"Sounds good. Because this involves turning the tv around (which
involves cleaning off the kitchen table) I'm saving this one for
third, even though it sounds like something I can do"

Haha, sounds like some of my houses.

"The only degaussing coil I have came from a tv I destroyed. I never
found a power supply for it, and right now I also can't remember where
it is."

You cannot just hook up an internal coil to AC, it will burn up before you can pull it away. Do you have a variac ? You can use that. Just put the coil in front of the screen, turn it up until you see the raster bend enough that there are black spots. you'll see what I mean. Then bring it down gradually, like over two seconds.

If you manually degauss it with it on, Don't leave it cranked long, it only takes a second. It upsets some vertical circuits. Also, with a coil out of a set you will not really want to go to 120 volts, those things pull a hell of alot of amperage. If you go to say 100 volts AC, as soon as you switch it on start bringing it down quickly. Either way should work.

Then just hope the connection doesn't intemittently make and screw it up again.

But I don't think there was an earthquake**, so I'm figuring the
aperture grill is still in the right place."

An earthquake strong enough to dislodge it would have take the building off the foundation. It gets knocked out when the set is dropped usually, and it has to drop pretty hard to create enough G force. However sometimes it just happens on its own. They try to match the thermal expansion coefficients as well as possible, but you are talking steel and glass here and in fact in a Sony I think a couple parts are cast iron for whatever reason.