Mrs. Homie watches the. dumbest. shit. on TV. Yesterday she binged-watched six hours of two guys not finding buried pirate treasure on Oak Island (because, guess what, there is no buried pirate treasure on Oak Island). She’ll watch sick or abused people being exploited for the sake of recreationally being appalled at how they live - people who weigh hundreds of pounds, young women growing up in polygamous cults (whose stories are, I’m sure, exaggerated if not wholly made up), people with hoarding disorders, etc. She’ll watch “scientists” and “historians” speculate about Ley Lines and aliens and the Knights Templar and all of that bullshit. She doesn’t believe any of it (although she’s quick to point out that she doesn’t not believe it either), but she watches it.
I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. She’s a discerning, college-educated woman. I’m not saying she should subsist on an appetite of Masterpiece Theater. And I myself am not above going lowbrow, to a degree (seriously, how highbrow is Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage, anyway?), but I draw a line at shows that deliberately expect their audience to not realize they’re being played.
My wife also puts it on TV, but doesn’t watch it, and does it for background noise. I don’t get it. I’d rather have my “background noise” be something not so awful, but whatever.
My wife will watch reruns of the same shows over and over and over again. I think she has seen every episode of Bones and NCIS and Castle probably half a dozen times or more.
And yet when she sees me reading a book that I read a few years before, she’ll ask “Why are you reading that again?”
Amusing (to me) tangent: We were in White Center (it’s between Kent and West Seattle), and its old nickname of Rat City came up. We asked at Rat City Bikes and they said there are conflicting stories, one being that the stevadores back in the 1800s were called “Harbor Rats”.
Well, lo and behold, my kid found me a RAT CITY t-shirt in a thrift store there, and asked the clerk, a White Center native, about the nickname.
She looked pained and whispered “It’s the rats. Lots of 'em.”
I had heard that it was because of a “Relocation and Training Center” there in WW2. This site repeats that story.
White Center is a census-designated place (CDP) in King County, Washington, United States. It lies between West Seattle and Burien. White Center is sometimes referred to by the nickname “Rat City” due to the historical presence of a military Relocation and Training Center during World War II. The Rat City Rollergirls are a Seattle roller derby team that began training in White Center.
I also heard it stood for “Reserve Army Training Center”, or “Recruitment and Training Center”. Something related to the military during the war. It’s plausible, because the whole Puget Sound area exploded during WW2, as it was used for a lot of war preparations for the Pacific Theater.
My own hometown of Bremerton was formed the way it was because of growth during WW2, and the whole reason I’m from there is because my dad was in the Navy and was stationed nearby, and the Navy has a huge presence there still. My dad was a submariner and worked out of what was then-called Naval Submarine Base Bangor. Bangor was founded in 1942 as part of supporting the war fleet. Bangor was merged with Naval Station Bremerton to form Naval Base Kitsap about 20 years ago. (Naval Station Bremerton was formed in 1946 as a place to keep ships following the war.) Naval Base Kitsap is the third largest installation that the US Navy has.
Bottom line, it seems plausible for it to be related to the military, as a lot of things in this area are.
Mrs. H does this too. I think she’s seen The Facts of Life beginning to end at least twice. Ditto Friends, Star Trek:TNG, and who knows what else. A few days ago she saw an episode of Little House on the Prairie that she had no memory of ever seeing; she was aghast.
The Furniture Guys!!! Dad was already very into furniture salvaging and restoration, but he loved seeing what they could do. On the other hand, Hometime convinced me that good sponge painting skills would be much more critical to my home decor than they have been so far.
As far as repeat TV watching, Mom is currently in her 6th? 7th? rewatching of the entire run of I Love Lucy ever since Paramount made all the episodes available.
I’ve seen the whole series at least twice, Seinfeld probably three times, and the Fawlty Towers episodes are on my tablet permanently in their own folder. I’ve watched it so often that the scripts are permanently etched into my memory.
Heck, I’ve run across a trove of Room 222 episodes on YouTube. I saw them in first-run, back in the day, I watched them in reruns subsequently, and now I’m watching them again, some fifty years or so later.
Recently, I’ve also watched The Facts of Life, Lou Grant, Here’s Lucy, Happy Days, and The Love Boat.
ICE followed a landscaping truck in my neighborhood yesterday and grabbed the guy when he got out of his truck. I’m pretty certain they just targeted and followed any old landscaping truck, figuring they’d hit paydirt.
But today, I have a Latino fellow doing fence and yard work, with a very big landscaping truck parked out in front, and I’m afraid he’s going to get nabbed. Just one block over (only 5 doors away) there’s a bunch of home construction going on with lots of “suspicious” vehicles which could attract attention. I’ve got my ICE whistle on and am ready to use it, for whatever good it’ll do. I love my fence guys, they’re super kind and have done bonus work for me for free. When they built one new fence, they replaced a post in concrete in another fence which was falling down without telling me and surprised me with it at the end of the day. They’re much better than the local guys and will do small jobs right away for me. Last week they came out and fixed my 80-year-old garage door which had just fallen off. ICE is supposed to be grabbing people with criminal histories, not average Joes.
I live in a very blue city and ICE has been gearing up here.
The internet knows I am in Canada and that my language is set to English. So if I dare to search for a phrase in another language, especially an obscure one, it just corrects me to something a Canadian anglophone might have mis-typed, even in so-called verbatim mode.
It is impractical to change the language settings every time I search, but the main thing that bothers me is I remember when this wasn’t an issue.
This is maybe my whole issue with AI: the presumption is that the algorithm is going to know my wants better than I can articulate them myself. This is true sometimes, but not all the time. Grr.
I’ve been listening to a new Sirius channel, and they play that Shit-Ass Vampire Weekend Crap. Goddamn I hate this band and the annoying shit they come up with. All the same. Annoying and trite. Just fucking Go Away!
