Thought number two

After spending most of the day horizontal in bed with a sore neck, I got bored and shifted to the couch in order to lie horizontal whilst watching John Wayne in Red River.

Out popped thought number 2.

How did black and white movies affect the way people of my generation and older in terms of how they see the world?

This is how I saw the US when I was a kid - through black and white westerns that we watched on Saturday afternoon. I always thought of Texas as being really dry and brown and dusty, since that's how everything looks through the filter of black and white.

I was 10 minutes into the movie when I thought, "Hang on, why would you be driving cattle to an area which is bone dry and has no feed?"

So I had a quick look at Google images for images of the Texas prairie.

Gee, looks nothing how I imagined it as a kid. I never even thought that Texas could have wetlands.

How many other things that we take for granted today have been similarly distorted by the way we viewed them as kids on the idiot box?