He took away our Expanded Basic and now we just have Basic analog service. Turns out we’d only asked TiVo to record one non-broadcast program in the last few months anyway, so it seemed a waste of $25 (soon to be $35) a month to have thirty extra channels we never watched.So goodbye MTV, AMC, TNT and Nickelodeon! Goodbye CNN, CNBC, The Learning Channel, ESPN2 and ESPN! Goodbye Fox News Channel, FX, ABC Family, CNN Headline News and Lifetime! Goodbye TNN, Shop at Home, The Weather Channel and Disney! Goodbye A&E and Animal Planet!On the plus side, Charter turns out to be too cheap to install the right filter on our cable line (I’ve always found it a little amusing how it costs the cable company more—not including license fees—to provide basic analog service than extended), so we get USA, Fox Sports Midwest, TV Land, Comedy Central, MTV2, The History Channel, VH1, E!, MSNBC, Court TV, the Cartoon Network and the Food Network for “free.”

(If I were really bored, all of those networks would have had links attached to them. But now that the cable guy has come and gone, I can finally leave the apartment. So I will. Those who really need to find the MSNBC Web page can use Google.)