Follow that hansom!

I call my digital television box HAL, after the mad computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey." HAL-9000 completely controls my connection to the outside world, and if it ever speaks, I'm evacuating the building.

HAL allows the cable company (Videotron, in my case, a company that has just announced some impressive business growth numbers) to track my every viewing moment. During one telephone call, the customer service rep asked us to confirm our identity by revealing what channel was on -- then announced, after a moment, that yes, we were clearly legit. Now how could she be of assistance?

Video on demand, downloadable iTunes and network shows, my DVD rental history... every move is tracked. Cookies placed into my computer by the websites I visit will follow my e-movements for years to come. (Even the telephone company not only knows the phone numbers of all my friends, but shamelessly brags about it by listing the long distance ones every month on my bill.)

Marketers know what we watch and what we don't -- they track pop-up blockers and spam filters and how your TiVo fast-forwards through commercials. And there's the rub: we're not watching the ads. This era marks, according to "Life After the 30-second Spot" author Joseph Jaffe, "the end of the commercial." (Hear his analysis here on NPR.

Unless advertisers can figure out how to get our attention again, this is also the end of television (where do budgets come from, hon'?). To be successful, Jaffe said the ad has got to become a destination -- it must be something we want to see. And one way to do that is to create beauty. As here.

I'm in favour of beauty. (Is this a controversial idea? Maybe.)

We don't all have the talent for joyful noise. So there's the other option. Over the holidays I listened to old World War II radio broadcasts of Sherlock Holmes adventures, with Basil Rathbone and what's-his-name as Dr. Watson, the tales' teller. (Holmes, by the way, is 152 today, according to a personals ad in this morning's paper.)

Popped into the beginning, end, and even in conversation with Dr. Watson, was the advertising. The show was presented by a single company, Petri Wines. The ads were bound within the fabric of the show itself, almost impossible to fast-forward through. I was forced to listen to the tao of P-e-t-r-i (now a California grape growers' co-op). Kind of like when watching the judges of the modern American Idol, seated with their big cups of Coca Cola in front of them throughout the show. Ah yes, what is old is new again.