Having cable means that television’s previous use as sleeping pill now causes slight sleep deprivation because I want to stay up and watch things. Like last night was the first I’d heard about the thousand+ year old cisterns modern-day Istanbul is built on, these cisterns, rows of stone columns literally bearing the weight of a metropolis. Que Calvino. Plus the columns were made of the ancients’ junk heap, a carved head of a Medusa used as a shim.