Jeff Stahler for May 25, 2021

“5” I only had 2 and they went off the air at midnight.

And as far as I know, none of them carry “Jeopardy”.

I leave all that “watching” stuff to others. Had to leave the room recently when Spouse tuned in to some horrible hospital soap opera thing with a surgeon character on the spectrum and dysfunctional characters in all directions. It wouldn’t be so bad if she just turned off the sound…

There were three for me: ABC, CBS, and NBC.

ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and three local stations. At 10pm, some stations would ask “It’s 10pm, do you know where your children are?”, and as someone mentioned above, at like 2am, they either went off the air, or broadcasted a video of the US Flag flapping in the breeze with “The Star Spangled Banner” playing.

Try the library, they have millions of books, books require more thought than watching a mindless tv program. Is that a problem?

The times, they just keep on a-changin’

One thousand Cable channels and 95% of them are infomercials. Their idea of sports is golf and tennis (which I admit are popular) and you can get as many as TWO, count them, TWO baseball games on the weekend unless you pay extra money.

Now all you have to do is subscribe to a dozen or so “PLUS” streaming service.

$500 a month later and you still have crap – a vast wasteland.

Choosing apps is like standing at the gate of a gigantic repossessed car resale lot and trying to decide which are the lemons. Iffy at best and very scary otherwise.

And we still have the same number of stations we can stand to watch.

ABC, CBS, NBC and Channel 11, which was an independent.

Something this simple, but completely accurate. This is a great strip today.

Remember: Readers digest books. Sheep devour television.

Only two things you have to do in life is die and pay taxes.

We got 4 channels from Seattle which is 87 miles across the Cascade Mountains. All signed off about 11:30 PM by showing the American Flag and playing the National Anthem. A local guy had his dad, a WWI Veteran, who would stand up and salute the flag before the TV station switched over to the test pattern of an Indian wearing his feather headdress. Don’t know if the Indian was Chief Seattle. Nobody complained. Just went to bed.

And in those early days, the television set was a piece of furniture of which most households had only one; like a telephone and an automobile. And to think that most of us survived such primitive conditions is somewhat astonishing, isn’t it?

the current situation cannot last… it’s like when we had dozens of car brands (marques to enthusiasts); now most of them are gone (some more missed than others)

I have dish network @ $140 a month, so I get the 500 channels and nothings on. I can’t handle another 90 day fiancée or Hitler show. I have no idea what is going on with the boob tube today but I am going to spend a lot of money to find out.

The Difference is that those 5 Channels were Free, paid for by the Commercials.

Now, you pay for the Apps and still get advertising.

We had an antenna that we could turn to face the direction of a particular TV station we wanted to watch. It was connected to a box-like device with a dial. You turned the dial to east or west, north or south, or parts in between, and the thing would click, click, click over in that direction moving the antenna.

lol, my first experience with cable TV was as a kid in WV during the 1960s – we had cable because (back then) between the mountains and the distances you could only get snowy TV channels via antenna. That cable did indeed have five channels – ABC, CBS, NBC, an independent (where I could watch “Speed Racer”!), and the cable company’s own “channel”… it was just a camera on a tripod that slowly swung back and forth across a row of gauges: a clock, a thermometer, a barometer, and a wind speed indicator. Of course, right after the 11:00 news they played the national anthem (and showed a flag waving in the wind) before signing off until 6:00 a.m.