Concerning the candy I grew up with, the poverty others grow up with, the love story I told with one letter, and how watching TV doesn't have to come with shame.
Whether its called a time suck, a time killer, or a time waster, people are accused of occupying their time with pursuits that are determined by other "industrious" folk as wasteful.
When I was young my time "waster" was the television. But it was never called the television. It was the "boob tube", the "idiot box" or the "great hypnotizer". And I'll be the first to admit that I spent a whole bunch of time watching television as a child (and still do today), but I never felt it as a waste of time. There's something to be said for passively watching television, which in itself is not a bad thing. When you come home from a long day and need to unwind, there's sometimes nothing better than mindless television to allow a form of escapism.
I have also maintained, later in life, that watching television does not always amount to passive absorption. I believe one can pursue a somewhat active viewing of television that doesn't necessarily involve sitting down with a notepad and jotting down cryptic observations or witty rejoinders. The background one has with the medium allows for an certain internal criticism that is at once both cognitive and evaluative. The ability to establish pattern in one's mind to determine potential plot twists, effective use of camera or lighting and the overall conveyance of mise en scene or role is a skill that needs to be exercised by regular exercise. That's right, I said exercise. I'll not presume to assume that whenever someone watches television they're taking the "engagement" of the mind to heart... and they probably shouldn't.
I also remember that, for some reason, the task of reading, which is equally enjoyable, is somehow thought of as a more lofty pursuit than watching television. In fact, I always found it difficult to understand the continuum of what was considered a "waste of time" when consuming media. I'm not quite sure if it remained the same for all parents with their children, or if the general societal understanding matched the prevailing ranking, but it seemed to go like this:
The Time Wasting Media Consumption Continuum (from Worst to Not-so-Worst):
1) Television (or all of its aforementioned monikers)
2) Video Games (although often interchangeable with television)
3) Web (mostly condemned due to misunderstanding)
4) Reading Comics
5) Movies (though defensible due to the social aspect)
6) Reading Magazines
7) Listening to Radio or Music
8) Reading Novels or News
And I know there are neurological studies that show brain patterns flattening out while watching TV compared to reading, but doesn't that depend on who's brain? There's a common approach to literary criticism called, plainly enough, Reader Response Theory that basically weighs the impressions of the reader above and beyond that of the author's original intention. In other words, even if the author tried to present you with an allegory of the Russian Revolution, but to you it was just a violent story of pigs fighting on some sort of Animal Farm, why should your impression hold any less authority than that of the author. In other words, whatever experience I bring to the experience of consuming media, helps to define the work.
The approach doesn't work any less with television or web content. What you bring to the experience helps to define the it. And it can be a learning experience. Every bad television episode or web page you experience provides a semblance of context around which all others will be judged. File this knowledge to provide context and you've just found a way to give purpose to the time wasting. Be an active consumer of media and you'll always have an excuse whenever someone tells you to "stop wasting time". Of course it's still hard to defend playing Bejeweled on Facebook at work, or defending any "unproductive" activity at work for that matter... but at least you can adopt an educated aire while doing so.
(In no specific order - thanks to Topher's Cereal Character Guide for pics and info)
The Lucky Charms Leprechaun
Not because he looked any freakier than any other leprechaun, but more the pervy way he was after MY Lucky Charms all the time.
Frankenberry
Okay, all the Monster Cereals by General Mills were infinitely cool and hold a nostalgic place in my memory. I even set up a Facebook page in their honor. And while they were all creepy, Frankenberry was the most freaky. Frankenstein's monster had nothing on the pink, doughy-looking, metamorphosis that was Frankenberry.
Sir Grapefellow and Baron Von Redberry
Let's celebrate WWI flying aces with crazy fruit cereal. If I don't like the cereal, will they be strafing my front lawn?
Crazy Cow
This bi-polar buck-toothed freakshow would turn your milk chocolate or strawberry depending on which side it/they were facing - Sybil anyone?
Colonel Corn Burst and Hattie the Alligator
What demented mind put this pair together? You've got a crudely-drawn alligator that's about to turn its head and swallow a microscopic adventurer. Either of these characters would be freaky enough in their own right. Together they're a total "corny" burst.
Cheeri O'Leary and Joe Idea
A demented beauty pageant tart and a boy who looks like he's got a John Merrick thing going on... yeah, that'll sell me Cheerios!
Mr. Wonderfull
From Mr. Wonderfull's Surprize Cereal, not only did he preach the doctrine of incorrect spelling, but here's a perv that needs be put into a registry before he moves into your neighborhood.
