This New England

-- Little Harbor, at Woods Hole, by Mrs. S.I. Snow, in 1921, back when the shoe manufacturers summered there, long before the arrival of the private-equity wizards.

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It's amazing that the very people who spend their lives watching television most devoutly have made the most noise and expressed the most confusion about the disappearance of analog signals. (Think rabbit ears.)

Television stations have broadcast information about this change relentlessly for a year, but apparently there is something so brain-killing and passive about watching TV that it went over or around their heads of this week's complainants

So phones were ringing off the hook at a walk-in information center set up by stations in Providence, our friend national TV expert Phil Swann informed us today from Washington.

Boston's Channel 5 reported that a volunteer at the center, Jeremy Taylor, said he tried to calm ''agitated callers'' and explain the reasons for the disappearance of analog signals, which have remained largely unchanged since the 1950s.

"I try to explain that the digital switch is not something we're doing to extort them of money."

Still, they'd probably be pretty easy to extort money from...

Or is Providence particularly zoned out?

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Geronimo's descendants have sued Skull and Bones -- the snobbish, "elite'' Yale secret society, whose building is a bogus crypt. The Associated Press says that members swiped the remains of the Apache warrior-leader in 1918 from a site in Oklahoma and have kept them ever since.

There's a long tradition of Yalies taking historical relics. The most famous is Hiram Bingham, who "discovered'' Machu Picchu for the white guys, and took away with him massive quantities of Incan stuff, which the Peruvian government has only recently started to get back from Yale's coffers -- after a long court battle.

Yale alumnus Cole Porter could have written a nice patter song about this.

 Tags  analog TV Geronimo Jeremy Taylor Phil Swann Skull & Bones

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