A funny thing happened a year ago in June of 2009... my 27-inch flat screen TV just plain quit working. The day before it was working great -- nice picture, great stereo sound, clear reception on every channel -- and the next day I got nothing but static! The thing was only two years old, to boot... "It's okay," I thought, "I have my back-up 19 inch TV... the old Sony." I pulled that out of my closet, plugged it in, and... nothing but static! Can you believe my luck? Two TV sets quit working on the same day! Intolerable...

Seriously, though... it was June 11, 2009 when television stations across this great land we call America began broadcasting strictly in the digital format. Tightwad that I am, I resisted all my life the lures of cable television with its HBO, movie channels, Cartoon Network, and 199 other channels that catered to every bizarre television need on earth. I've always been happy with my basic free TV channels: 4, 5, 7, 9 (the boring public TV channel), 11, 13 and 22. That's 7 lucky channels for FREE, and I was happy with that. True, my reception wasn't that great, but considering I usually would watch TV after I took out my contact lenses for the night, I couldn't see anything anyway and I was content. Then along came digital TV...

"You will get more channels!' they said. "Digital TV offers a clearer picture!' they claimed. "Analog is out of style, you need to get with the times. You will LOVE digital TV!" they roared. "All you need is a digital converter box for your out-of-fashion non-digital 27-inch flat screen TV and you will love it!" So they said.

I waited as long as I could. Finally, after I received my government check good for $25 towards a digital TV converter box, I gave in, went to the local Fred Meyer, and bought myself a digital TV converter box. I didn't even bother plugging the thing in or trying it out until after June 11th when the static came... so after watching the static on my set for half an hour, I took the converter out of the box, connected it to my TV, went through endless menus on the digital converter box remote control just so I could receive a signal, watched a little digital tube, and said... "THIS SUUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKKKKss!!!"

Alas, digital TV did indeed suck. The first thing I noticed was that the picture did not fill up my 27-inch flat screen anymore, in fact, each channel seemed to have a different sized format. Some were wide screen, some were letter box, some were the same size as my screen except for a six inch black border around all sides. The second thing I noticed was that the volume of digital TV was LOW.... so low, in fact, that I had to crank up the sound on my TV set all the way to ten just to hear it well. "What happened to the sizing?" I asked myself. "What happened to the sound?" But that was nothing compared to the crappy digital picture issue...

The third thing I noticed about the new digital TV format was that -- no matter what channel I went to -- the picture would freeze up and digitize every few minutes. It looked like the picture was turning into a jigsaw puzzle and falling apart right before my very eyes! Some channels were worse than others, but they ALL had this super annoying digitization problem. It was just the same as trying to watch a dirty old DVD movie that had been scratched with a screw driver and dragged through the dirt! To me, this was intolerable... "This is digital TV?" I asked myself. "This is an improvement???" But then I suddenly remembered what could be a redeeming quality -- there would be more channels than before!

Unfortunately, I found that I received only four or five "new" channels... one showed nothing but boring sports. Another showed black and white movies made before there was color in the world. Another showed TV reruns from the year 1950. And yet another I could not tell what it aired because the digitization breakup was sooo gosh danged bad!

I took to the streets in anger. "THIS SUUUUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKKKKKSSSS!" I cried out to the streets. And so it did...

At that point I decided to wait a year for "them" to get the bugs out and in the mean time dedicated my 27-inch flat screen telly to nothing but watching DVD movies and playing old Nintendo games. And then the year passed by and I tuned back in just last week...

I tuned back in to digital TV again last week -- June 1, 2010 -- and found the same crummy channels showing the same weird sized formats on each channel with the same digital breakup every gosh danged two minutes and the same gosh danged super low volume... a full year had passed and they hadn't fixed a gosh danged thing! And so, I say now to the world, to you -- my readers -- in all earnest and without hesitation, I say to you...

"DIGITAL TV STILLLLLLL SUCKS! IT SUCKS! IT SUCKS! IT SUCKS! IT SUCKS! IT SUCKS! IT SUCKS! IT SUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCKKKKKKSSS!"

Please.... would someone please bring me back my analog? Please...???

2015 update: five years later, with a brand new 32" LED HDTV, digital Tv still sucks. Bah!

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