Crabgrass by Tauhid Bondia for April 23, 2023

Wise words, Miles.

Oh it does quote of the year people

I thought he wasn’t allowed to watch that sort of stuff.

Miles! What have you been doing?

Remember: “Crabgrass” is set in the 80’s, just before the Wild West of 500 channels began.

And whoever Perry Mason is talking with at XX:53 is probably the killer. Two minutes to explain motive, commercial break, and a minute of wrap-up/epilogue/final pun on name of episode.

Everything I’ve learned about life came from the backs of cereal boxes.

Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Rifleman, heck with just westerns alone they’ve seen hundreds of shootings and murders. (Excuse my language.)

If you ask me, we can learn a lot from the animation medium.

Early on I learned from bullies, that survival of the fittest meant destruction of the weak

Youse guys musta never watched soap operas. . .

Far too much “smooching and stuff” nowadays. Often strikes me as these kind of scenes are there for two reasons – 1. appeal to the voyeurs and 2. hoping no one will notice the lack of intelligent dialogue.

Does anyone have a clue what the TV is showing in the second panel?

Television, higher education, and management have been ruined by a surfeit of otherwise worthless English majors.

That’s right Kevin, nobody who acts like Bevvy, Barry or Erica would have the type of revelations they do in the second to final scene in the Goldberg’s. People who think that way are hard wired to a self centered victim mentality. 80 years later I expect a certain someone to yell “I don’t forgive you!” over an assumed offence as he has done many times a mutual acquaintance called him up over the last 40 years. I’m gonna yell back, “I never asked you to but Jesus would!”

It is the adult part of “and stuff” where the vast set of complications that television still cannot be bothered to explain reside.

As far as And Stuff, last night watching the first episode of a new series, I told my husband “if they start getting it on, I’m done”. I have no interest in watching another couples favorite position of the week,

It’s the “and stuff” that I like.

I first started to realize this watching the Partridge Family back in the day. The intro to the show had an animated bird, which I assumed was a partridge, walking around the opening graphics. Later I learned it wasn’t a partridge, but a quail. When I misidentified a quail as a partridge in the wild, I felt pretty dumb and everybody laughed at my reasoning. Hollywood smarts are definitely not.

cussing and kissing, the two ways conflicts are resolved

I read an interesting article about how TV can send kids in a bad direction. And not the ways you might think.

In most sitcoms, there’s a character who frequently says cutting but funny things to their friends, and that’s treated as normal and they are still part of the group of close friends. And some young people look at that and think that it is normal. And they emulate it by frequently insulting people in ways that they think are funny.

What the kids don’t realize is that character exists to make the TV audience laugh. In reality, people don’t like other people who regularly insult them. Keep in mind, the kids’ insults don’t come from a team of comedy writers. They aren’t really funny. But the kids don’t understand why they don’t have a big bunch of friends, like the people on TV do.