Saturday-scatterday

I left home yesterday to roam around while Otis had some appointments. I hied myself to the Wallingford Tully's for a bagel and some browsing (what did I do before I had a laptop anyway?) while waiting for the rest of the world to wake up.

I went down to Gasworks Park for the PB&J. Dingo was still waking up and didn't want to bike, but Johnbai was game and said he would roll down the hill on his antique road bike. I made a little tour out to Ballard while waiting for him to reach the B-G Trail. The good news was our rendezvous was accomplished with little difficulty; the bad news was that Johnbai had a flat. We attempted repairs, but they didn't take, so we just took a nice walk back to the car and called it good. So much for the bike ride.

While drowning our sorrows in iced coffees, Dingo called and wanted company, so we zipped back up the hill for a Deluxe lunch, made even tastier when Silvio showed up. Dingo and I then took Johnbai home and met Sachet at their building, just before she took off on a mysterious mission. Dingo and I capped off the day by taking some goods up to the Value Village, and I dropped her off at the University Street Fair before heading home. Whew!

In contrast, the evening was very mellow. Otis had some grading to do after dinner, and then we just lay around the living room in the dark, listening to Amanda Wilde's "Swing Years" and taking turns petting the cat.

The big controversy discussed at lunch is the impending "obsolescence" of television sets. On February 17, 2009, broadcasters will begin transmitting digital signals only; analog TV broadcasts (the way they are now) will be no more. What that means is that old sets that receive signals through rabbit ears or antennae, and even old "cable-ready" sets that have the coax running directly into the set, will go dark at midnight - at least without a converter box. Fancy new sets and sets which use cable or satellite converter boxes already will not be affected, as they either have digital tuners in them or do the digital-to-analog conversion already. Here's a pretty good story from MSNBC, and I really like this proposed warning label.

All of this came up because Dingo was getting rid of an old TV (see above) and Jon of Monmouth has gotten a new one. Since many of us don't watch much TV and watch it on the computer a lot anyway, it wasn't an urgent item; I just love these culture-wide transitional moments - when Sweden changed to right-hand drive, when Europe went to the Euro, stuff like that. I imagine this event will be in the background of some movie someday.