Without a TV you’re forced to gather most of your pop culture knowledge in the supermarket checkout line - which is fairly informative but not really thorough. It does a first-rate job of keeping you up to date on really vital stuff like Britney, Paris, Lindsay Lohan et al, and fairly good on popular TV shows.
But there are gaps. A year or so ago I was shopping for a package of crackers. There they were on the appropriate supermarket shelf - but what’s this? A prominent picture of some gal calling herself Rachel Ray. Who is she? What is she doing on my cracker package? Google helps provide the answers, but you have to deal with the initial shock on your own.
I have heard of it a a vague way but in an absent minded moment, I could easily ask the same thing. I have only heard of it through the SDMB and I am sure that my wife and young daughters don’t know anything about it at all.
We aren’t Amish or even have an anti-pop-culture agenda, we simply don’t watch much TV. My 5 year old daughter and I watch the Discovery channel after I pick the kids up at night. Sometimes we watch Spongebob Squarepants or Nickelodeon. My wife watches reruns of Law and Order occasionally. FIOS TV gives us a few hundred channels to choose from and we almost always select from documentaries, kid’s shows, or cartoons. I do like Mythbusters and that was the show for tonight.
I have never seen an episode of Lost or 24 or a myriad of other shows I have heard to be good. I have seen about five episodes of My Name is Earl over the years and I thought that was a good show. That is about it. I don’t understand how people have time to sit down and pay attention to a pop-culture show. We don’t at all. I just turn on entertaining or educational shows in the background as we complete the nightly routine.
I don’t have anything against people that watch a lot of pop-culture TV. I just don’t understand how that works.
I still have very little idea of what Rachel Ray does. Apparently she has some cooking show or something, and cookbooks. Something. As a duuude whose idea of cooking is pretty much baking Marie Callendar’s lasagna, I have almost no interest or information.
But some things are big enough they grow beyond themselves. They get mentioned on other television shows and in magazines and newspapers and on the radio and around the watercooler at work. I’ve never personally watched an episode of Baywatch or American Idol but I know that these shows exist and have a general idea of what they are.
A person might not know who Brian Epstein was or what the track listing on Revolver is and that’s okay. But somebody who doesn’t that the Beatles were a famous musical group from England that was real popular back in the sixties is too ignorant to be excused.
