"You see all these pockmarks in his cheeks and he looks like an entirely different person -- and you go, 'Wow, is that Brad Pitt?'"

HDTV looks so good, it makes mere mortals look bad. Actually, the HD camera makes the picture so sharp, it's not just clearer than old-fashioned TV, it's clearer than what you see looking at the real world with your human eyeballs. It's exciting, but also distracting. You fixate on details of the set or some minor feature of a face. Don't succumb to that crazy absorption! Don't sit so close! That's what mothers have long said to kids watching TV, and there really wasn't any problem that needed solving. Now, with HDTV, we should sit farther back, to keep in touch with reality and to stave off that autistic focus on the unimportant.