Miranda and I had arranged to meet at Re Sette. I arrived first. I had an amusing story to tell her.

    In the morning, when I arrived at the gym in my building, one of my neighbors was trotting on a treadmill, watching a live television program that dispensed drivel to a studio audience of screeching cretins.
    “Excuse me,” I said with a neighborly smile. “Do you realize that you have the television set to ‘stretch’?”
    “Huh?” she said.
    With a friendly chuckle, I commandeered the remote-control and showed her how to change the setting from ‘stretch’ to ‘sidebar.’
    “There!” I said. “Now the things that you see on the screen, including the moronic host and his ditzy assistant, have their natural proportions.”
    “Oh,” she said. She continued trotting on the treadmill for a while and then burst into tears.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “My body image,” she sobbed.
    “Well,” I said, as neutrally as I could. There wasn’t really much consolation I could offer her. She was built like a pear.
    “I was pretty comfortable with my body,” she said, “but now I see that I was living in a fool’s paradise. All those people are much thinner than I thought they were.” With a sob, she ran to the door, where she paused and said, “Thanks for opening my eyes, you bastard,” before leaving the gym.

    At Re Sette, an attractive woman took a stool to my left.
    “They’ve installed a television,” I said with a nod of my head in the direction of the set.
    “Oh,” said the woman. “You’re right.”
    “It’s an intrusion,” I said. “Whoever had it installed does not understand that a bar is a place for conversation, for encounters with strangers, for the exchange of ideas and anecdotes.”
    “Mm,” she said.
    “Not only have they installed a television,” I said, “but they’ve got the screen set to stretch. We used to be a nation of idiots whose VCRs were forever flashing twelve-twelve-twelve, and now we’ve become a nation of idiots whose widescreen TVs are set to stretch.”
    “You’re quite a conversationalist,” she said.
    “Excuse me,” I called to the bartender. “Are you aware that your television is set to stretch?”
    “What?” he said.
    “There are options for the display: letterbox, sidebar, zoom, and stretch. Yours is set on stretch. It’s bad enough that you’ve put the damn thing in here—”
    “Sir—”
    “It’s an offense against civilized drinking.”
    “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
    “Leave?” I said, incredulous. “I’m trying to help—”

    When Miranda arrived, she found me outside. “They installed a TV here,” I said. “Let’s go to the Modern.”