Lone Star: Channeling George Clooney

Josh Lucas

 This is weird: I decided to give the new Fox series Lone Star a shot, mainly because I didn’t see anything too appealing up against it, and recorded it along with the NBC show Chase. Well, we, my wife and I, weren’t far into the first episode of Lone Star when an actor pops up who strikes me as familiar. “Hey,” I said, “isn’t that the guy who played Reese Witherspoon’s husband in Sweet Home Alabama?” My wife said she didn’t know. Well, from another angle, it was obvious that this was not Josh Lucas, the guy I had been thinking of.

Cole Hauser

 Next, we watch Chase. As soon as character Jimmy Godfrey appears on the screen, I say to my wife, “Well, I’ll be damned! There he is. That’s the guy who played her husband. Can you beat that? I thought he was in the other show and, now, he turns up in this one.” “That’s weird!” she agreed. Of course, as it turns out actor Cole Hauser was not the guy who played Reese’s husband, either. But, like I said, it’s weird. In my defense, Looking at their pictures, it looks like their noses are similar.


Putting aside indications of my diminished mental capacity, we gave the two shows mixed reviews. Before it was cancelled we had already made up our minds not to watch Lone Star again. It just wasn’t offering the kind of story I could get into on a long term basis. The only thing mildly interesting, aside the obligatory hot girlfriend, was James Wolk’s Clooneyesque facial contrivances. What the hell, if you have aspirations of being a heartthrob, who better to mimic.

It’s sort of ironic that the show is being replaced by Season 3 of Lie To Me, another show that me and my honey removed from our potential watch-list after seeing the first episode. Go figure.

The Transition To Digital TV

I haven’t been paying much attention to the messages that have been crawling across my TV screen concerning the transition to digital signals, mainly, because I have cable. There was a time, though, when I lived in northwest Montana, back where cable would not go, that I relied on an antenna and a signal booster from Radio Shack to pull in reception from the distant Black Tail Mountain. My heart goes out to folks in that same predicament.

That’s why I was struck the other day when I noticed among my items sold the Philco TB100HH9 Digital to Analog TV Converter Box. The manufacturer’s description reads as follows: “The Philco TB100HH9 Digital to Analog TV converter plays an important role in the completion of the digital TV transition. Designed to easily receive over-the-air ATSC standard-definition and high-definition terrestrial broadcasts, the DTA800 comes equipped with a remote control unit and the ability to provide on-screen program information sent by local TV broadcasters to easily identify details about TV programming. The DTA800 is designed solely to receive digital TV signals with an over-the-air antenna and converts those signals into analog for display through a TV set's analog connections.”

Here are a couple customer reviews:

Picked up two of these yesterday and I'm very happy with them.

They have one great feature in particular - through the menu you can access a signal strength meter. With the meter on, you can adjust your antenna for the best reception and it tells you the strength as you make adjustments. It takes the guess work out of it!

I have a dvd player with a built in converter on one of our tvs. I temporarily plugged in one of these boxes just to find the best antenna position and now we get several more channels.

And,

For $9.00 after the government rebate (I bought locally not on Amazon), this converter was a good choice for me. In setting it up, however, I got into an enthusiastic hurry and totally neglected to read the manual expecting a Converter Box to work like a DSL box...., i.e., attach the antennae and TV to the converter, plug TV and converter in and its done. NOT SO with the Digital to Analog Converter box. As per other reviewers, the manual instructions need to be followed. After attaching antennae to box to TV, I followed the instructions to scan in the digital channels but none were available, yet, as per the "no signal" message after fully scanning. Then, turning to manual pages 27 through 29, I learned how to "pass through" to analog channels, an additional few easy steps. Finally, with a bit of rabbit ear adjustment for each channel which is usual to pick-up signals in my area, I was done and the stations are coming in clearer with the converter box than with the antennae alone... NO SNOW. SNOW meant I had NOT quite gotten to the "pass through" instructions or had not taken extra time to hand adjust the antennae after "pass through" was complete... I also found (and haven't quite figured this one out) that I might need to "pass through" for an individual channel if the set-up worked for some but not all the analog channels. Follow the manual, take your time, and the Philco works fine (so far!).

The only thing I don't like is the remote. But I plan on programming a universal remote to work the box so I never have to look at their ugly one again.

Hey, if you’re in the same boat as these folks, maybe this box will help you.