I snarled at the Old One, and resolved never again to fall sleep in front of the trid when watching reruns of old shows. The Old One's grasp of technology faded about the time man began to make tools out of something other than stone, but occasionally he latched on to make-believe stuff. Someone once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic8, and proof of that was the Old One fully accepting as real the technobabble science pedaled as entertainment by the media. Of course, he thought of those shows as "Shamans in Space"—they were chock full of special effects he saw as magic—but the ratings folks never asked his opinion anyway.