These are some television shows, computer videos that provide ‘goofy’ entertainment
In this time of great inconvenience it is good to have a few simple pleasures.
For example, it may be petty, but I do enjoy it when the Los Angeles Rams lose a football game.
It also is fun to watch people falling into water, falling on snow and ice and felling trees on cars and houses. My computer, through some kind of Big Brother computer wizardry, knows I watch these kind of things and apparently has an endless supply of them to show me.
It is empowering to watch them in the sense that no matter how stupid you might feel in your life, at least you know you will never try some of the idiotic things you see in videos.
I don’t know what the things my computer suggests I watch say about my taste but it is disturbing that I keep getting a lot of ABBA video suggestions.
Of course there are many irritations, like the flood of advertising you get whenever you look at something on the Internet. It took months for an end to the advertisements for small refrigerators when I did some research about them. And still Mayfair occasionally sends me one. Computers never forget. That’s an ominous thought.
Other goofy sources of entertainment are the oddball channels that exist in the shadow of the major St. Louis over-the-air broadcast television stations. Each channel has several offshoots that show old situation comedies, movies and reality TV shows, ensuring that the sun never sets on M*A*S*H.
Storage Wars is a favorite of mine. People in Texas bid for the goods in abandoned storage lockers. They have to decide without going inside the locker but just looking for a few seconds from the doorway. The excitement is finding treasure worth quite a bit at resale or the disappointment of spending several hundred dollars for a bunch of junk that has to be thrown away.
I enjoy watching the dealers value their finds, blithely assuming they will get hundreds of dollars for tables, chairs and beds that don’t seem all that valuable to me. And of course someone always finds something odd and valuable that has to evaluated by an expert.
Where else but these channels could I watch people drive trucks over ice roads in the far north, drag logs out of a swamp or remodel houses at enormous expense?
Annoying commercials, reverse mortgages and more
Of course you have to put up with the irritating commercials. But at least after Monday the annual enrollment period for Medicare is over and I won’t have to listen to once famous quarterback Joe Namath tell me about how he called the hotline and got all the Medicare benefits he had coming. But Tom Selleck is still out there shilling for reverse mortgages.
And of course there are always online word games to play. I get a kick out of whimsical words in the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. There are favored entries that show up time and time again, like ELO fror Electric Light Orchestra and baseball’s Alou family. That horrid African dictator Idi Amin was in there the other day, crossed with Mr. Hyde, the evil side of Dr. Jekyll.
Thankfully it takes so little to keep me entertained because it looks like a long, isolated winter.