Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for September 06, 2015

STOP your whining!I had to change the channels with a pair of pliers.

I’ve got no problem getting up to change the channel, but the trouble is that today’s televisions are designed to be operated by remote control. When many of us were young we had televisions with two rotary dials that were used to access a fairly small number of channels. Now we have cable with hundreds of channels, but the buttons for quickly selecting the channel that we want are only on the remote. The TV or cable box generally only has two buttons, one for scanning to higher channels and the other for scanning to lower channels, so you might have to scan through a hundred channels or more to get to the one you want without the remote control.

Pastis had it easy. The only time I got to watch TV growing up was the rare moment at my grandparent’s house.

Oh, those sure were the days (the getting up and manually change the channel, raise/lower the volume, adjust the contrast, etc.) in which I also grew up.

That’s nothing — I grew up using a rotary telephone! I would literally dial a number every time!

This joke has been done to death.

My grandfather practiced using his toes to turn the dials so he did not have to get up.

Yup, sonny. Been there, done that.Rat should be so lucky as we were!

Just saw Pastis in D.C., worth the 2X the admission – FREE!. – JK. Definitely a must see.

Remember to yell “Screw you Pastis”

No kidding a Great Night!

Thanks Steph

My father invented the remote control years before Eugene Polley, but never got credit for it. In fact it was so advanced that it was voice activated. It worked something like this.“Son, change the TV to channel 5!”

this one’s the best!

Not just getting up to change channels and volume but the direction of the antenna had to be changed. I also remember using a slide rule for math problems…………….Have a great and safe holiday everyone :-}

We had a TV, but it was only allowed to be on about 2 hours a week, and we watched shows as a family. They were chosen in advance, so there was no channel surfing. As an adult I gave it up entirely, and haven’t watched TV in over 30 years, so cartoons like this are lost on me.

Black and white, 19" television. With four channels!

I had to wade through 10 feet of shag carpet to change the channel or volume, and getting a static electricity shock in the process. Don’t tell me how hard you had it.

I can’t believe that nobody has commented on the improbability of Rat showing compasion.

It doesn’t matter HOW you change the channel. Remote or by hand. There’s STILL nothing on worth watching.TV – the vast wasteland…

Had to wiki this, but Strphan was born in 1968, so he’d legitimately be able to say he remembered the horror of manual TV channel selection. I don’t think Rat could handle black and white much less adjusting the vertical hold.

Now that’s an ugly couch.

Pastis, when you were a kid, you were the “remote”.

I have you all beat, we didn’t have TV until I was 20 years old.

My family got a TV in 1954. It was a Zenith “portable”. Portable in the sense that one strong person could move it if he was willing to risk a hernia…Watching TV was an occasion in the 50s. People would invite people to a party just to watch TV. There are no TV repairmen today, but back in the 50s, you could be your own repairman…

We had 4 channels NBC,CBS, ABC, and PBS with no VCR or Cable. Every time mom turned on the vacuum cleaner the picture filed with static.

adjust the bunny ears.Won’t that get you kicked out of the club? Or is that just the bunnies’ tails?

Worse yet Rat there was only 3-4 channels available [Horror!]

When I was a kid, we had remote control. My sisters and I sat on the floor in front of the tv. Dad would yell at one of us to change the channel, and we did. He never had to walk across the room.

Most of the tried-and-true comments about back-in-the-day life of watching TV have been posted, so I’ll just add this memory — TV shows proudly promoting themselves as being broadcast ‘IN COLOR’.

Of course, there were only three channels, so you didn’t need to change them so often. Also, there was this “magazine” (a paper pamphlet that would be mailed to you (through the “Post Office”) every week, listing what shows would be on and at what times.

…and then with the “click-o-matic” remotes you could mess with the people watching the TV by jingling your keys.

those kids were so tragic. no remote no cells no iPads or iPods

I Know Right

Here’s another something kids these days are bound not to know about

I don’t remember having a set of rabbit ears that looked like this, but I do fondly remember rabbit ears. Especially as there were times we didn’t have the right equipment to plug in both the rabbit ears and the adapter that allowed us to plug in the Atari 2600 so we had to unplug the one to plug in the other and then when done playing video games go back through all that just to watch TV again.

We had to walk uphill in both directions, and there was always a blizzard on the TV.

“Yep, back when I was growing up, we didn’t yet HAVE any remote controls; we had to walk all the way over to the TV set itself to change the channel. But even so, we survived. In fact, sometimes we even enjoyed life; maybe even more so than a lot of people do today with their so-called tranquilizers, antidepressants, other drugs, booze, and what-have-you.”Rat: “Oh, shut up!”

Our first TV was a BW model with a lighted bezel around the picture tube so that you could watch it in a dark room without ruining your eyesight. You had to pay a little more for that model….

@sully2000…those tuning fork remotes were driven crazy by the sound of flicking a Zippo lighter open!

This reminds me of the time that one of my nephews was driving in my sister’s car which, at the time, lacked power steering. When he discovered that he had to physically roll down the windows, he squawked, “You have the roll-y kind!”