Too much time on my hands

I’ve decided I have way too much time on my hands. Thanks to another one of those endless, little, irritating, indignities that mark the aging process, I recently found myself unable to do many of the simple pleasures that I have come to enjoy – like walking, sitting upright, bending or sleeping.

Coupled with the ongoing pandemic, this has left me free to watch a lot more television than I would normally do. It also has left me free to marvel at some of the idiocies of life in general.

Now, regular readers of my weekly missives will probably be aware that I am already of a somewhat disgruntled nature. As difficult as this to believe, I have actually been called a “malcontent” as well as a “grumpy old f—t.” I prefer to think of myself as a person of discriminating taste – a modern Don Quixote, if you will – bent on bursting the balloons of the pompous and pretentious.

To that end I offer a few observations garnered from the many hours I have recently spent in front of what is affectionately called the idiot box.

One of the things that struck me was that baseball managers and their many base coaches, as far as I know, are the only non-players in the world of sports who wear a complete uniform. Soccer managers wear, for the most part, a jacket and tie as do basketball coaches, hockey coaches and even lacrosse coaches. Why, for heavens sake, do baseball managers don a uniform from cap to cleats, complete with the baggie pants? It’s not as if they’ll take the field in a pinch. Most of them couldn’t run from the bench to home plate.

Who coined the term ‘Reality-tv’ and what kind of world do they live in? How is anything ‘real’ if it is scripted, edited and then televised? It strikes me that if you’re out in the wilderness, apparently waiting at any moment to be savaged by a grizzly bear, with nothing to defend yourself with but your bare hands – that’s reality. If you have a complete film crew, a director, a doctor, make-up artist and likely a well-armed hunter just off camera – that’s a bad movie.

While we’re at it, if The Real Wives of New Jersey, Beverly Hills, Miami, New York City and Atlanta are in fact ‘real’ then even without Trump the United States is doomed.

Have you ever noticed that weather forecasters from different channels never agree? It seems odd since most of them rely on Environment Canada for much of their ‘forecasting.’ Montreal weather people like to do a blanket forecast for the city and for the regions around it which means ‘The Townships’ gets a single forecast. I’ve got news for them. The weather can be, and usually is, a lot different in Franham than it is in Stanstead. Just climbing up the autoroute from Granby to Sherbrooke can mean the difference between a rain storm and snow.

One last reflection: How can television programmers justify their blanket use of reruns and still expect people to pay? We used to expect summer programming and a few reruns from June until September but today you can catch all-year marathons of House, Friends, Big Bang, CSI, NCIS and a host of others. Reruns of reruns. All of the actors have moved on. Heavens, some of them are probably like Monty Python’s parrot.

Oh well, things are looking up and opening up so it’s not all bad.