Thunderstorms and high winds ravaged Memphis on Friday, downing trees and power lines and leaving thousands  without electricty.  One man, 86 year-old WWII veteran Robert Monsarrat, lost part of his house and would have lost his life had the switch from analog television to digital not occurred that day.

On Saturday, he said that if it weren’t for the switch from analog to digital television, he might be dead. Monsarrat hasn’t received his digital converter box yet, so instead of watching “The Oprah Winfrey Show” from his bedroom like usual, he went into the kitchen to use his only digital television.

Soon after, lightning struck a large red oak in his backyard, causing it to come crashing down on his house at Hawthorne and Peach near Overton Park… The tree destroyed the back of the house, including his bedroom.  “I was curled up in the fetal position under the rubble when they dug me out,” he said.

I wish I could get odds from Vegas on whether Oprah takes credit for this, because I would richer than royalty by the end of the month.  As for Monsarrat, well, we now know that the Final Destination movies are real.  He’ll be dead in a week when he succumbs to Death’s wiles in a horrible accident… involving old age and natural causes!

(photos by Brad Luttrell/The Commercial Appeal)

Today’s the day that both of the remaining households without cable or satellite television finally make the switch to digital TV feeds, and it’s INSANITY!!!  Ahhh WHAT’S HAPPENING????  How was I supposed to know?  Who saw this coming?!?!?!?  Or, as The Live Feed — which is live-blogging news about the transition — smartly put it:

2.8 million Americans [are waking] to a new dawn of inconvenience, a disaster akin to a power outage (if the outage only impacted one appliance in your home, was entirely solved by a trip to Best Buy and you knew it was coming for two years in advance).

So what’s the problem?  The problem is that it’s a GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY, MAN.

In a sprawling, consummately paranoid tirade, “Dr. A. True Ott” theorizes that the DTV box is a miniaturized version of the military’s HAARP project, a device that he claims will be used to totally pacify the world’s population, allowing the “New World Order” (funded by those international Freemason banking consortiums, natch) to deploy the military industrial complex and create a global fascist police state.

Quick everyone!  Collect all the bottled water, canned food, and pandas you can find, and get to the bomb shelters!