The One Where My Inner Child Watches TV

Since Lost was a rerun this week, I ended up changing my TV watching routine. Unfortunately, I also apparently regressed to a twelve year old. (Hoping you all buy my attempt at saying I'm not normally this immature.)

First, I like a lot of the shows on VH1 now. Yes, I remember when it was a music channel. It was sort of the Adult Contemporary counterpart to MTV's Top 40. Now, it's transformed into what is essentially half a pop culture channel and half reality TV featuring celebrities. What really interests me are the pop culture shows: I Love the 80's (70's, 90's), Top 100 One Hit Wonders, Best Week Ever, Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever, and so on.

Tonight, I turned it on and found "I Love Toys." A countdown of the top 100 toys of all time (Magic 8-Ball, Sea Monkeys, Pong). It's basically just a bunch of clips of people talking about these toys. I was watching and pondering all my memories of these toys and wondering why I couldn't be on that show with the rest of these people. Then I realized, it's because they are funny or famous or both (or at least, they're supposed to be). If I can, maybe I'll go through their top 100 toys list and write some of my thoughts about them here. After all, it's my blog, and what are you going to do if you don't like it? Well, I suppose you could stop reading. Anyway, I don't know what all 100 of them are going to be, but if I don't see Optimus Prime before the end, something is wrong.

There was also a new episode of Mythbusters on tonight. They tested whether Ben Franklin could really have flown a kite in a thunderstorm, gotten it hit by lightning, had the charge move down the string to a key and to his hand. They decided that he could, but that it would have been fatal. I thought they jumped to that conclusion a bit too quickly considering all the trouble they had making it happen at all. More importantly and much more amusingly, Adam and Jamie tested some of the most popular flatulence myths. It was really amusing to hear them do the whole show without ever saying fart (it was censored the one time it was said--when Adam was saying they wouldn't say it). Instead, they only used the words flatulence and flatus. They tested whether lighting a match got rid of the smell of flatulence: It just creates another smell, but doesn't eliminate the gases causing the smell. How about whether certain foods increase flatulence? Beans do, carbonated drinks do, meat doesn't (at least in their testing). The big myth they tested was "Death by flatus". You've probably heard this one; I even think it was a Darwin Award winner a few years ago. A guy eats lots of beans and cabbage, then goes to sleep in very small, poorly ventilated room. His gas builds up throughout the night, eventually suffocating him. The final verdict on this myth? He would be more likely to kill himself through build-up of carbon dioxide from breathing than flatulence. He could build up enough gas to kill himself--if that was all he did for about three or four months. I always enjoy watching Mythbusters, but I particularly enjoyed this episode, and it made me wonder: Why aren't there more shows about the science of bodily functions? That's just good TV.

Until later...