A sickie, tea and bikkies and time with the tele

LAST week I took a sickie.
I spent the day glued to what I call the “Open University of Popular Culture”: Channel Ten.
In the morning I saw ads for six different contraptions that give you eight pumped abs in five different ways. Endorsed by three minor celebrities, payment was accepted by four major credit cards. You could have delivered a calf with one of them and all six looked like implements of torture.
Later, the Jerry Springer Show provided an insight into the kind human behaviour perhaps best dealt with by experienced professionals in the privacy of a padded clinic.
I watched, engrossed, as a line of women readily confessed to providing the sort of services you don’t find in the Yellow Pages.
One-by-one, they embarrassed themselves and their unwitting relatives and partners not just before a studio audience, but television cameras with the power to beam their humiliation to the world.
A blood sport for the new millennium.
But what confessions! One woman needed to tell her boyfriend of six months that she worked as a ‘Human Chilli Dog’. I can see that would be the kind of thing you’d need to get off your chest.
Oprah was just as scintillating, but on a different level. She profiled very interesting and educational survival stories. My favourite was the tale of a woman who was shish-kebabed by a marlin while deep-sea fishing. You’re never going believe this, but her breast implant saved her life.
There is a lesson for all of us in that.
And after that tele-visual feast? Tea and bikkies with the Bold and the Beautiful.
I note that Brooke is considering changing husbands again. But I can understand that. I mean it’s so easy to fall pregnant to the wrong brother these days.
My suspicion was that the pickings would be very slim for those stuck at home during the day. But I have to say I am now completely addicted. I’d absolutely love to stay home every day with my AbCurler, Bert, Jerry, O and the Forresters.
I’d engineer myself a career as a stay-at-home Dad except I’d have to engineer the kids as well.
And I can’t even engineer my own abdominals.