Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for March 22, 2018

“Your Window To The World” is a registered trademark of Chicago PBS station WTTW.

If your turn your television off, your home becomes eerily quiet! Quick! Turn it back on!Sad to say that was my house when I was growing up. I would get scolded by my parents sometimes when I turned the TV off. I’d say, “I’m not watching it.” My dad would say, “just leave it on”…looking at me like there was something wrong with me.

I watched “My Favorite Martian” before it was reruns. What category does that put me in? (Besides “astonishingly old”, that is.)

I am old enough to remember not having a TV; we listened to radio: Jack benny, Red Skelton, Wild Bill Hickok, Amos and Andy, The Shadow, No School Today, Space Patrol, Burns and Allen. and a bunch more that I can’t remember right now.

I am old enough to remember not having a TV; we listened to radio: Jack benny, Red Skelton, Wild Bill Hickok, Amos and Andy, The Shadow, No School Today, Space Patrol, Burns and Allen. and a bunch more that I can’t remember right now.

OK, maybe I didn’t have a butler named Mr Belvedere. But we did have a talking horse named Mr. Ed. I’m sure of it!

MY butler was named ALFRED!

My father always called it “the idiot box”.

I just read a quote from Grouch Marx. He said he found television very educational. “Whenever someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Sorry Ruben, before TV was radio! Though I didn’t start listening to radio till the 1970’s. Now you need Sirius XM to hear the old radio shows.

For those unfamiliar, parodying the previous style of “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” http://www.gocomics.com/ripleysbelieveitornot/1996/12/30

I miss Peter Jennings. He was a Canadian who Americans embraced as one off their own. He died of lung cancer. Was a smoker.