Frogs and Ghosts

Personally, today has been a bust all around. I should have gone into work much, much earlier, and I should have not wasted the earlier part of the day watching television and playing video games; I didn't even feed myself properly, but instead I subsisted on potato chips and soda, as if I were still a young teenager with the biological fortitude to handle that kind of abuse. Ugh. Still, I did go to work so I haven't failed on all accounts yet.

As for the television and video games (and I also include web surfing which is pretty much the same thing), I managed to catch a the special reunion show for That's Incredible, a cheesy 80's precursor to the modern reality shows. Like many things associated with my youth, I remember the show being much more cooler and interesting than it actually was. With stories about a ghost haunting a Toy-R-Us, a man who had been struck by lightning seven times, and an opera singing parrot, combined with what they called "action stunts," I can see the appeal to my eight-year-old self. Now, with an adult perspective, I see the show as mostly exploitative, yet also somehow ever-so-slightly innocent, even though I understand, after doing some modern Net research, that the show is indirectly responsible for six people losing their lives(!). No kidding.

I suppose that this was the then modern television equivalent to the "Odd Tales" and "Weird Stories" I would often read in the school library. Tucked in the corner of the youth science fiction section, the section primarily reserved for kids with strong nerdly leanings, these "odd" and "weird" stories - usually a two or three pages - purported to be true accounts of how it rained frogs in a small nebraska town in 1892, or how a deserted mineshaft in the old west has a legendary ghost that is occasionally seen by tourists. I devoured these stories whole, but now I've grown into a full fledged cynic. Which, as far as being a cynic, is - in an odd way - partially responsible for my not wanting to go to work today.