Kipper

I end up watching children's programs on Netflix sometimes with my four year old. In general, they all entertain and educate at the same time. Kids these days know all sorts of things just from watching TV. I guess that's good. But when The Cat in the Hat changes from troublemaker (as he is in the book) to educator ("The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That"), it seems wrong somehow. And then there's Dora the Egomaniac who always wins at everything. And then there's the Dinosaur Train, which is okay until you've see it, "four billion trillion killion times," as Little Z says.

And then there's Kipper. That's Kipper the Dog.

I love Kipper.

Kipper is a British dog with a great outlook on life. Kipper doesn't try to be very educational at all. There's one where Kipper is even visited by aliens. That's my favorite.

Little Z used to like Kipper so much that she would pee on the couch whenever she watched it. She was basically potty trained, but Kipper was so exciting!

We've been on a long Kipper vacation, but tonight she's watching it again. In this one, Kipper's friend Jake has an imaginary friend named Wilbur. Kipper, in usual good sport fashion, pretends to see the friend. What a great guy. Of course, there is a twist in the end, but I won't give it away.

A Pleasant Waste of Time

I've been wasting my time watching Billy the Exterminator on Netflix instant. I'm with Neil Postman when he says that the best TV is really trash TV. This show is so freakin' awesome! Here are my top ten reasons I love this show:

10. The goth fashion. Billy wears spikes on his shoulders even! It was really funny when the church people tried to hug him.

9. Billy has the greatest attitude. It's all about helping people.

8. Billy's brother Ricky goes on a lot of jobs with him, and whenever they go to exterminate wasps, their mom says, "You better be careful because you got Ricky with you and you know he's allergic and if he gets bit I'm gonna have to kill him I'll be so mad." Every time! Every time!

7. The way they exterminate crocodiles is like this: one guy (Billy) wrestles the alligator to the ground and pins him while the other guy waits with some duct tape and tapes its mouth shut.

6. Billy always says, completely seriously, "We put safety first here at Vexcon!" (After he gets rid of the wasps with his allergic brother, wrestles an alligator, and puts a viper in a tub to release it into the wild later.)

5. They save everything and release it into the wild on someone's 100 acre estate. Everything: alligators, rattlesnakes, raccoons... everything except for the wasps.

4. This show makes me really happy to live in Wisconsin and not Louisiana, where it takes place.

3. Always when they are at the most dangerous point possible, some kid runs out of the house to see how it's going and almost gets killed.

2. Dude, if you counted how many times Billy says dude in an episode, it's like, dude, 300 times or something. Dude.

1. Billy is super nice to bats.

Glasses Dark As These

I propose a new TV series based entirely on the songs of Johnny Cash. It might be a bit violent- should be late night. Each episode would follow the life of someone- the outline established in an old Johnny Cash song. The theme would be that of redemption, of course. It could be called, "Glasses Dark as These" from the quote, "It's so hard to see the rainbow through glasses dark as these."

Possible episodes (there are more, I'm sure):

One Day Too Late

No Picking Cotton

Oly Gets His

Tennessee Stud

One Man Who Tried (Climbing the Wall)

Mamma Waits Up

Johnny Take His Gun To Town

Ira

"My Name Is Sue. How Do you Do?"




I'm sure that one of you is secretly a television producer, right?

Ay! 8 hours?

I heard recently that we Americans watch, on average, eight hours of television per day. On average? Eight hours? How is this possible?

We sleep 8 hours, work 8 hours, and watch TV 8 hours? I'm dumbfounded. I just cannot imagine doing that without going into seizures.

Don't get me wrong. I did go through a phase of my life when I was a couch potato (the first twenty years). A friend of mine and I even changed the words to the old Beach Boys song, "Wouldn't it be Nice" from,

"Wouldn't it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn't have to wait so long"

to

"Wouldn't it be nice if we were crippled
and we didn't have to go outside"

But, even then, I couldn't have averaged more than four hours a day. I would make resolutions to, say, watch all of the "Star Wars" trilogy or the entire "Dukes of Hazzard" marathon, but I never followed through. It was just impossible. I think the most television I ever watched was my last vacation to California, at the ol' family home, where I discovered there is now an entire channel devoted to real estate deals. Real estate! Can you believe it? Fascinating. I couldn't walk away. Someone finally convinced me I needed to sleep. It was like it just hypnotized me.

That must be it. Everyone is just hypnotized. Beware!

I've been reading this horror novel, Drood, that deals a lot with hypnotism, except he describes it as, "magnetism," as though the magnetic field in your body had something to do with it... and then there's Nikken, but that's another story.



(Afterthought: it just wouldn't be complete without TV.)