Tag Archives: programs

Boundary-Setting and Avoiding Spoilers

a 1970s style portable televisionHave you ever tried staying off your devices and social media to avoid spoilers about a show or an event that you haven’t watched yet? I surprised myself recently in discovering just exactly how difficult that can be.

I wouldn’t consider myself addicted to social media, my phone or my iPad by any stretch of the imagination. I can definitely go a few hours without looking at any of them and not feel the slightest sense of missing out. I do it all the time when I am deeply in the creative zone.

In the years that I have been writing, interruptions have been my kryptonite that have been known to break my flow. That being the case, with so many writing projects in the queue, why would I get in my own way and check my phone between paragraphs? Why would I subject myself to the negative energy of articles that the algorithms have mistakenly assumed that I want to look at? If those aren’t a buzzkill for creativity, I don’t know what is.

This past weekend was the grand finale of the Eurovision Song Contest, an event that I have followed for almost 20 years. Throughout that span of time, I don’t recall its schedule conflicting with North America’s Mother’s Day weekend, but this year it did. Continue reading

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Filed under Humour, music, pop culture, stories, TV

Where Have All the TV Theme Songs Gone?

This season, the American television network “The CW” launched a reboot of the favourite 1980’s prime time soap “Dynasty”. In watching the very first episode, I was delighted to see several nods to its original series, including having kept its great orchestral theme song. The only thing was that it was a much shorter version of it.

Similarly, Netflix has recently rebooted “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Again, a really unique theme song, but chopped down to just a few bars of its original.

Have you noticed how the opening themes for many American TV shows have gotten shorter and shorter over the years? Now, some shows don’t even have them at all.

If I mentioned the names of program like “All in the Family“, “Golden Girls”, “Three’s Company”, “The Brady Bunch” or “Gilligan’s Island”, even if you weren’t a huge fan, I’m sure many of you would be able to recite a few words if not the whole theme song.

These theme songs became deeply entrenched in our pop culture, and some have become synonymous with the decades when the shows originally aired. In doing so, they also became entrenched in our hearts and minds.

As young kids, we couldn’t play “Batman” without singing few rounds of the famous theme from the 1960s. Continue reading

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Daytime Horror Stories

RemoteYou wake up one morning and you really do not feel well. You put on your robe, you call in sick, you take your meds, and you make a warm drink. You grab your pillow and favourite blankie and you make your way to the couch for a mellow day of just looking after yourself. The mission of the day: feeling better!

You grab the remote and start surfing the channels. You stop. You prop yourself up. You lean forward to look more closely at the screen. You start breaking out in a cold sweat. You get the shakes. You grip your pillow tightly and then…. “AAAAAAAAAAAHHH” You break out into an ear-piercing scream…

The cause: the horrors of daytime television! Is there anything less conducive to feeling better than a whole day of watching daytime TV?

The last time I spent the day on the couch, fortunately I was sick enough to sleep most of the day. In between my naps, however, the daytime talk shows offered an endless parade of stories about being at death’s doorstep like: “the hidden dangers of leftovers in your refrigerator”, “the bacteria lurking in reusable grocery bags”, “when was the last time you bleached your kitchen sink?” and “when was the last time you checked your smoke detectors” Just what I wanted to hear, on a day I was trapped in the house!

Even if at that point, I felt the slightest hint of “get up and go”, there seemed to be no shortage of stories there to act as a deterrent from me from ever leaving the house: “distracted drivers are 23 times more likely to crash”, “the bacteria and germs lurking on the grocery cart”, “what you might not know about public restrooms”. If these aren’t enough to make one want to stay in bed, I don’t know what will. Continue reading

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Filed under Humour, pop culture, stories