It’s a most unusual day

I know today is Friday the 13th, but it’s actually turning out to be one of those days when the Cable Gods are smiling down upon my ‘umble existence here at Rancho Yesteryear.  Let me see if I can explain why in a few short sent…oh, hell—you should probably know by now it’s never going to be a few short sentences…

Last night, I turned on the TV set in my bedroom shortly before eight o’clock because Thursday evenings offer up my boob tube favorites: Parks & Recreation, The Office…and I would have Community on this list except NBC has for the time being assigned it to that frustrating television limbo known as “hiatus” in order to put 30 Rock back on the schedule.  (I also like Up All Night, despite what majorly important TV critics say.)  But the channel I had watched when the set was last on was the digital feed of MSNBC, and I noticed when the set came on that all that was left of the Lean Forward people was a blue screen with a “No Signal” box floating around in all its blue-osity.

This is generally a sign that our cable company, CharredHer Communications, has done a shuffle of their channel line-up and the last time this happened I thought (briefly) that I had lost my fiancée, Me-TV.  So I went ahead and reprogrammed the set, and when I was finished noticed that many of the digital channel versions of some of the stations I watch had vanished…which was a small disappointment.  However, since Me-TV was still intact I didn’t get too worked up about this.

This morning, I started surfing the new channels and came across Seems Like Old Times (1980) on one of them…and since I had nothing else to do at that time, watched a bit of it until the station break.  It was at that time that I was informed I was watching…wait for it…

Antenna TV!

(Heavenly chorus)

I know what you’re saying/thinking right now:  “It takes so little to make him happy.”  And you would be right, though I’d be in a much better humor if you removed a little of the sarcasm from that remark.  But the addition of Antenna TV to our Athens environs (courtesy of WATL in Atlanta) can only be a good thing, because now I have access to such TV chestnuts as Bachelor Father, Father Knows Best, Gidget, Hazel, The Flying Nun (touché, Ms. Driscoll!), The Monkees, The Partridge Family, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny and so many more.  With great TV comes great responsibility, however…I’m fearful I may never emerge from my bedroom again.

CharredHer Cable is a completely evil entity (in league with the USPS, by the way) but every now and then they do something worthwhile…and they’ve come a long way from RTV, which we no longer get but that I also no longer miss (CharredHer in Athens doesn’t carry the RTV affiliate in our area, WYGA).  I welcomed Antenna TV on Facebook this morning, and this is the response I received: