Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for June 13, 2024

I don’t know (I’m sure it’s got to be done differently) how the TV ratings are done nowadays. In the 80’s, I was given a book and a small stipend to enter my program viewing for a couple weeks. It was awkward and I told em so beforehand because I’m in Canada and, at the time, my shows were off a 10ft satellite dish of channels from the US, with the odd ones from our Anik. Good times.

Nothing will ever replace books! [Years Later] Ok, but nothing will ever replace the radio! [Years Later] Alright, but nothing will ever replace TV! [Years Later] Fine, but nothing will ever replace the internet! [Years Later] …What? Oh, right, the gag. Give it a couple more years.

People once made similar observations about cartooning…or so I’m told.

Don’t watch nearly as much TV now. By the time we’re done sifting through streaming sites, surfing cable options and arguing over what’s the least repetitive, it’s bedtime.

Some people do turn the tv on and just leave it on throughout the day. My grandmother did this. She never sat down to watch anything until Perry Mason came on at night. Once a week. And then later it was Matlock and Murder, She wrote. Now there are networks that run those shows all day. Personally I prefer the radio, CBC or NPR or iTunes. Right now I am playing a Be Bop and Bossa Nova/Brazilian mashup and loving it.

..what is this “television” that you speak of?

I remember that MY family had a butler named ALFRED!

And let’s not forget Saturday morning cartoons!! Only three channels….watched whichever one your TV antenna could pick up clearly….unless like my dad who had an antenna bigger than some NASA antennas and it was positioned by a knob on top of the TV….and vacuum tubes were the high tech of the day. Yeah….I be old.xD

Before we had TV, we would listen to radio. It had many shows that moved to TV: Jack Benny, The Shadow, Charlie McCarthy, Wild Bill Hickock, Burns and Allen, The Cisco Kid, Amos and Andy, Space Patrol, Sky King, No School Today, etc. I think the disappearance of the shows from radio finally prompted my father to get our first TV.

I always thought, “Why would Walter Kronkite lie to me?”

Today’s anchors would lie to me for a 0.1% ratings “bump”.

My grandparents told me that before there was television, they were in a cave and were entertained by watching shadows on the wall.

I miss Peter Jennings. Most sarcastic news reader ever. The SF Giants had a radio guy who was like Jennings. He could read Wonder Bread ad copy as written and make it sound like toxic waste but subtly enough that he kept his job for 30 years.

Who is this “Peter Jennings”? (Oh. 2001. Never mind!)

Peter Jennings: The Last Anchorman. Miss him too.

Sixty light-years from here, some unfortunate civilization is just starting to watch ‘Petticoat Junction’, ‘I Love Lucy’, ‘Gomer Pyle USMC’, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, ‘My Mother the Car’ …