I write a gratitude list in the morning, I’d say about 95% of the time, that percentage taking into account my inherently flawed humanity, which also is the cause of my forgetting so many of the things for which I can be grateful but, instead, which I take for granted, another human characteristic. (Writing run-on sentences is another one of my flaws.)

Now that I am spending the summer in Minnesota at my mother-in-law’s, where our TV reception is rabbit ears, I need to remember to add satellite TV and our DVR to my gratitude list. There’s nothing like rabbit ears to help you realize just how out of touch you can be.

I was on the phone with my manager today, who’s in Los Angeles, and he was telling me that he was watching CNN, and an American Airlines plane was being evacuated. People were sliding down those slides. You know the ones that they make look like so much fun in the emergency procedures card that’s tucked into the seat back in front of you? The one that you’re supposed to peruse but, instead, you listen to your iPod or look at wildly unnecessary products in the Sky Mall catalogue? Those slides.

Of course, we’d have no way of knowing that here because, if we turned on TV, all we would get is “Hawaii Five-O” or a fuzzy local weather channel.

And my conversations with friends around the country have begun to, thusly, become affected:

“Did you see that an American Airlines jet was evacuated?”

“No, but did you see Steve McGarrett and Chin Ho bust those drug lords? No? Well, my friend, you’ve got to get yourself some rabbit ears.”

I still don’t know why that jet was being evacuated. I’m sure it will be in the paper tomorrow, along with some other old news. I don’t know if I’ll even bother to read that. I mean, it’s old news, and there’s an episode of “Mannix” on.