The Decline and Fall of the Rooftop Aerial

Okay, this will show you how much attention I pay to such things, but it's only in the past several months that I've been noticing how scarce TV antennas have gotten. I drive around the area, and it's a rare house that has an antenna on its roof any more. What I see instead are satellite dishes. All over the place. Satellite dishes.

Not that I'd know, left to my own devices. I still have an antenna on my roof, and I get all of half a dozen TV stations— mostly from La Crosse, one from Rochester, and weather permitting, one from down around Cedar Falls or somewhere. When I bother to turn my TV set on at all, which often I don't for weeks or even months at a time.

What's this I hear, that in a couple of years they're going to discontinue our current mode of TV broadcasts, and old TV sets will have to get a converter box if you want to watch the "new TV"? Mebbe I'll catch up with that by around the year 2015. Or mebbe I won't catch up at all.

I must confess, television and the top-down world of the MSM long ago lost me to computers and the bazaar of cyberspace.