Like millions of Americans, come February I’m going to need a digital converter box to watch television when the analog signals go silent. Last spring I submitted a request for a coupon for the box, and on Memorial Day I went out to Best Buy and bought one, hooked it up, and entered the digital television world.<\/p>\n
I watch very little televisioin. I’m not sure that with the digital converter box I’ll be watching much more. The first thing I noticed, after hooking up the box and getting it configured, was that the picture was rock solid and sharp. The second thing I noticed was that most stations now had three or four different channels. Channel 2, for instance, now had Channel 2-1, Channel 2-2, and Channel 2-3. The PBS stations had a Spanish language channel in addition to the “regular” channel. For most of these stations, the extra channel was simply a place for a doppler weather radar and headline news.<\/p>\n
A few Sundays ago, I was flipping through the channels, and I discovered that one channel, WJLA out of DC, showed old television shows from the 1960’s and 1970’s on one of their “spare” channels. I was intrigued by what they were showing, a sitcom called Operation Petticoat<\/i>. Wasn’t that a film that starred Cary Grant? I thought. But here was a sitcom starring John Astin. I gave it a shot, and I was amused.<\/p>\n
It’s about a pink Navy submarine, on various missions, while carrying a bunch of Army nurses and getting into various scrapes. Other than Astin and Jamie Lee Curtis, I don’t know any of the other actors in the show. I don’t imagine it lasted long; Wikipedia mentions that it existed<\/i> and little else. I certainly have no nostalgic memories of the show. The sub interiors look fine, if a bit clean. Anything back projected looks terrible as you might expect. For something made in the late 70’s, it’s adequate. John Astin’s always fun to watch.<\/p>\n
They also show Airwolf<\/i> on the weekends. I’ll have to remember that. Though with my luck, right now they’re in the middle of the Barry Van Dyke era. \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n
Old television shows never die. They just get shunted off to weird stations no one ever watches because they’re cheap to buy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like millions of Americans, come February I’m going to need a digital converter box to watch television when the analog signals go silent. Last spring I submitted a request for a coupon for the box, and on Memorial Day I went out to Best Buy and bought one, hooked it up, and entered the digitalContinue reading “On Watching Old Television”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}