I am – Hercules!!


One year from today, we will switch on our old Watchmans and nothing will come out. No channel 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 or 13 for that machine unless maybe you make some mechanical alterations.

My shower radio’s VHF-TV audio bands won’t work anymore.

The TV frequencies we all grew up with – they’ve been around since the Great Depression – are going away.

If your non-digital TV at home is hooked and stays hooked to cable or a satellite dish, you probably won’t have any problems.

But if your analog TV gets over-the-air programming via rabbit ears or a roof antenna, you need to hustle out to Radio Shack or Best Buy or Circuit City or Wal-Mart and get a digital tuner. The government is handing out $1.5 billion worth of $40 coupons (up to two coupons per household) to cover part of the cost of these tuners, which run about $60 each.

Thanks to something called the Digital Television and Public Safety Act of 2005, millions of U.S. television sets will stop receiving over-the-air signals on Feb. 17, 2009.

Less than 15 percent of U.S. households relied exclusively on over-the-air broadcasts in 2004.

The U.S. Senate barely passed the measure a little over two years ago. Dick Cheney had to fly in from the Middle East to cast the deciding vote. There's no word on whether he grumbled "Fuck Herc's shower radio" just before he pulled the trigger.

Uncle Sam can afford the $1.5 billion in coupons because the airwaves being taken away from broadcasters (already using different bandwidths for digital TV and HDTV transmissions) are being auctioned off for about $10 billion.

Learn more about the situation here.

Includes the incredible – and, until recently, hard to find – work of dead comedy geniuses Michael O’Donoghue and Doug Kenney!!!