By way of a eulogy for today’s official death of analog-signal television in the U.S., here’s a sight that we’ll presumably not see again: The dreaded white-noise TV screen.

Who can hear and see that hateful electronic crackling and not cringe? As bad as the skull-piercing morning alarm clock. It triggers a reflex action in me: I have to shut it down ASAP.

The blue screen of death that now signifies digital TV outage just doesn’t inspire the same raw emotion. It just sits there, blithely displaying a lack of activity. At least the old small-screen snowstorm had activity to it, coming at you like some doomsday beast, or the entryway to the gates of hell — “hell” being a protracted timespan with (gasp) nothing to watch.