Complete with bad commercials that repeat all night both in compatible color and black-and-white

This office has been lately receiving all manner of questions relating to the coming scheduled change to digital television: why digital television? Why this change? Is it better exercise to sleep while laying on your chest so that every time you breathe you're raising and lowering your whole body weight rather than sleeping on your side where you don't lift anything? Why is it coming in the middle of February next year? Wasn't February inconvenient enough? The answer is ``Marilyn'', although I don't know to which question.

The major advantage of digital television is the pictures and sounds on it are created by digits, that is, finger puppets. This produces a greater fidelity than do older televisions, which use foot puppets. Television producers like the change, since they hate having to sit on the extremely tall chairs so their feet are in front of the cameras. But changing the broadcasting without also changing reception would be terrible: the resulting loss in resolution would cause television producers' hands to ``lose resolution'', turning into feet, and you go around these days with a pair of feet over your hands.

Still, people have been happy with the pedestrian old television for a long time now, so why change? One reason is to satisfy the transmission fidelity fans. There aren't many of them, but they're influential consumers, and you can't fault manufacturers for catering to a market of people who will happily plant silver-core trees in the yard so that the autumn colors come in with less chlorophyl loss.

And it's hard to not overlook that the old-style foot-based televisions had become very cheap to sell, since feet were almost everywhere in the old days. They reached the point good-quality nineteen-inch television sets were regularly included in cereal boxes. That's great for people who need television sets, but inconvenient for folks who just wanted to buy breakfast cereal, as there'd be room for something like twelve Frosted Cheese Puffs per box. Plus the picture tubes sticking out the back of the box left grocery stores shelves full of side-heavy packages ready to fall over, breaking, scattering shards of public service announcements all the way to aisle twelve (mayonnaise and imaginary nectarines).

This isn't the first time television got itself ripped out. In 1946 the Federal Communications Commission decided there wasn't any good reason to have a Channel 1. So New York City's Channel 1 was relocated to Channel 4, where no one would look for it. Channel 4, which had been there, was moved over to Channel 5, where decades later someone realized they could make a catchy jingle by using ``fun'' and ``five'' as alliteration, and if they knew in 1946 that they could have done just as well on channel ``four'' they'd have felt indifferent about moving.

Meanwhile, with Channel 1 now Channel 4, Channel 3 had to move to Channel 2 because old-style foot-based televisions couldn't tolerate having stations on adjacent channels, as they would squabble over the armrest and insisting to their neighbors they were ``not touching you''. Channel 5 is not adjacent to Channel 4 due to the Straits of Bosporus. Television pioneer Robert Hinckley, employed by ABC after spending the war years as a freelance elephant, stayed out of this, on Channel 7. And now a mere sixty-three years afterwards it's all being confused again.

In 1953 color was added to what had been black-and-white broadcasts, but this was done through a clever ``backwards compatible'' version with the extra information needed for color reception snuck in on the other channels that one was not watching. This is why color television did not become truly nationwide until the late 1960s, when most markets had enough other channels to support all the color information being sent.

Still, the coming change must be for good seasons, since there would hardly be all this fuss over it if it weren't, I guess. The February 17, 2009 changeover date was chosen to be a nice commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the Vanguard 2 satellite, which made the historic discovery from orbit of clouds surrounding the Earth.

Trivia: Captain Robert Dover's ``Olimpick Games'', started on Dover's Hill in Gloucestershire, England, in 1612 -- and held intermittently up to 1852 -- featured competitions in (among other things) horse racing, chess, wrestling, jumping, shin-kicking, dancing, and the javelin. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: The Rise And Fall of The Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000, Paul Kennedy.