It’s the TV that needs to be digital.
My friend lives directly between Milwaukee and Madison and thus can’t pick up eithers NBC affiliate worth a shit (pixelated hurky Jerky picture).
Back in the day of analog tv they actually got both channels pretty good.
As it happens it was a very flavorful thrown together dinner. Garlicky chili lime shtimp with brie, onions and roasted poblanos on corn tortillas. 1/2 lb shrimp enough for six tortillas. Appetizer was cowboy candy on wheat thins so sweet and spicy.
Unless you have a very old TV, it’s digital.
The issue is – and was, when over-the-air stations changed over from analog to digital signals in 2009 – that the old antennas which people used to pick up TV stations no longer worked, and people had to buy new digital antennas if they wanted to still watch over-the-air TV.
Edit: I may be mistaken, but I believe that antennas which converted the digital signal for use by older analog TVs also exist (or existed).
And that is the other issue. With analog signals, you could watch a semi-distant station (over 30 miles or so away), and get a pretty good picture, even if there was a bit of interference. With digital, it’s all-or-nothing. If you can’t pick up a strong enough signal due to distance or other interference, you get no picture at all.
This is not correct. Old antennas do pick up the digital signals. Antennas only pick up the frequency, not the data format. “Digital antenna”
is a marketing term and it’s misleading.
I own a cabin and while the television is new and digital the antenna has been there since at least the mid 60’s and it picks up great.
Thank you for the clarification. I learned something today. It must have been digital converters that were needed for older TVs to be able to work properly after the switchover to digital signals.
I recall when I had a TV for years that could only pick up the local Fox affiliate, given when I was living. It was the only channel that came through strong enough.
(No, not Fox News, the Fox network. Very different, and in fact they had pretty decent unbiased local news.)
It was the only signal that my TV picked up. So, if I wanted to watch TV, that’s what I watched. Luckily there were some decent shows. I was way too poor to afford cable back then. And of course, there was no way to watch sports broadcasts at home unless it happened to be on that channel, but I wasn’t much into sports at that time anyway so it wasn’t a big loss.
(Most of my entertainment back then was from reading books I would pick up from the library.)
That’s not quite correct. What actually happened was that the switchover to digital television broadcasting was also mostly associated with stations going from VHF to UHF frequencies. That’s not directly related to being digital – there were analog UHF channels before, and there’s no reason a VHF channel couldn’t be digital – but that’s what mostly happened. Around here at least, every broadcast channel except one is in the UHF band.
UHF is nice because the short wavelength allows UHF antennas to be relatively small. I have a flat “bowtie” type antenna consisting of four small bowtie-shaped elements in front of a reflector grid that is at most maybe 24 inches wide and 3 feet high that gets all the TV stations within many miles.
The thing that actually makes reception digital and high definition is the TV having an ATSC tuner rather than the old NTSC standard. Anything that you may remember that converted digital broadcast signals for use by older tee-vees would have been some type of converter box, not the actual antenna.
With everybody and their dog jumping into streaming services and/or cable television, the old over-the-air broadcasting system is still alive and well and, in fact, delivering better (in the sense of less compressed) high-definition picture quality.
Now what did that have to do with snax & drinks, or food & cooking? Not much, I guess! 
Surprised to learn that…
Again, the game was/is broadcast on conventional free over the air (“OTA”) TV. Which is great if you live in any US city or a small town near any US city.
But since the advent of digital TV, cable, and now streaming, there are vast sorta-sparsely inhabited regions of the country with no source of OTA broadcast TV. They either get it over cable, or streaming, or they get nothing. And these options have subscription costs.
In fringe areas you might get e.g. one OTA channel out of the e.g. five broadcast channels in your nearest city. If that’s not the channel carrying the game, well, … you’re not gonna watch it that way.
Super Ball Snacks?
Do they make edible things out of Zectron these days?
Can’t use the other word without violating the NFL’s trademarks on ordinary routine English. I thought it was a clever euphemism.
Chips and French onion dip. Also crackers and cheese with little pieces of summer sausage on top.
I provided chips with queso and guacamole.
In the past I tried making the queso from scratch by starting with a bechemele, and then adding real cheese, and stuff. Nobody ate it. Now I just drop Velveeta and Rotel in an electric fondue pot, and give it a few stirs, and people love it. No accounting for taste, I suppose.
A spice related question: The guacamole is very simple, just avocado, garlic, lime juice, salt, and cumin. I ran out of ground cumin, so for the guacamole (and charro beans last week), I’ve been grinding cumin seeds. The fresh ground cumin seeds smell really good, but I can’t taste the difference between using fresh ground and store bought ground cumin.
Any reason to keep grinding them? Do I need fresher seeds to taste a difference?
It’s pretty darn good though. You can’t really go wrong with that. Nachos are supposed to be made from processed stuff, at least that’s the classic sports-watching version of nachos.
Were the seeds roasted before you ground them? (2-4 minutes over medium-low heat.)
Probably my least exciting ever: a small piece of mint dark chocolate and Athletic Nonalcoholic IPA. Had a burger with fries before the game.
That’s our version of queso, except we add browned Jimmy Dean sausage. Decadently good.
I’ll have to try that; if nothing else it will smell good. Now things are just getting more and more complicated. I used to be able to make guacamole with a minimal amount of fuss, and now we’re headed down a path we’re I’m going to have to poach the avocados or something absurd.
That does sound good. One year I added ground meat for cheeseburger queso, and people just thought it was weird. My conclusion was I wanted much more meat in the dip. Sort of a Philly cheesesteak version of dip, with mostly meat and some cheese holding it together, rather than mostly cheese, with some meat floating in it.
I’m debating whether or not to mention the whole controversy about including peas…
I can accept avocado based dips that are not guacamole, such as mashed avocado with sour cream. Even Alton Brown once mixed avocado with sugar and called it frosting. I’m also not much of a purist, and am fine with experimentation.
At some point though, you’re not making guacamole, your just making green veggie dip. And as Pace taught us, that point is definitely New York City.
I am completely in agreement with you. I haven’t made guacamole too many times, but when I have, I’ve been a minimalist. Generally it’s fresh mashed avocado with some lime juice and seasoning. I don’t add tomatoes, onions, nothing. And I think it’s amazing that way.
Funny enough, the whole “peas” controversy originated from an infamous article in the New York Times, so you are completely correct with this take.