Dial File — Steve Bornfeld: File closed: Goodbye TV; Hello Life

Friday, March 17, 2000 | 10:52 a.m.

Steve Bornfeld is the Sun features editor. His new column, That's Life, will appear Fridays beginning April 7. Reach him at steveb@vegas.com or 259-4081.

"Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction." -- Jean Dubuffet

Even TV junkies have to hit the power-off button on the remote sooner or later.

So it is with Dial File, which clicks off today after a nearly three-year run.

But while this column is canceled, this columnist isn't: After 10 years of TV writing for five daily newspapers (and somehow emerging semi-sane), I'm swapping reel life for real life.

I'll return to this space every Friday starting April 7 with That's Life, a new column that will examine what makes us human: the values we have, the instincts we share, the larger questions about the way we live and how they shape us as we rush headlong into this new millennium.

Expect ruminations and rants on such topics as family, friendship, loyalty, duplicity, greed, sacrifice, honesty, deception, selfishness and selflessness (you know, the easy stuff), sprinting across such areas as politics, sports, religion, business, world and national news, and the popular culture.

In short: anything and everything.

Granted, it's the intellectual equivalent of trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. Call it Navel-Gazing 101 and I wouldn't argue. Maybe you'll come to think I should meditate on a mountaintop and never come down. Maybe you'll be right. But even in this Information Age, there's more to life than ceaseless short-term news. There's deeper long-term meaning: seeing the entire forest once we've examined the bark on every tree.

If that sounds grandiose and pretentious, fear not. Sagacity's not my thing. Neither is fortune-cookie philosophizing. But curiosity is: mulling over the less-obvious questions that we don't always stop to ask ourselves as modern life barrels by us in a blur.

And TV? It will make occasional cameos in That's Life -- don't ask me to go cold turkey, it wouldn't be pretty -- and always warrant vigorous coverage in the Sun. In my dual role as Accent editor (my evil alter ego!), I guarantee it. As a columnist, I'll miss TV's most compelling component: It's a window on the world.

But it's time for this columnist to shut the window and step outside.

Croon a Tune: The results of the final Croon a Tune? The Singer: John Sebastian. The Song: "Welcome Back, Kotter." The Winners: Peter Green, Jerry Gordon, Dollie Ferguson, Dan Brown, Mark Ritchie, Shelley Bristol, Linda Noel, Doug Weise, Andrew Hatcher, Alex Jeanos, Val Kolar, Dick Fuller, Joe Lacy, John Dalton, LaLa and Penelope Wells.

The Truth: You've been very generous and kind to share my love of television themes. It has been deeply appreciated, my friends.

Closing Credits: I'm not Kotter, but I hope you'll welcome me back on April 7 in my new column, That's Life. And thank you for your loyalty to this column as I've blathered on here about television -- a medium I truly love -- since 1997. Hopefully you've found the scribblings in this space mildly diverting and quasi-intelligible.

But now it's 2000: A New Space Odyssey.