Ms. Block deployed her implements — hand-held microcassette recorders and walkie-talkies, a contact microphone brushed through her hair, a cathode light that flashed in time with pattering electronic pulsations — with an elegantly choreographed efficiency.
The two guardian anchors looking out for me that morning and gently directing me to the cathode light at the end of the tunnel were John Anderson and Scott Van Pelt, who, like almost all "Sports Center tandems, are a pair of very straight-looking white fellows in their early 30's, clamping down loosely on their absurdist tendencies.
It's easy to overhype something in today's media feeding frenzy, to have a desperate one-night stand with a show, and then wake up in the cold cathode light of day, stumbling to swap your vodka vision for contacts that work as you realise you've been getting a little too infatuated about something that maybe you should have walked away from after the first sly wink in a darkened room.
And on it goes – love potions to smell; songbirds singing in cages as a living mobile; the flashing rays of 184 cold-cathode lights.
Some components and accessories are relatively inexpensive -- round data cables, for example, start at about $20, as do cold-cathode lights (the brighter, cooler successor to neon lights) to illuminate the case's interior, multihued water-carrying cooling tubes and fanciful fans.
Lying down and looking at fish in an aquarium sounds hippyish and soothing, but, as you recline there with those flashing cold-cathode lights beaming into your retina over and over again, it's by no means the chillout you might imagine.
A cove of cathode-tube lighting, which rings the room where the walls begin to barrel into a vaulted ceiling, strengthens the aperture's ability to disembody the spectator.
These seven plasma and liquid-crystal sets, priced at $4,500 to $10,000, incorporate a feature called Ambilight, a series of cold-cathode fluorescent lights that project various colors onto the wall just behind the television.
The active gases are pumped by chemical combination with the sputtered titanium, the inert gases by ionization and burial in the cathode, and the light gases by diffusion into the cathode.
