Saturday Morning

I don’t have time to fill in on everything that’s been going on, so I thought I would leave this with another great memory from my youth.  Saturday morning cartoons with a MONSTER bowl of cereal were a staple of my weekly life as a kid.  Here’s a taste of one of my favorite shows from “back in the day”.

TV From My Childhood

I got so excited that I actually found this, I had to post it.

It’s hard for me to believe that I actually remember this “Hour of Kid-Joy” that apparently was on for only six months. If anyone has an info on DVD’s I would love to get my hands on them.

They just don’t make shows like this anymore….

More Cool TV

I do watch my fair share of television.  Thankfully, my TIVO allows me to do it at my leisure.  Here’s a quick rundown of stuff I’ve been watching this summer.

1) Hell’s Kitchen-This is my favorite reality show this summer.  It combines my interest in cooking with the release of watching others get their ass chewed off.  Gordon Ramsey is my HERO.  He flat out says what most of us think when we are around incompetence.  To add to the weekly joy, I’ve found two more of his shows on BBC America.  Kitchen Nightmares, where the famous chef tries to straighten out restaurants that are in danger of going out of business,  and Ramsay’s Kitchen which is a videography of him starting his first restaurant in London.

2) Man vs Wild-Read all the internet chatter you want about how “fake” the show is…Bear Grylls is the real deal.  Any man that will squeeze the juice of an elephant dung into his mouth for my personal entertainment, gets my respect.  His survival techniques are solid and he does put himself in precarious situations on purpose to show what one would do to survive.  Did I mention he drinks his own pee?  I like how they turned the audio up on him gulping it down.  Now that’s great television.

3) The Closer-This is a great summer crime drama with great characters and interesting stories lightly seasoned with just enough humor.  The stories this season have been especially creative.  One episode featured two murders being solved while the entire team was being trained in HAZMAT suits.

4) Monk-An obsessive-compulsive detective plagued with a plethora of phobias makes for entertaining television.  This is another show with great characters and smartly written scripts.  My favorite episode this season has been the Snoop-Dogg guest appearance called Mr. Monk and the Rapper.  (Spoiler Alert-If you haven’t seen the show yet but plan to, don’t watch the linked video.) Snoop even remixed the show’s theme song for this one episode.

5) Traveler– I cannot for the life of me figure out why this show was not renewed.  It was only five or six episodes, but they were intense!  In a nutshell, this show was about three college buddies, one of which might be a domestic terrorist.  What two of the guys thought was a harmless prank, turned out to be a museum bombing.  The third buddy is the one who framed them.  Sorry for the lame description, but the show is gone anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.  It’s not like I can talk you into watching it now.

6)Shaq’s Big Challenge– Shaquille O’Neal, NBA basketball star, tries using his star power to whip some overweight and uncooperative kids into shape.  He hopes to use his success as a model for a nationwide plan to solve our obesity problem.  The best part of this show so far has been its complete failure.  The kids are cheating.  The attempts to change the school lunch have failed miserably.  They revamped the menu, but kids were throwing the food away.  The school he was working with kicked Shaq and his team out at one point.  Great stuff.

7) Rescue Me–  I can’t say much because I’ve only actually watched one episode. (It was great!)  However, I can’t wait to watch the rest on TIVO.

What have you been watching this summer?

Doctor Appointments

It’s hard for me to keep up with them all. My oldest daughter just got tubes put in her ears because she was having so many ear infections. They asked to do a follow up appointment after the surgery which we missed. Actually, my “reminder” ringer on the cell phone went off 15 minutes before the appointment was supposed to occur. The appointment was 30-40 minutes away. A colleague of mine has heard this ringer many times before major events at work. I usually set such reminders around 8 eight hours before such events, but I just didn’t this time. We had to reschedule the appointment for today. Tomorrow, my newborn daughter has her second appointment to make sure she still has ten fingers, I guess. Next week, my wife has a “post-delivery” appointment. I need to schedule my yearly physical which I have been putting off until I can get some of this summer weight off.

As you can see, we are very familiar with our doctors lately. Today, my oldest asked if she could take her new Cinderella doll to show her doctor. I’m sure this was the highlight of his day. She told all the nurses, and anyone else who would listen, about her new baby. It was cute, I hear. I stayed home with the newborn.

I am thankful that all these visits are just checkups. I know folks who have more visits than we do, and they’re not just checkups. It’s good to be healthy.

On a different note, I have been listening a lot to different webcasts. Some people refer to these as “pod”casts, but I refuse to give Apple naming rights to these wonders of the web. Most of the webcasts I’m familiar with are basically radio shows on the web. The cool thing about them to me is that you don’t have to tune in at a specific time to catch your favorite show. I just download WCs that I’m interested in and save them on my Zune for listening when I have nothing else to do. From time to time, I will update on what I have been listening to. Recently, I have been enjoying the Ramblecast with Jay and Jack. They are two guys in North Carolina who are mostly known for their Lost webcast about the TV Show. I listen to it too, but the Ramblecast is more fun to me. They talk about anything from movies to games and music to sports. Jack is actually Jay’s dad. In their last episode, they each picked their favorite ten TV theme songs of all time and played sections of each. Dawg won’t belive this, but THE WALTONS was not on either list. Shame. This one’s for you, dawg.

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What are your favorite TV theme songs of all time?