Here I was chastising Mark for not posting follow ups on his postings. He wrote that his TV went out, but he casually mentioned that it was working. Turns out he unplugged it and plugged it back in, and it worked.
So last night I had my dad look at the car's air conditioning. I popped the hood and he looked at it while the car was running, and didn't know what was wrong. But then cold air was blowing out of the vents. He showed me that one of things he did was fiddle with the wire connecting (and here's where I show my ignorance, only to later realize what it's called and revel in my stupidity) to the metal cylander. He thought the only other possibility was the fuse to the compressor went out. So we'll see how it runs, and go from there.
To borrow from Kathleen David, I'm grateful for having someone nearby to troubleshoot problems in the car and home.