Missing Listings

Has anyone seen this lately?

It recently occured to me that these once vitaly important ingredients of the daily Friday newspaper is now long, long gone (okay, so newspapers themself are fading the way of oragami dinosaurs as well, but that's another valid subject altogether).

Each Friday morning before I would head off to school or work, I would flip open the folded newspaper on the table, porch or stoop, pull out the entire Television Listings Section and flip directly to the weekend listing pages to seek out just which college football games would be broadcast in our town that Saturday and just which NFL football games would be broadcast in our area that Sunday. I certainly would get right to the most important information, first...

...I would know what I had to look forward to, or not look forward to during the weekend.

I would then flip quickly through the listings to the days of the week when my favorite shows aired, hoping not to see the dreaded (R) after the television series title - for that meant, dear viewers, this week's episode of that particular show was a repeat/re-run, and you'd probably seen it before. No tension, no new humor, no new snazzy car chases or gun fights this week...

If I had then struck out in the football game and weekly television show areas, I would give it one last attempt and look up the Movies of the Week each network would run on night a week (that means there were only three Movies of the Week, dear viewers). If none of those weekly movies was a movie that was released before the 1970's or contained an actor I had at least heard of, I had wiffed on all three television pitches.

I'd then have to make due with football teams I had no interest in and hope highlights from my favorite teams' games were aired on the recap shows; old episodes of may favorite shows and movies I had no interest in.

Maybe we wouldn't have to sit through another of Dad's vintage war movie/western movie weekend marathons.

Maybe Dad wouldn't make us watch a show on PBS.

Maybe the president wouldn't be on....

(Image from here.)