tidings “I had realized I could live without television just fine,” said Womack, a 48-year-old Ashland resident. National TV Turn-off Week, which began Monday and continues through May 1, can be traced back to a 1977 Mississippi movement. The Rev. Donald Wildmon and his grassroots protest group, the American Family Association, organized a national Turn Off TV Week in February that year. The modern incarnation is supported by more than 70 organizations and promoted through the TV Turn-off Network, a nonprofit organization that promotes health by encouraging children and adults to watch less television. In Ashland, Funagain Games is hosting a week of game nights for families. Each night features two different games appropriate for children and adults. “The idea is just to remember that there are other things you can do,” said Merry Vediner with Funagain Games. “In some areas, it’s really a big deal. It was here in Ashland 15 years ago.” Vediner and the staff at Funagain organized five 90-minute game nights because they couldn’t find any other activities in Ashland that celebrate TV Turn-off Week. They sent an announcement to the Ashland Schools Foundation that ASF executive director Susan Bacon passed on to school principals in town, hoping people will flick off their TV sets and spend time with family and friends instead. “We used to do it with our family,” Vediner said, explaining her family would play board games, go for a walk, play musical instruments and read aloud together during TV Turn-off Week when her children still lived at home. “It was all of the activities we would normally do, we just did them that week to commemorate it.” The average American watches more than four hours of television a day and TVs in U.S. homes are turned on about 7 hours, 40 minutes a day, according to research on the TV Turn-off Network Web site. The organization alleges television promotes violence, obesity and over-consumption while undermining family life, hampering education and squelching political awareness. “I’m not a TV watcher,” said Janice McGlaze of Ashland, a former elementary school teacher who considers television “an irritant” and thinks television may have contributed to the demise of her marriage. McGlaze hasn’t had a TV set in a year — she also went TV-free for four years, but relented and bought a television set for her family to watch when they visited her. She says she doesn’t think she misses out on much when she chooses to garden, cook, knit or listen to books on tape instead of watching the tube, “except when I was a full-time teacher, I felt I should know some things,” she says. She had to ask her students who Sponge Bob Square-pants was. Womack, who says she’s ignoring technology for the time being, has lived overseas on and off throughout her life and hasn’t watched much television since she moved back to the United States after a stint in Japan. “I’m not uneducated at all,” said Womack, who has a bachelor’s degree in computer science. “I just went on a ‘I don’t need any of these things’ feeling.” A recent trip to visit friends in Washington’s Puget Sound solidified her anti-TV stance. The 17-year-old son of her friends needed to write a book report about “Fahrenheit 451,” a 1950 classic by Ray Bradbury about burning books. The boy, who lives in a media-savvy house with few books, had chosen the novel because he thought he could rent the movie. “I was there and I just said, ‘No way, not with me around,’” Womack said. She hid his pool cues, took the connecting cables off of his electronic equipment and grabbed all of the batteries in the house to reduce the distractions, re-read the book herself and helped him through the project. “At the end I was so happy because he said, ‘Ray Bradbury, what a [expletive deleted] genius,’” Womack said. “I’m still reeling from that experience.” Her TV set picks up three channels thanks to a pair of bunny ears. She has a DVD player she finally took out of the box nine months ago and just opened a Blockbuster account to rent movies, but prefers to leave the player unconnected to the TV set. She relies on Jefferson Public Radio for news and reads a lot. “I almost broke down and watched ‘The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour’ — I still call it that — and ‘Washington Week,’” Womack said. “I just said, ‘No, I don’t need this right now.’” Funagain Games, in the Ashland Street Shopping Center (1662 Ashland St.), will continue to invite people in to play board games from 6 to 7:30 p.m. all week. For more information, call 488-4761. Staff writer Jennifer Squires can be reached at 482-3456 x 3019 or [email protected]. 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