Friday, April 06, 2007

The Price Is Right

Today was the confluence of several events: A cold and wintry day, my day off, and Katie's spring break. All of those events collided this morning, like the Titanic and it's iceberg, to cause us to watch The Price Is Right on TV.

I haven't seen The Price Is Right in 20 years, and I noticed a couple of things. First...Bob Barker is OLD. Ancient old. Museum mummy old. He looks like my grandma right before she died, and she was in her 90's. Is Bob Barker in his 90's? Shouldn't CBS have some type of pension plan for him by the time he's...oh...85? Aren't they going to be embarrassed when he drops over dead in the middle of his show?

Imagine how this would look for the network. "CBS released a statement on the death of Mr. Barker. 'Bob died doing what he loved'." Bad. It would look bad.

Would they have made Dan Rather report the news until he was 90 and died in his chair? Maybe he was lucky to have reported about Bush's Vietnam War dodge and gotten fired. Otherwise he might be in indentured servitude to CBS for another 30 or 40 years.

Bob Barker has that wispy white hair that anciently old people have, and a creepy orange tan-in-a-bottle that's probably supposed to make him look outdoorsy, in the way that pumpkins and carrots are outdoorsy. I suppose he seemed healthy, but ungodly old.

Secondly...there's a lot of hopping and screaming on that show. One woman shrieked and wept her way to a new car. Men tend to mostly hop as a form of Price Is Right self-expression, women mostly shriek and flap their hands. I decided that I'm not a good choice for The Price Is Right, since I hate both noise and excessive movement. It might ruin the ebullience if I had to shoot myself in the head.

Thirdly...I don't have any idea what things cost. None whatsoever. I realized that when I couldn't even get close to correctly guessing the price of a stove, a mop, a box of granola bars, or a Ford Mustang.

Clearly, I'm not a good choice for The Price Is Right. Between the head-shooting and the bad price-guessing, I've decided to skip it.

So that was helpful. In just one short hour, I was able to determine that appearing on The Price Is Right is not a good recreational option for me, which frees up more of my time for fishing, sitting around in the yard, and drinking beer.

Knowledge is power.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

See? It is strange how things collide - I watched "The Price" while waiting for Barry at the VA. It was about as surreal as you mentioned - except in addition to the orangish, loud, yelling, flapping and hopping people on TV, I was surrounded in real-life with grey-haired, blotchy-skinned, missing-body-parts, beaten-down middle-age to old-age people with baaadddd attitudes and guns and knives to back it up with. Scary shit - both on tv and off!