Enthusiastic Wii Sports usage has seen televisions destroyed by flying remotes and a variety of injuries, including fractured limbs, dislocated knee caps, torn knee ligaments and facial injuries.
Newspaper publishers were waking up to lucrative possibilities: postwar gloom had lifted, shiny new products were on the shelves; cars, televisions and holidays were within the reach of ordinary people.
Everywhere you went in Paris during the revolt in Tunisia, portable televisions blared at top volume in shops, takeaways and cafes, broadcasting a polyglot, polyphonic babble from Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and the French-speaking channels from the Maghreb.
As long as they had televisions and understood Spanish, a grandmother living in El Salvador, a cousin living in the Dominican Republic, and an uncle living in Paraguay could all share a common reference point with family members living in the US and Canada – much like strangers use Twitter now to talk about Scandal or Game of Thrones.
Babies screaming, children playing, cicadas, chickens, songbirds, cows, televisions and, floating above it all, the call to prayer at a distant mosque.
"I came out and the first thing I saw was a woman with no head and no legs," he said, standing amid the twisted remnants of laptops and televisions, twisted into spidery globules of black metal.
Of course, they still complain about their fate, but at home they have plasma televisions, and they drive out on their fields on tractors worth tens of thousands of euros.
I don't even think he should be on the screens of our televisions.
El Fenn has no phones or televisions in its rooms, and although it does have Wi-Fi, it requests, very gently, that you don't spend your whole time on it.
One night, we left all the items on – and then the following day, we turned everything off: the kettle, the oven, the microwave, the televisions.
He's noticed another trend: people who've had their benefits sanctioned stealing televisions or other items sufficiently expensive to guarantee they're sent down.
