What's On TV?

Cable TV is awesome...overly priced but awesome. She has a TV in almost every room of the house, and usually at least three of them have different channels playing at one time. She calls this ADD, but she hears an echo in the back of her mind, "Add the 'H.'" "H" for hyperactive. Maybe she is, maybe she isn't, but she does know that cable TV was invented for her.

The channel lineup is approximately 90 channels, four local networks, the remainder everything from 24-hour science fiction and psychics and aliens from other planets to the top ten hotels in the world to a geography lesson on the Middle East. Everything from Baby Boomer favorites on TV Land, like "I Love Lucy" and "Mayberry RFD" to constant streaming music videos and world weather reports. She had the choice last night, of crawling into The King and tuning into a debate on one of about five world news stations she receives for paying her bill of sixty bucks a month, watching an overdone cop show where the suspects always spill the beans without benefit of an attorney, even when there is no evidence against them, or "Family Guy," a sort of out-of-the-mainstream animated show where the characters are so believable that you forget you're watching cartoons, right down to the talking dog, Brian, who lives within the family unit as a slightly odd-looking human member, complete with a vocabulary that Webster would envy, and a truly frightening looking infant child in diapers whose vocabulary Brian envies.

"Family Guy" won out, really without much contest at all, and she settled in for a couple of laughs, which she definitely got, and maybe in a bizarre way, a little nudging lesson in life.

Stuey ran away from home with the express purpose of finding the BBC studios where his favorite show, a Snow White-like production with a colorful green hill and plush grass and loveable characters, was filmed, thinking in his childish mind that the setting for the show was absolutely real.

Brian ran after him, of course, to save him, and they both found themselves landing in the Middle East instead of Great Britain. From a vendor there, they stole a camel and rode into the middle of the desert. Keep in mind they could not buy a camel because Brian only had fifty dollars in cash on him and Stuey, well, Stuey wears a diaper and nothing else.

The two quickly became lost in the desert, the camel died, it was getting late and cold out there. After a conversation regarding the necessity of staying warm, Brian convinced the baby that he had to cut the camel open while it was still warm and crawl inside, to provide shelter from the freezing desert that night.

The slaughter was gruesome, and baby Stuey held his breath and crawled in, promptly shouting out, "Oh, I've puked in his lung!"

Standing outside the camel, Brian looked up and said, with no ceremony at all, "Oh, a Comfort Inn." About 50 yards away was a luxury hotel, teeming with life, in the middle of the barren desert.

The life lesson? Do not, under any circumstances, crawl inside an eviscerated camel for shelter in the desert until you have done a 360-degree survey of your surroundings.

Oh, and Stuey found the BBC studios and was crushed to learn that the people were only regular folks with pissed off attitudes playing parts they hated and the plush green hill was made of painted cardboard. He learned the grass really is not greener on the other side.

Laughs and lessons. She thinks she might have done better in school if "Family Guy" was the teaching film strip.