by Bob Stealey

EDITOR

Watching TV is something I sometimes enjoy doing, although I must admit that lately, I've been somewhat mesmerized somehow by all the media hype on CNN over all the post-election harangue, and I do wish somebody would do something -- oops, I already used that one -- about it. Wow, that was some sentence!

Last Wednesday evening, I did make an exception and watched my favorite show, "Law & Order." Other than that, in my opinion there wasn't much else worth watching, that is, unless I'd do as my wife does and tune in to Discovery, The Learning Channel or The History Channel. I do enjoy "Touched by an Angel" on Sunday evenings, though.

I'm not much for watching sitcoms at all, but I do like to stay up for Jay Leno's monologue after the local news.

Living out toward Good Hope in southern Harrison County, there really isn't much of a choice of channels from which to select.

When I'm in Clarksburg, I notice that Time Warner includes a pretty decent selection of stations, including CNN Headline News, which we do not receive in that section of the county serviced by another cable provider.

Being a newsman most of my life, I do watch a lot of the shows on regular CNN, as I mentioned above. While I enjoy watching "Larry King Live" and some of the other 30- or 60-minute programs, sometimes I think I'd prefer to watch a sampling of different news developments throughout the country and the world rather than a steady diet of month-later election coverage.

Contemporary music is something I enjoy. When I lived in Clarksburg about 11 years ago, I enjoyed tuning in to VH1 to view and listen to music videos. 'Can't do that now.

Constantly, I see in the TV listings that channels like AMC, A&E, Court TV, Sci Fi, MSNBC, The Travel Channel, FoxSports, E! Entertainment and others are available on Time Warner. And I learned in recent days that a few extra channels are being added onto Time Warner's spectrum -- free of charge to customers. The channels I'm able to receive pale in comparison, I'm afraid.

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Norman Drainer of Route 1, Flemington, who has written to me before, has a question for Bob'n'Along readers. He says, "A friend of mine by the name of West Patents (sic) from Massachusetts is a writer. He has a college degree in history. We exchange books. I read his and he reads mine. We were on the same destroyer. He was an officer and I was an electrician -- 'enlisted man.'

"West stops by when he passes through West Virginia. He always has something to ask about history. His question was: What state has the least number of counties? I answered, 'Alaska,' which has one.

"He said, 'wrong.' There is a state, Louisiana, that has zero counties. I tried to explain to him that zero is not a number. Zero is nothing and doesn't exist. That is why you cannot build a 100-foot fence with 10 posts 10 feet apart. Which is right -- zero or one? I also asked him how many seeds are there in an apple, and he didn't know."

Maybe I can help on the counties question. It is true that Louisiana has zero counties. That state does not have counties, but parishes. Thus the zero answer. Now, why don't you take a bite out of that apple question.