People should enjoy books instead of sitting in front of the Telly!

I've never seen the TV shows; "Merlin", "BONES" or "How i met your mother" and i don't know who won the miss universe contest in Canada or who that famous singer everyone is talking about. I have two televisions at home but they are hardly ever on. Why? It's because I LOVE reading books! They are my inspiration, fantasy and information research centers. It seems that books have been on this planet almost as long as the moon and the stars. They are part of humanity and give us knowledge plus imagination. Charles William Elliot once said, “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” So how do we get people reading books again? Why books instead of television?

Well for one thing, it is the healthiest way to 'shop' for fun.
A recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the more hours spent watching television, the more likely children were to be both fatter and less physically active. The major reasons for this are:
· When watching television, children snack on foods because they need to do something with their hands.
· They lack physical activity because they tend to go to your sleep.
The cause of this is, when we watch the telly, the only thing we do is move our fingers to switch channels while our eyes are focused on the screen... motionless, like the bulging eyes of a dead fish!
But books are pretty passive too, so why read books when they won't exactly get your heart racing like after swimming four hundred meter laps? However, they are still an active activity. Our eyes move over words across pages, we're engaged with something in our hands, our fingers flip pages, our hearts and minds visualize the characters in a way that NO TV screen can display! And we also learn from the stories without polluting the planet.

Currently the electricity bills are rising in Australia. George Maltabarow, Managing Director of Ausgrid, one of the largest electricity networks in Australia, recently told ABC's insight, that one of the main reason prices are rising is because consumers are pursuing energy intensive lifestyles, which means electricity networks have to spend huge amounts of natural resources to meet the rising demand.

Televisions don't magically function themselves like the wizards in fairyland. They need power to work. The power operates by consuming electricity. We encounter bills for electricity too, hence the more television watched the more electricity utilized, resulting into expensive bills and wasted resources.
Books on the other hand, do not need to be powered by electricity or any other power at all. You just need to pay about two dollars to become a library member and acquire a library card to borrow as many books as you wish. Then you can read until your dying days without a penny to spend.

The ability to transport ourselves from this world to another lies in the creative abilities of the author in a book, where he/she shapes, forms and invents the words of her stories. To transport ourselves into another world also lies in our own imaginative power and our abilities to actively visualize what the author describes on the page. Stephan King, the author of spine- chilling thrillers, says that, “Books are a uniquely portable magic. Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”

Television, however, sucks us into the same world just as a black hole engulfs everything around it, over and over and over. Tune in next week for... more of the same. Yawn!

Now... think about the children, do you think they will live healthy lives by watching television or by