Don’t Know Why, There’s No Sun Up in the Sky, Stormy Weather

Frank Batten, who built a network out of the idle chatter and guesswork that takes up 10 minutes of every local news broadcast – 15 minutes if it rains, snows, or is hot, or is going to rain, snow or be hot, or they had predicted it was supposed to rain, snow or be hot and it wasn’t, has died at the age of 82. Batten was watching a TV test pattern and decided that turning the colors into blobs and having them move in an incessantly repeating pattern would prove comforting for old people and lull them into remote control inertia. The same phenomenon was later applied by the producers of According to Jim.