Sock it to me.

L-R: Michael Cole, Peggy Lipton, Clarence Williams III - The Mod Squad

Now that I can watch and record over-the-air TV, I'm enjoying some old shows that I wasn't able to watch as a kid.

For some reason, I associate The Mod Squad with Nixon, Vietnam, and boycotts, all of which I knew only through television, but which were cemented by Vernondale Elementary School and catch phrases like "I am not a crook" or "sock it to me."

Little did I think in 4th or 5th grade that 40 years later I'd be able to record The Mod Squad on a computer and watch it on a quiet Saturday morning when my wife and children are sleeping.

Someday someone will likely have the same nostalgic reverie, but it will go something like this: "Little did I know that 40 years later I could call up any show from any year and watch it on the wall paper in my living room."

[2014-06-20]

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MeTV (the channel, not the app) ran a promo today for weekend westerns and concluded it with "tune in to the next rope opera," which has a nice sound but is invented only for the sound, and in this case for a bad pun.

When a writer manipulates sound for a pun, or strays so far from conventional usage that the reader/listener is left wondering at the words and not their sense, the words have failed.

(FWIW, old-timey westerns are usually referred to as "horse operas"; and folks like myself that remember rabbit ears are MeTV's demographic, but probably not the demographic of their marketing department, which is sort of inevitable, I suppose, as the original demographic is dwindling due to a life spent enjoying butter, salt, sugar, and tobacco.)

[2014-06-21]

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