Thanks, Don. ;-D Capatain Kirk is incredibly awesome, isn't he? I can only wish I was even half as amazing as William Shatner...God knows...but at least it gives me a benchmark to aim for!

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My father is the guy to blame for the fact that my parents didn't smoke and we had no TV in the house. He was a bit of a nonconformist for some reason on certain matters. He had never smoked, in an age when virtually everyone else did, and he convinced my mother to stop smoking when they first started going out. (She'd only been smoking for a few weeks at that time, so she didn't have much trouble quitting.)

He didn't want a TV in the house because...

1. They were very short of money in the early days and couldn't really afford any luxuries like that.

2. He considered it trivial, escapist, and something that would waste a large amount of his valuable time...and he always wanted to be busy doing something he considered valuable (sort of a workaholic tendency, I'd call it).

My father was a very stubborn guy, and he stuck to certain ideas like that.

If it had been up to my mother and she'd been married to anyone else, then I'm sure the family would have smoked, had a TV, and done all the usual conventional stuff typical of that time period.

So it's my Dad's fault that I turned out this way, Don, such a purist as I am! ;-D Take it up with him.