The Woes of Modern Technology and 3-Year-Olds

Do you remember a few years ago, when fancy flat TVs and Wii game consoles were starting to become the norm in average households?  Remember those stories and youtube videos of the unfortunate incidents of a Wii remote leaving someone's hand and smashing the TV screen?  I remember feeling like that was one of the more awful accidents I could think of happening.  I couldn't imagine spending all that money on a TV and having it wrecked, just like that.  The TVs when I was a kid were practically indestructible, and it was typical for us to have the same one in our living room for a decade or more, so I was looking at these new ones with their modern technology as being pretty fragile and kind of dumb.  Wow, that makes me sound old, doesn't it?

Alas, the male portion of my household eventually won, and we, too purchased one of these flat screen accidents waiting to happen.  The Wii had been previously gifted to us.  For three years, all was well.  The TV and the Wii got along just fine.

Then one day, on a sunny weekend in October, the news came from the basement:  Sebastian had "made cracks" in the screen on the TV.  We went down to survey the damage.

Was it a Wii remote?  Nope.  A penny.  Yes, he threw a penny at the TV, and it hit in the upper right corner.  The cracks that were reported were not even in the outer screen, that part is unblemished when it's turned off.  It looks like a chipped windshield, and it's the inside screen (?), which apparently houses lights and pixels and pathways of sorts, which are now broken and/or blocked.  Or something.

So now this is what it looks like:

See that vertical line over Father Mitch's finger?  And the horizontal line at the top of the screen?  Where those two intersect is the point of impact of the penny.  The whole screen has lines and bluriness, and varying degrees of weird light.  It's pretty much toast, unless you like being really frustrated when you're watching something.

So that's that.  I guess this is one of those stories we'll tell over the years - "Remember when Sebastian threw a penny at the TV and we still let him live with us?"  Now we just have to see how the story ends - "...And you guys all emptied your piggy banks so we could buy a new one?" or "...And that was the winter we went with no TV and everyone learned to knit?"  Or perhaps from the youngest Smiths - "WHAT?!  We had a TV?!"  I'm  tempted.