The quality of television programming available as workout accompaniment at our local gym ranges from trite and inane to offensive and enraging. (For which reason I have learned not to go at the 7 PM hour. I always get stuck at the Lou Dobbs treadmill.) Which is why I bring my iPod along and groove to Spoon or Pavement (shut up) or Otep or the podcast for This American Life or or, if I’m feeling particularly aggro, Lamb of God. But I am an attention deficit-disordered person, so even if I have awesome things to listen to, I will end up watching the TV too, or indeed all of the TVs, my eyes flitting between the screens (all the while guffawing at closed captioning borkings, because I’m nerdy like that).
So it was that today, at an earlier hour than that to which I am accustomed to working out, I was positioned between two monitors that had on some lameass shitsucking crossword puzzle-themed gameshow (really? a gameshow centering around crossword puzzles? Like gameshows aren’t already so inherently fucking1 stupid2?), and The 700 Club.
I gleaned from this experience two pieces of knowledge:
- I can never be a contestant on Merv Griffin’s Crosswords. That is because, if I were asked the question, “What does a lady who has been tied to railroad tracks need?” my answer, despite knowing the word had four letters and began with an h, would not be “hero.” Rather, it would be “Why, a knife! First, to cut the ropes. Second, to cut the motherfucker who’d tied her to the tracks.”
- On the 700 Club, when Pat Robertson is supposedly praying? It does not appear to me that he is praying. Rather, it seems he is straining to have a bowel movement. And/or is passing a kidney stone.
You’re welcome.
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1 Cross-word puzzle enthusiasts of the world, I do not mean to diss you. Being a word geek, I get the attraction even if it ain’t my thing - but to debase that concept with a game show? That, my dears, is the phenomenon for which I mean to express my contempt.
2 I would have elaborated here about the piece of crap garbage-chewing-and-regurgitating stupidity that is Deal or No Deal, which invades my home life with embarrassing regularity and against my wishes, but then it would have turned into a spiraling tangent about my eternal loathing for certain of my husband’s television watching habits, not least of which is My Big Redneck Wedding, and then I’d be all off-topic and shit.
Oh wait.
