Do not adjust your set

Late, late Saturday night, NBC shows a full 90-minute old "Saturday Night Live" rerun, which my TiVo dutifully records, and then I watch the good sketches and fast-forward through the bad ones.

Last night, my NBC affiliate, KNBC in Los Angeles, must have been having some kind of bizarre technical difficulties, because what my TiVo captured was, first of all, only about an hour and five minutes of recording, which means KNBC was off the air from 3:00 to 3:25 A.M. And when they came back on, and the TiVo picked up the recording, it was to a station identification slide, which said "4 (NBC logo)/KNBC-TV Los Angeles." It was outdated, too, since the "4" wasn't in its current font, and the graphic design of the whole thing didn't match their current on-air look at all.

Occasionally, there would be very quick flashes of other images (less than a second), including "EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM MESSAGE" and something that looked like the kind of video feedback one gets when plugging a video output back into its own input. At one point, there was a quick flash of Dennis Miller, apparently from the scheduled "SNL" rerun, but then back to the station ID.

Eventually, after about 20 minutes, the station ID began switching back and forth occasionally to what looked like a newer version, this one saying "4 (NBC logo)/NBC/KNBC Los Angeles."

And then, with no warning, "SNL" came back on, in progress, at about 4:00. So apparently they haven't worked all the bugs out of this "television" thing yet. Philo T. Farnsworth, where are you when we need you?