ometimes you just
need to totally escape from life, if only for an hour.
Last night, my wife and I watched a total of four episodes of "General
Hospital". The frightening thing about this is that I'm not even ashamed
to admit it. We didn't actually sit and stare at the TV for four hours
straight; we skipped the most boring storylines (and of course the commercials)
so it took only an hour and a half total. It was enough to convince me
that the show really is asinine. There are plots about a girl getting blackmailed
because she ran off from a party to a hotel room with a guy, who ended
up dead with a hypodermic needle in his hand and who turned out to be an
undercover cop (got all that?). There is a kid who has been brainwashed
by this evil old woman, who also seems to be able to make some other guy
hallucinate about a former love. It's the most unbelievable, poorly scripted
thing I've ever seen on TV.
We watched it again at lunchtime today.
But wait! This was not the highlight of my TV viewing for the evening.
I was flipping through the channels and came across something called Noggin,
which shows semi-educational kids' shows. They were showing what
had to have been the very first episode of "Sesame Street", because they
spent the whole hour introducing all the characters. It was bizarre
-- Gordon had an afro, Oscar the Grouch was bright orange, and Big Bird
had this tiny head. Frighteninly, though, I still remember half the
clips from it. I wasn't around when the episode aired in 1968 or
'69, but they recycled a lot of the pieces, like the dots that marched
onto the screen in various states of disarray (which, even at age of 27,
I still find hilarious), and the guy that sings "Three -- birthday
-- cakes!" and proceeds to fall down the stairs.
The scary thing is, these shows were airing at 10 pm -- in other words,
their target audience was adults like me. Well, I guess whether or
not I'm an adult is probably still up for debate after this entry.