Magic Hat
Cool beer. Psychotropic-induced cereal character. Don't take the brown acid folks.
via youtube.com
A wicked retro trip back to Saturday morning in the 70s. The Krofft Supershow had a host of cheesy parts that made up the epic entertainment experience, but perhaps the cheesiest was Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. And as the post title indicates, in this clip they follow the Sorcerer who's bent on traveling through time to steal the Mona Lisa from Leonardo Da Vinci.
Start digging on the wrist communicators - you KNOW you want one!
via youtube.com
I grew up with this demented, surrealistic freakshow called The Uncle Bobby Show every day as a kid. I don't think it ever extended outside of Canada. You know that creepy, perv uncle in everyone's family... this is him.
If you want to subject yourself to a WTF? moment or two as you watch the daily Birthday celebration from a host I'm sure was polluted beyond belief and a guest "Birthday Picker" who looks like she rolled out of his dressing room two minutes earlier, you gotta check this out.
Bimbo the clown looks like a hobo on a ripple bender and the crazy marionettes that fall from the ceiling are the icing on the demented cake - enjoy!
via youtube.com
Okay, if you weren't from Canada (and specifically Ontario) you may have never seen the Polka Dot Door while growing up. And, if you never saw the Polka Dot Door, you never saw Polkaroo. Polkaroo was one of the best legal trips one could have as a kid. Always a bit surreal and bit insane, the Polkaroo could express a million thoughts with any number of well-placed instances of the ubiquitous "Polkaroo".
Take the three minute trip of this video clip, or, to translate: "Polkaroo? Polkaroo!"
via youtube.com
Many Canadians are all too familiar with this classic cartoon from the National Film Board, but for the benefit of the unitiated, I submit for your perusal, The Cat Came Back. If you just can't quite appreciate the storyline, you'll probably find the music quite infectious. It's sometimes years between seeing this short for me and I usually smile a nostalgic smile every time. Hope you enjoy it.
I know some of these clips will seems ridiculous to anyone who did grow up with them, but these are the video games of my childhood. Not to say I didn't drop ton of quarters into arcade machines every week, but a video game at home was the holy grail. And I guess for some it still is.
Never let it be said that the iPod touch cannot be used for a long form blog post. I said in a recent podcast that I never thought I'd be podcasting about hockey, but I'm Canadian, and after some 70 or so podcasts and a couple hundred blog entries, I think I'm entitled come playoff season. As I sit in a Montana's in Mississauga (restaurant chain for the uninitiated) I am watching the NHL playoffs on multiple TVs and recalling a few memorable times that hockey has influenced my life.
The only time I ever felt like a sports hero was at age seven when I scored an overtime goal on a breakaway and, for the first time in my life, intentionally lifted the puck off the ice for the winner. And while I enjoyed many other moments playing hockey, that moment ranked right up there.
A couple of decades later I had bit more of a surreal hockey moment when I spent the one semester if my post-secondary life in a university residence during Teachers' College. Sitting in our floor's TV lounge/common area, a group of us foul- mouthed Canadians in a US Teacher Ed. program (all guys in the room at the time mind you - and at a university that still bore the vestiges of a Franciscan monestary... save your Catholic jokes for later) learned that Mario Lemieux had been stricken with cancer in the prime of his career. In the five months I spent in that dorm, I never heard the place so quiet... eerily so. You wouldn't think that a collection of some of the most misogynist mouths I'd ever heard could be stunned into silence at the news of a hockey player's illness. No one spoke for several minutes, or at least until the next gratuitous sex-filled beer commercial anyway.
The last hockey memory comes in the form of a trip to Las Vegas. The moment itself was hardly earth-shattering, but did suffice in conveying a vast gulf between two culture. On the one occasion I've been to Vegas in October, I happened to be sitting in the MGM Sportsbook in front of a sea of television screens (a place I often refer to as Valhalla). That night was a major playoff game between the Red Sox and the Yankees and the room was full of fans in official MLB attire hootin' and hollerin' as their teams played what I'm sure was an amazing. My friend and I, however, sat at the far end of the room watching two small screen that were playing NHL games. It was the opening night of the regular season. The games were insignificant. I think Minnesota and the Ducks may have been involved. And we were in our glory.
There was a popular beer campaign a few years back that rifled off a dozen reasons to claim "I AM Canadian". And while I would never claim that Canadians have a sole claim on the game that I was raised with, I never watched one of those commercials without thinking, how many people could explain the following: Peter Puck, putting the biscuit in the basket, straddling the blue line, going roof, Savardian Spinnerama, neutral zone trap, or why 92 goals or 215 points in a season are feats of biblical proportions.
