LAS VEGAS - Here's a fun fact at 12:10 a.m. while watching Letterman after blowing a hundred bucks on sushi and blackjack with an unnamed staff writer at a recently acquired media Web site/magazine: It's TV Turnoff Week.

Talk about an unreported story ... while the few dispatches about this National Association of Broadcasters' convention deal with the various products displayed or maybe the slight discord within the industry, those troublemakers at Adbusters want us to just turn off the box.

'Watching TV is a passive, brain-emptying experience - not even network executives deny it,' the Adbusters say on their Web site. 'But that's not the point of the alarm clock experiment. The point is to think for a moment about what it means to spend hours every day somewhere in between living and dead.'

Not surprisingly, TV Turnoff Week has not been a topic here in Las Vegas. But it has a brief if interesting history.

'In 1994, Adbusters launched TV Turnoff Week as a seven-day break from the dreamworld of the tube. It's an explosive idea - this year, millions of people in over 25 countries around the world will take a break from televised culture. Some will host rallies, parties, or TV smash-ins to let the world know that TV Turnoff is a turn-on to reality. Most, though, will quietly celebrate.'

Lest any NAB2001 flacks read this dispatch and think I'm some anti-teevee hippie pal, let me reiterate that I'm watching Letterman right now. That old dude on Survivor, the Kentucky teacher? Apparently he got booted off the show. How would I know this without the teevee? This filthy hotel has about 11 channels. I've got 140 at home, piped into a dual-whatever dish system. The information professional must have all channels, all the time.

But it's a shame nobody will write about TV Turnoff Week. So I'll do it. Turn off your teevee. Have some fun for once. Play a board game with your pals, as the Adbusters suggest - I prefer Monopoly and two cases of Pacifico and my friends' rule that All Deals Are Good. Take a walk, grow a beard, plant some crap in the back yard. You will honestly feel better. Forget the whole week, just try it for a night. Or try not turning on the wretched thing in the morning. Then take it a step further and stay off the Internet a while. Read the paper outside - the weather is nice this time of year, just about anywhere.

Demographically, it won't make a bit of difference ... yet. The Nielsen people have never contacted anyone I know - if they did, teevee might be better - but this isn't for immediate demographic changes. It might be about something bigger, and much scarier to those gathered for NAB2001:

'For veteran TV Turnoff participants, just nixing 'Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire' is no longer enough. This year, TV Turnoff Week is also the kick-off to kick the Media Carta campaign, a broad-based battle for media democracy. Whatever your interest - from Internet access to corporate monopolies - there will be people working to make change happen.'

All right, I've done my duty. Now let's talk about the broadcasting convention. Specifically, let's talk about the broadcasters' plans for the Internet.

Learning From the Losers

Broadcasters are taking particular pleasure in the failure of upstart Internet-content companies. NAB's John Marino, the VP of science and technology, said his industry is looking at the lack of sites that make money.

Attendees 'come to the show to learn new ideas and ways that might be revenue-generating opportunities for them,' Marion told the NAB Daily News. That's code for, 'They couldn't make money off this gimmick, but we will.'

'Seizing the Attention of a New Generation' was the title of a Monday session. Tom Marcoux, who does some lecturing at Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale, Calif., led the session. Marcoux -

... whoops, Craig Kilborn just mentioned that it was TV Turnoff Week. Scooped again ....

Anyway, Marcoux did a survey on the youngsters' Web habits. They go to the Web for three reasons: recreation, necessity and community. Yahoo and iFilm topped the list of 20-something sites, and I don't know why Napster isn't the top site.

So, what do the kids want? Uncluttered design, 'cutting-edge content,' quick loads, simple navigation, good graphics and Flash animation.

Right. Quick loading and Flash animation.

The list of what they hate is about the same: slow-loading pages, pop-up windows and Flash animation.

This is confusing to the teevee executives. It shouldn't be. Certain people like something clever, whether it's Flash or plain text or a scanned cartoon or whatever. People hate waiting 10 minutes for a Flash 'intro' to a stupid site.

My favorite part of this survey is that 20-somethings have a 'dark sense of humor,' according to an NAB Daily News' article on the session. How much money does the broadcasting world spend trying to guess the scumbag humor of college kids?

Sure, some 20-somethings will take the corporate-approved trashy viewpoint, whether that's Tom Green or Eminem or MTV's Jackass, but they'll always be slow. And slow costs money. How many corporate millions went into Marilyn Manson's last record?

The broadcasters should relax. Smart people will never make up more than a tiny percentage of the population, and the Nielsen folk rarely care about them. Oh, and the brilliant Webmasters who make the NAB site might want to consider pasting in a line of code - it's 2001, after all, and we don't need to type in 'www' before a domain name. Unless the site is run by clueless morons.

A final and completely unrelated thought: Did the builders of the obscene Luxor realize the pyramid tip's phallic beam of light would attract a billion glittering bugs, or was that a happy accident for nighttime strollers and the fat bats of the desert?