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family anecdotes

Bernie

It feels like ages since I blogged about Miss 4. She’s my little TV addict. Hubby used to worry about how much time she spent in front of the screen, but I assured him that it was less than he thought. She would just like to watch ABC2  (a kids’ TV channel) in the early evenings, so he would come home from work, see her in front of the idiot box, and assume that she’d been there all day. Which she hadn’t.
Plus, from what I remember of what I learned, way back when Miss 7 was a baby and I was going to a Mother’s group, the main concern with too much TV watching in kids was that they don’t develop their vocabulary as quickly as non-TV watching kids. Apparently it’s something like 6 words fewer that they learn, per every hour of TV. But that was never going to be a problem with her. She could talk the hind leg off a donkey before she was 2 and a half!
So she was always able to balance out her TV watching with talking, and drawing, coloring in, trying to write, and so on. And she, like her older sister, seems to be developing an amazing memory – for images, at least!
Just the other day, she asked me if she could watch a particular TV show. But she couldn’t really remember the name of it. So she drew the picture (below) then tried describing it, and what she remembered.

  • It is on ABC2
  • The main character (on the left) is ‘Bernie’
  • He is happy
  • His friend is angry a lot

I still couldn’t guess, so I delved further.

  • Bernie is on two shows, she only wants to watch one of them
  • In the show she’d seen, he was playing with a baby (this didn’t help very much!)
  • One of the shows he is in, is Sesame Street
  • She doesn’t want to watch Sesame Street, she wants to watch the other show.

And then the penny dropped. And I looked closer at her drawing and was very impressed… Miss 4 hadn’t watched the show in literally months, yet she had remembered the huge smile on her favourite character, the stripes on his shirt and his bigger, frizzy hair. She’d also remembered the unhappy look of the other character, his plain shirt and his shorter, sticky-up hair. And drawn them both really, very accurately, all things considered!
So… can you guess the show too?

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Random thoughts

So what are *you* watching?

I own the first 5 seasons of “House M.D.” on DVD. Being a “Becker” fan (yeh, okay, a while back now) I enjoyed the taciturn-doctor-who-actually-did-care-about-his-patient-in-spite-of-pretending-not-to character, and I really felt as though Hugh Laurie embodied this far more than he did the father in “Stuart Little”!!! But that being said, life got busy, the episodes started getting far too similar for my liking, the House -Cuddy relationship got too soapy, and so I lost track of it for a while. But I noticed that it was back on a couple of weeks ago, so thought I’d start watching it again. And then it finished! As in, for good!
Oh well, I guess all things need to come to an end. And when I think about it, I wasn’t the most impressed of people at the ending they chose. House “dying” in a building fire, and then spending the remainder of Wilson’s life riding around on Harleys (of course, with the stereotypical ‘ride into the sunset’), with no ability to then reclaim his life because he’d faked his own death… I found it all a little trite, to tell the truth.
Not so the ending of Season One of “Once Upon a Time”. Now *that* was an intriguing ending to a brilliant first season, and I’ll confess it now, I’m addicted. I was extremely impressed with the cleverness of the script, the cast choices (yes, I also liked that Jennifer Morrison was a main character; I had missed her after her exit from “House”) the locations, and the entwining of the fantasy world with the ‘real’ one. So much so, watching this on TV meant that when Hubby took me to the “Snow White and the Huntsman” I found it extremely disappointing. Even more so, that I’d spent money for the privilege of being disappointed! (Lucky I’d passed on the Julia Roberts version of the fairy tale, a few weeks earlier!) But yes, I really liked this first season, and am looking forward to the next. And if Hubby doesn’t take my “I want you to buy this for me for Christmas” hint, then, dear readers, feel free to oblige! LOL!

CC Image courtesy Koramchad at http://www.flickr.com/photos/alvarogan/115912693/

Categories
Random thoughts Technology

On Reality TV

If you’ve ever taken a quick peek at my Facebook profile information, you’ll see that I’m a fan of Survivor. I’ve been one since Season One, when the whole concept of ‘alliances’ was created by that guy who used to walk around the camp naked, just to annoy his fellow competitors. And he won, too – the first ever Reality TV millionaire, wasn’t he?

Anyway, I got my Mum hooked too. We used to discuss the different personalities, the different strategies, and how the variety of challenges and the pressures intrinsic to the game would mean that, even though they might not want to, the competitors would fail to truly mask the side of their personality that they would normally hide. We would debate the role of the TV producers, and their choices in what footage to show, and what to cut, and all-in-all have a very pleasant time of it.

I guess we weren’t the only ones who enjoyed the format, as Reality TV took off in a major way. And Mum and I followed – more regularly than I’d like to admit to myself now! I wasn’t into the ‘Big Brother’ side of things (although I liked the romance of ‘The Farmer wants a Wife’ and I sat through an episode or two of ‘The Bachelor’,) I was more into the ‘improvement’ ones, such as ‘The Block’, ‘The Renovators’, and ‘Top Design’ – and I guess ‘The Biggest Loser’ could also fall into that category, too… And I also tried taking up dance again after the second season of ‘So you think you can dance’. Then I realised that I was pregnant with Mr 3, so stopped. Plus I realised that I’d probably never be as good again as I was in my memories…

Now I have to point out that I was NOT a religious watcher of these. (Except perhaps The Renovators.) I laughed through some episodes of ‘The Apprentice’, ‘America’s Next Top Model’, ‘Wife Swap’ and ‘Super-Nanny’ whenever I happened to watch them, but never bothered with any of the kitchen / cooking ones (although I watched ‘My Restaurant Rules’ – the Brisbane girl was an ex-student) and I never watched ‘Dancing with the Stars’, ‘Australia’s Got Talent’, or ‘The X Factor’. That being said, I’m not sure about this ‘The Voice’ that’s being so heavily promoted on Channel 9. I like that it seems more ‘real’ than the media-image-heavy other talent shows. (Funny, now that I’m a marketer myself!) But still…

So anyway, Mum’s still an avid fan. She monopolised the 7pm timeslot for Biggest Loser a few weeks back, when she stayed with us while I taught for the week, and The Big Bang Theory had to be taped (which is what I do anyway, to watch it sans ads) but I feel as though I’m kinda over it now. As is everyone else, it seems. The shows are getting trashier and trashier -‘Please Marry my Boy’ – SERIOUSLY??!!! and I’m over that style of TV. I wonder what will be next? If I review my TV habits in a decade, what will I have watched? Interesting to ponder…

Have a lovely day, all!