Philip's Tunnel to Nowhere 3

Being confined to hospital for a week isn’t great, but it does give you the chance to get out of some well-worn channels of your daily routine and into some other habits of greater or lesser value, such as reading novels or watching TV, respectively. I’m fortunate to have had some friends from church who brought reading material, and others who loaded up the church iPod with more than just sermons. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last week:

• The Price Is Right is an underappreciated cultural staple. Well, not exactly underappreciated, but… OK, what I mean is, I’d not bothered to watch it in the Drew Carey era despite considering myself a low-grade game show connoisseur. (Mind you, low-grade because I’m certainly not like most of the people commenting here). Now that I have spent a week waiting for 10:00 CT to arrive each day so I could watch the only remaining network daytime game show, I’m quite impressed by how they mixed so many of the naturally retro elements that have just aged well with other more consciously retro accents to celebrate the show’s place in TV lore. In the former bucket we have:
  • the dollar sign logo and “the price is right” logotype
  • virtually all the music and audio cues, from the iconic “losing horns” to the little ditties that play when prizes are shown off
  • minor elements of the set, such as the curtains in the back of the studio and the little flower design motif
  • many classic games, such as the Range Game whose analog mechanism looks like it hasn’t changed a bit.

  Meanwhile, I think I’d always been put off by what I glimpsed of the Carey-era changes, until it dawned on me this week that they’re consciously in homage to the hearty roots of the show in 60’s consumerism:

  • the changes to the set, particularly the box motif in light blue/dark blue (or whatever other color schemes)
  • that weird almost polygonal shape around the logo now

  There are a few other signs of the times — do the models’ longer dresses mean that we’re getting away from, “Sex sells,” finally? — but in general TPIR is still a lot of fun for those of us who grew up on daytime game shows in the 1980s.

• When you spend a lot of time watching the local TV news, the anchors showing up at their appointed times start to feel like family. “Oh, it’s the 5:00 pm news. There’s good ol’ Jim Jaggers doing the weather!” I get virtually none of my news from TV newscasts, so this time spent watching TV when I didn’t feel like getting news off the computer gave me some insight into the emotional bond that older generations seem to feel toward their TV news presenters.
• Life of Pi , Yann Martell’s fanciful 2002 novel about an Indian zookeeper’s son lost on the high Pacific, is the kind of book that makes me question why I don’t spend more time reading novels. I’ll have much more to say about this book. Its central theme of God expressing himself through story should be right in the sweet spot of most emergent/postmodern Christians’ discussion. (Wait, do pomoXtians ever actually discuss novels, or just talk about how important stories are? And no, of course A New Kind of Christian doesn’t count.)
• Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg , a 1990 first-hand account of his efforts to counteract malicious hacking into early computer networks, was interesting, too, in a different way. Quite dated of course but fun to read about for anyone who’s ever cared about this time in tech history.
• The Apple iPod user interface is hugely overrated, and even though I might consider purchasing an Apple device I’ll still be a proud curmudgeonly Luddite. My complains may show up as a post of their own, so I’ll just summarize it like this: When someone tosses you an audio player the day after your surgery, even not being an “Apple person” it shouldn’t take you more than ten seconds to figure out how to do anything besides play all the songs alphabetically starting at AC/DC.
• That said, two days later when I picked up the iPod I took to the UI a lot better. Obviously someone at my church has similar musical taste to mine, but in much greater depth, because I kept finding whole albums by artists that I just kinda-sorta-thought would be worth learning more about.
• By now I’m familiar with most of the songs from Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois but for the first time I listened to all 22 tracks pretty much in sequence. It really drove home why that guy is so highly thought of.