The New Fall Season

The new fall season line up on television has started. Such perennial favorites as The Biggest Loser, The Simpsons and CSI Miami, Las Vegas, New York, ad infinitum once again grace our big flat screens with their version of reality “ripped from the headlines.” Or do they?

If you’re one of the lucky people who subscribe, at exorbitant prices, to one of the satellite dishes or cable TV, no worries; you’re getting your favorite shows in high definition and living color with interruptions only when it rains, snows or the cable “goes out.” However, if you are throw- back to another time, or just plain stubborn and you’re using an old fashioned antenna, well my friends, that’s a horse of a different color.

First, the government warned us for months that as of February 2009 we would no longer be able to watch our old TV sets with just an antenna on the roof. But, oops, not enough of us were buying (literally) into the switch, so the date for us old fogeys to get it in gear was changed to June 2009. As of that date we had to have either cable, satellite, or a digital converter box set up and ready to go in order to view our much beloved boob tubes. Don’t get me wrong, there ARE some intelligent, thought provoking, uplifting shows on television. I personally have access to over 300 channels, but I just can’t seem to find them very often.

We find our old antenna from 1965 isn’t good enough, so we buy a new one, making sure the distance ranges will get us to Buffalo and Erie. Okay, we have our vouchers from the government to get our magical converter boxes to hook onto our antennas. But before we can do that, we have to find a young person who understands the mumbo jumbo that explains how to set up the converter box. Got it hooked up? Good!

It doesn’t work.

It wasn’t enough that we had a remote for the television, another for the VCR, a third for the DVD, now we have another for the converter box AND the antenna rotor as well! But when the new antenna and converter box still don’t bring in the channels we want, we need an antenna booster to amplify the signal. Gone are the days of channel 2, 7 and 12; now we have channels 2.1, 2.3, 2.5 etc. and can’t find any of our old shows on any of them.

I think it’s all a plot by the cable and satellite companies to get more customers.

New antenna: $114
Power booster: $59
Turning off the TV and curling up with a good book: Priceless