Televisions do not make noise when turned off.

Up until recently, this statement formed a small yet dependable piece of my mental fabric. While hardly the petrus on which I had built the church of my weltanschauung, I felt it to be an incontrovertible fact of modern society that appliances, when turned off, remained inactive. I have lived through a series of televisions, approximately seven. Under each of these regimes, the television would act as I expected: when turned on, it made a series of noises and emitted a series of pictures designed to make me feel good while simultaneously killing my attention span and using the corpse to strangle my brain. When turned off, it would lie dormant.

Lately, however, a "new" television has arrived on the scene. And the mechanical devil that is the television seems to have developed a mind of its own. Periodically throughout the day, it will make a series of buzzing noises, even when off. Occasionally this phenomenon is associated with an incoming-but-not-yet-arrived cellular telephone call. At other times, it happens for no discernable reason. As a result, I am put in the awkward position of having to revise what I thought to be an incontrovertible Law of Nature into a (significantly less forceful) statement of policy:

Televisions do not should not make noise when turned off.