Digital transition

Fear and trembling!
Will we have to call Time-Warner to report no TV reception?
Today (Friday, June 12, 2009) is the day of the great digital TV transition, when Granny gets cut off from her beloved TV soaps, and news, and “Wheel.”
We are cable-TV, and supposedly won’t need a converter-box.
But at age 65, I’ve been on this planet long enough to know that just because some hot-shot techno-maven promises something, doesn’t mean it will happen.
Them techno-mavens gotta stay employed; i.e. fix their muck-ups.
So, the great test. (Drum-roll, please!)
7 a.m.; turn on TV.
“We still have ‘tail-a-bizhion,’” I cried.
Apparently the great digital TV transition occurred shortly after midnight this morning.
“It’s a miracle, Bobby!”
When we first built this house, the cable was not out front yet, but I knew it would be shortly.
I buried a TV cable underground to the street. No hookup yet, but they came in two-or-three years.
Since then my buried cable disintegrated, and they’ve buried another.
That cable also delivers Internet.
Others were trembling.
My sister in Florida advised all the members of her condo association to get converter-boxes, despite her building getting cable-TV (converter-boxes supposedly not needed).
My wife’s 93-year-old mother is also worried, despite her retirement-center getting cable-TV.
My, how things have changed over the years.
When I was born, TV didn’t exist yet. And radio was hot tubes.
Our family got our first TV, a black & white RCA, in 1949; about three-four years after the first TV broadcast.
The first TV I ever saw was that of my paternal grandparents, a giant cabinet with a tiny circular picture tube.
At that time ya had to have an outside antenna. Ours was affixed to a large hollow pole on the back of our house. I remember it howling in a hurricane.
We used to watch Howdy-Doody and Jackie Gleason and Uncle Milty.
My father, a fervent anti-smoking Christian, used to turn down the volume on the Camel cigarette commercials during John Cameron Swayze’s NBC Evening News.
That TV finally gave up after our family moved to northern Delaware in late 1957; and my father was in no hurry to replace it. —He considered TV to be of-the-Devil and a wasteland.
I remember my 11th-grade English teacher being dumbfounded that I couldn’t watch Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as assigned. —He thought TV was of-the-Devil too, and here my father was doing what he should have done.
Color TV was coming into use by then, but it was so awful I wasn’t interested.
And TV was still the three networks it was when it started, which meant three commercial broadcast channels out of Philadelphia, four if you include the educational TV channel.
Now it’s 89 bazilyun channels, most of them on cable.
I still have the gigantic lightweight aluminum-tube antenna I was gonna erect in our attic if I needed to. But by then rabbit-ears were sufficient (although marginal, out here in the country), and I knew cable would be out front eventually.
I switched to cable in Rochester. We had cable there way before out here.
My current TV is a tiny Sony fed by a combination DVR/VCR, driven by cable.
Various of my siblings go ballistic because it isn’t a giant wall-mounted plasma-baby.
It reflects my priorities. Most of my money is in this here rig, and I think most TV is a wasteland.
Stupidest are “WipeOut,” “Extreme Home Mayhem,” “The Bachelorette,” “Wife-Swap,” and bearded hippies fashioning a glitzy custom motorcycle out of rotting banana-peels with ballpeen hammers and flaming torches.

“Wheel” is of course “Wheel-of-Fortune.”

“Tail-a-bizhion” is how a previous landlady in Rochester pronounced “television.”

“It’s a miracle, Bobby!” is something my God-fearing mother used to say to me.

RE: “When we first built this house......” is 1989; moved in in 1990. We did not actually build the house, just designed it. Our house was built by a contractor. (We live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield in Western N.Y.)

“My sister (Betty) in Florida” lives in a condominium building. —She’s an administrator.

“RCA” is Radio-Corporation-of-America, once the largest purveyer of electronics (radios), but now defunct.

“Uncle Milty” is Milton Berle — Texaco Star Theater.

Our family lived in “Erlton,” a suburb of Philadelphia across the river in south Jersey. (“Erlton” [‘EARL-tin’] is where I lived until I was 13. Erlton was founded in the ‘30s, named after its developer, whose name was Earl. Erlton was north of Haddonfield, an old Revolutionary town.)

Prior to living in West Bloomfield, we lived in Rochester.

“Plasma-babies” are what my loudmouthed macho brother-from-Boston calls all high-definition wide/flat-screen TVs. Other technologies beside plasma are available, but he calls them all “plasma-babies.”