I haven’t had a chance to return my father’s phone call from yesterday because I’m getting home too late to call him. He’s on the East Coast, 3 hours ahead of San Francisco. I grew up on the East Coast, so ET is still internally in my head at (seemingly) all times, even though I’ve been in SF for seven years now. Given the dominance of East Coast prime time in setting network TV schedules, I wonder if it matters where you grew up — do most Americans have a sense of ET all the time? Do they always know their offset from ET? I watched a fair bit of TV as a kid, so maybe if you didn’t, you weren’t caught up in this mental time zone. And I imagine that as TV becomes more scattered (and, in some instances, less dominant), both in channels and timing, thanks to TiVo and other PVRs, this sense of what time it is other than where you are will diminish. Or maybe it’s just me. I dearly love that NFL football games are on at a reasonable hour out here; how does anyone on the East Coast stay up for Monday Night Football?