In print, in The New York Times Magazine, this photograph is less tightly cropped, and you can see that the bulletin board behind Conan acts as a layout of the weekly schedule for “Late Night,” the pinned-on index cards denoting guests, sketches, etc. What’s also cropped-out here is a certain card that caught my eye. The card says, “GIVE AWAY PART OF THE SET.” Initially this seemed more Letterman than Conan — sort of snidely metatelevisual — until I realized that, as this was his final week as host of “Late Night,” Conan was probably literally giving his guests bits of the set before it got torn down. Kind of like, Hey, the show’s over, folks. Like for good.

For a minute I thought it might be interesting, entertaining, fun, whatever, to check Conan out in his new digs as host of “The Tonight Show.” I like Conan. Mostly because he studied English at Harvard, but also, or maybe consequently, because I think he’s really funny. Compared to Leno’s puerile schlock, I figured he’d be nothing short of side-splitting. But then I reminded myself of my deep conviction that television is one of the biggest time-sucking, mind-numbing, ad-disseminating features of modern life, and that to watch “The Tonight Show” would mean compromising my ideals. Nope, I thought. I’ll just have to catch him on YouTube.

Actually, I’ve been wanting to sell my television for a while now — I need to pawn it off on some poor sucker before it becomes obsolete. It doesn’t take a mystic to see that a one-trick device such as a TV set isn’t long for this world. As Hulu, Joost, and YouTube are already proving, computers (phones, even) are the next, if not new, televisions.

I did manage to sell my VCR last year, which was shocking. Over the past twelve months I’ve sold almost $750 worth of electronics, books, and CDs (CDs are like television in that I need to get rid of mine ASAP, since no one is going to want them in two or five years) on Craigslist and Half.com. This began, mostly, as an effort to clear out the apartment for a potential (and now impending) move, but also to keep my life from being overrun by objects. It’s worked pretty well so far, though the television remains, mostly because Kate doesn’t want to give it up. She’s uncomfortable not owning a TV set; she says, for one thing, that if there were an emergency we’d be at a disadvantage without a TV. I think the Internet has, again, supplanted television as the fastest and most efficient distributor of information, but she’s not so sure. Also, she wants it to watch “Saturday Night Live” on, even though the show has been consistently horrid since Amy Poehler left. Not because she left, but just because that’s the way the show works.

But I can’t help feeling like time is very quickly running out. Each day we move closer to a televisionless, CD-less society, and if I wait too long to rid myself of these antiquities, I’ll be forced to just give them away. Sure, pre-move giveaways are, to some extent, unavoidable — my Herman Miller chair, for example, which the cat has torn to shreds, stained with vomit, and reupholstered in her own hair, wouldn’t sell for a shaved ice in Alaska. But if I can score $15 for a VCR, I should be able to get ten for that TV set. Probably more if I advertise it as “vintage.”

UPDATE: Television’s analog to digital transition, which I somehow completely overlooked, has rendered my TV an outright static dispenser. My chances of selling the set — of even giving it away — have, I’d say, pretty much perished. Maybe I can make an aquarium out of it. Actually, the best thing would be to just drop it off my apartment roof, for entertainment, like Letterman would do. In reality, though, it’ll doubtless end up on the street next to the dumpster, where even the trash man will ignore it for weeks.