A: It's to do with lawn bowls. You see, television pictures are created on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico (just sou'-sou'-east of the Jurassic Park islands), where teams of specially-bred pigeons paint by dipping their beaks into pots of paint and pecking at the canvas. Each image requires four pigeons: red, blue, green, and quality control. Once each picture is complete, it's loaded into a catapult and fired towards the TV set it's intended for, according to a set of ballistics calculations performed by the non-artistic pigeons (actually it's very simple, but they needed something for the non-artistic pigeons to do). After its brief journey through the upper atmosphere, the picture descends towards the target TV, and - in the case of indoor aerial sets - gets in via a very narrow slit in the top, too narrow for the human eye to see. Similar slits are put in the ceiling, and any floors above the TV, by rogue termites who live in the aerial, and shun the randomly destructive ways of their kind, working for the TV pigeons as a kind of penance. This is why you have to adjust the aerial whenever you move the TV - waggling the aerial around wakes up the termites, who quickly scurry up and burrow new slits for the pictures to arrive through.
In the case of TVs with rooftop aerials, it's much simpler - the termites live in colonies on the roof, and catch each picture as it descends, roll it up very tightly, and slide it through the cable into the TV.
Obviously the catapult requires a great deal of force to propel the pictures to their destinations, and for a long time colour TV seemed impossible because of this - only one pigeon can fit inside a TV (using black paint on white canvasses), so colour was impossible until a solution was found that allowed the pictures to be provided from an outside location. This solution was lawn bowls. Every time a bowler sends a bowl screaming down the lawn in a cannon shot, rather than the usual sedate wobbling roll, the excess velocity is bled off by special devices in the gutter at the lawn's edge, and fed to the catapult. One frame of lawn bowls provides enough kinetic energy to provide one picture each to all the TVs in the world - hence TV pictures being referred to as 'frames'.
(This also explains why flat-screen TVs were impossible prior to recent advances in miniaturisation. The pictures used to be curved, to give them the necessary lift during their flight. Nowadays, pictures destined for flat-screen TVs create lift by the use of several very small helicopter rotors.)
Q: Why, given that the colon character is symmetrical, and there are two brackets available, are smileys always 90 degrees counter-clockwise - : ) - rather than the other way around - ( : - ?
_________________ Chris Cook
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