I am still recovering from the 8-hour-long Blitzer-krieg pundit attack that was Tuesday night. It was like an awesome television-drama crossover episode (the classic Magnum P.I./Murder She Wrote two-parter springs to mind)—all my pundit friends were there AT ONE TIME. Jones and Castellanos and Gergen and Crowley! Carville and Martin and some blonde lady I'm pretty sure was Republican! (Gloria Borger could be Jessica Fletcher. Van Jones could be Magnum. David Gergen would obviously be Higgins. I was going to make a crack about how Ari Fleischer could be the person whose murder they'd be solving, but then I decided that was unnecessarily nasty).And I reaffirmed my sense of the places in America I would not like to live and the people I would not like to live with. I would not like to live with these people (because they're racists) or this person (because he's sexist—he seems to have now made this post private, so I was forced to track down a weird copied-and-then-pasted version). Although I have to thank the sexist Christian man, who credited the "slut vote" for Obama's win, because the only thing liberal sluts have been able to do in large groups together that doesn't involve crazy open-minded sex using birth control is walking, and now they have another option. You know that if this guy had published his reasoned argument about slutty lady voters a week ago, there would have been organized "slut votes," and left-wing women would have gotten all dressed up in their actual, everyday super-slut clothes and gone to the polls together. Maybe they'll still do that four years from now, but it's all too possible someone will call them sluts for doing something completely different, and then they'll start doing that together and forget all about voting in a big old harlot bloc. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you're not entertained, fair enough.
I have always known that if I were to become addicted to any substance, it would be one with sedating, rather than stimulating, properties. I am sufficiently nervy already, thank you very much, without taking something that would make me peppier and full of a burning need to conquer the world of 90s advertising.
I am also, however, tediously law-abiding, and so will never be in a position to lay my hands on whatever my dental surgeon gave me when I got my wisdom teeth out.
So what I needed was to find something non-pharmaceutical that would recreate that post-de-toothing bliss, that calm, carefree, unbothered serenity.
In the end, I found two things: Murder She Wrote and Matlock.
It started innocently enough. Murder She Wrote aired on A&E every few hours when I was younger, before that network was taken over by shows about what Jessica Fletcher would be like if she never went out and spent her time arranging her belongings into teetering, dangerous piles and alienating her family. One day, I caught just the last few moments of it - what I call the "Fletcher freeze-frame." At the end of every show, the camera focuses and then freezes on Angela Lansbury's face while she does something like laugh indulgently, shake her head regretfully, or look generally smug. It was so outrageously awful, I had to watch a whole show. In each and every show, children are innocent and sometimes poor and in need of a free bicycle, an easily-identifiable and generally straightforwardly-Biblical motive leads to murder, and some stupid, stupid person thinks an elderly retired schoolteacher probably doesn't have what it takes to solve a crime.
Before long, I was watching it all the time.
During grad school, when I was in a vulnerable and susceptible state, some station in Kingston started running Matlock at two in the morning. Did I have room in my heart for another folksy old person who brought order to the chaotic modern
world by solving many murders that somehow often involved Patrick Swayze's slightly less successful brother Don? It appeared I did, because before long I was watching as much Matlock as I could get.
It never ceases to amaze me that it was Murder She Wrote and Magnum P.I. that had the cross-over episodes, and that Jessica and Ben never shook their heads complacently at one another and then brought someone unscrupulous (inevitably played by a guy who also guest-starred on the Love Boat, or Don Swayze) to justice.
When I watch either show, my heart-rate slows and I feel like I am being hugged by a loving grandparent who compulsively brings criminals to justice. I used to tell myself that I watched these programs ironically and so made a point of chortling knowingly to myself during each episode. But how many times can you watch Andy Griffith play his ukulele or trick someone out of money to buy himself a hotdog before your cold, unforgiving post-modern heart is conquered by a warm, forgiving, pre-modern kind of love?
So I am profoundly grateful for Angela Lansbury and Andy Griffith, even if they have inspired unrealistic expectations about how when I'm older, I'll be really successful and happy while all around me, people drop dead.
Also, I've been planning to write about these shows for days and days, but the post ended up being unexpectedly, and regrettably, timely.
 Andy Griffith June 1, 1926 – July 3, 2012
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
I owe AMI-tv an apology.AMI, which stands for "Accessible Media Inc.", is a television station that broadcasts all programs with open described video and closed captioning. I have passed a number of hours with the station because for a few, brief, fulfilling weeks it showed Magnum P.I. reruns on Friday afternoons, and it continues to air Perry Mason on weekends (Raymond Burr calms me). At first I was startled when I discovered that these shows were "open described" and that "open described" meant that a sonorous voice explained what was happening while it was happening ("Magnum smiles cheekily at the scantily-clad waterskier'), but now I've gotten used to it.The only problem is that now and again, the sonorous voice says things I'm pretty sure are wrong. It describes a character as "downcasting his or her gaze", and/or as averting someone else's gaze. I've been known to make mistakes about such things (I know this because my father has the right to make grammarian's arrests as a result of the authority vested in him by the Oxford English Dictionary), but I searched the internet, and the only people using "downcast" as a verb appear to be those writing Sonic the Hedgehog fan fiction (not kidding) and unsolicited sequels to Pride and Prejudice (also not kidding).I have been cultivating described-video-related indignation for a while now (and withheld-described-video-related indignation, in that AMI has now replaced Magnum with one of those Law and Order spin-offs that doesn't star Richard Belzer), but, as is so often the case, I've come across something that makes the downcasting of gazes seem downright adorable.Dancing on Ice, a British reality television show that presumably features both of those things, has recently come under fire for close-captioning the dancing and the ice in such a manner as to confuse, insult, and concern deaf viewers.The National Deaf Children's Society has called ITV (the network involved) out for providing such captions as:- "Across the ice and the Samaritans and speedo you."
- "Right is affecting their partnership. Pulled your ball up."
- "The jump just walk straight in the fridge."
- "...dolomite go horribly one when you got your Blades Court..."
The BBC, unfortunately, is not in a position to feel smug, as it has, in its close-captioning past: a) referred to the Labour leader as the "Ed Miller Band", b) called the head of the Church of England the "arch bitch" of Canturbury, and c) indicated during a report on pigs that the pigs "like to nibble anything that comes into the shed, like our willies."So maybe I shouldn't feel so aggrieved when the smooth-voiced AMI man averts my gaze; at least he's not telling me to pull my ball up. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
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