Our twenty inch Toshiba TV set, a 2005 model, came from Wal-Mart just like every other TV we've owned for the past ten years. This one might have been only three and a half years old, but those years included moves from Arizona to eastern Colorado to western Colorado and back to Arizona. During that time, it never failed to deliver a crisp picture and great sound. Michael Jackson was an entertainment icon to the world at large, but the Toshiba was an entertainment icon to our family. And now it's gone.

We'd all gone through a very rough summer together, a time when the bank account was in continuous trouble and our single TV channel our only source of distraction from a diet of beans and bacon and mighty little bacon. I'd put up a monster deep fringe antenna in June, hoping to bring in several Tucson, Arizona, stations, but had gotten only one. No complaints. Without that one, my wife and I would both have gone off the deep end.

That all changed yesterday. Around noon, the picture began to deteriorate. Continuous wavy lines.

If this had happened just one month earlier, we wouldn't have had the cash to buy the gas to drive to Wal-Mart, let alone splurge for a new TV set. This month, thankfully, we actually have a little money in the bank. By noon today, I was back at Wal-Mart in Sierra Vista, looking for a replacement. Pam later reported that by the time I got home around four p.m., the sound had also about had it. So I unplugged the venerable Toshiba and lugged it out to one of the storage sheds. It'll get loaded up for my next trip to the dump, but for now....

My visit to Wal-Mart was traumatic. There weren't any television sets at all! Not one! Nothing but a bunch of flat screens sitting up there--where was all the stuff that made those screens work????

I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. My brain, what was left of it, shorted out entirely. Mentally throwing up my hands in surrender, I sought help from a knowledgeable employee.

"Where are the TV sets? Where have they gone? There's nothing that looks like anything I know."

The young clerk no doubt assumed I was either psycho or senile. It took a while for him to understand what on Earth I was talking about...and then a while longer to get it through my head: Those flat screens were the complete sets.

No. You can't be serious. Oh, the DVD slot is up there on top of that one, slides in behind the picture screen? Well, now don't that beat all. I was intending to pay for the load of other stuff I'd already bought, lug that out to the truck, come back with a flatbed cart for the TV, but--the entire box is only six inches thick? No. And...ten pounds total? Now I know you're pulling my leg.

Turned out he wasn't kidding. I could carry the whole nineteen inch TV set with DVD function, the whole combo, in one hand with a couple of fingers left over.

Imagine my disbelief when I plugged in the new, thin winner of The Biggest Loser contest for TV sets and it actually worked! But wait. There's more.

Remember I said our Toshiba had been faithfully pulling in the lone station the deep fringe TV antenna could reach? Turns out it wasn't the antenna that could only pull in one station; it was the TV set. When the new, lean, mean Emerson did its autotune thing up through the frequencies, it found not just one but a full dozen stations with cable quality pictures! Holy fine tuning, Batman! From the moment I'd planted a stout post to support that deep fringe TV antenna installation, I'd realistically hoped to reach every Tucson area station but one. CBS puts out a signal much weaker than any of the others, and even my determined optimism recongized that one as unlikely, but the rest of them seemed at least theoretically possible.

When I wrote down what we were now getting, it turned out my antenna installation had matched maximum expectations from Day One: We got them all. Not CBS, but all the rest. We can now watch a variety of PBS stations, the ABC network, and most happily of all, FOX. American Idol, your most fanatic fans won't miss the 2010 season after all. In addition to all that, the nineteen inch Emerson cost under $250. Then I cycled through the stations one more time and discovered we're even pulling in CBS! The station with no power output worth mentioning, yet we got it.

If that's not a miracle TV set from Wal-Mart, I don't know what it would take to qualify.