So what is our fascination with gorge, death, murder and mayhem? No I really want to know, how I have gotten so desensitized that having the ID Channel going on in the background while I nap is comforting to me? You know the channel I am taking about, the Investigation Discovery Channel, 104 on my Cox Communication dial. It is relatively new channel and even Oprah Winfrey's channel OWN has picked up one of their shows, Disappeared.
I have always been a fan of the mystery, and things that go bump in the night. You know Agatha Christy, Columbo, Murder she Wrote, MacMillian and Wife. You get my drift right? I think I took a wrong turn in the 1980's and I became addicted to Freddy Kruger (Nightmare on Elm Street), and Jason(Friday the 13th), then there was my all time favorite scarey movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween and it's many sequels. Ok, it is getting more clear to me. Then we move into the Quentin Tarantino movies, his first and I think his best, Pulp Fiction of the 1990's and it is starting to make more sense. They say that life imitates art, but I swear after discovering the ID Channel even Hollywood in it's magnificence could not come up with this stuff.
There are a whole host of shows that have great titles, some that have a narrator as the victim, telling their stories. Today was a marathon of "Who The (Bleep) Did I Marry?" I know some real people who are asking themselves that at this point, that is another blog for another time. This includes the story of the woman who loved to marry and fleece military men. Poor Joe Wood married a woman who whoops turned up pregnant immediately after marriage, only later did Joe discover she left her last husband that way, and poor Joe thought it was his. Turns out she had 12 husbands, and about 8 childbirths they could find. The babies never stayed with her, and she appeared like a single young woman for the next soldier. Mary Jo Buttafucco was one of the stories, if you are not familiar with that story, Joey slept with 16 year old "long Island lolita", Amy Fisher, who promptly went to Joey's house, and shot Mary Jo in the head, and Mary Jo lived to tell the tale. Imagine hours of gut wrenching "I thought something was wrong, but I wanted to try to hold the family together" upon discovering their husband is a pedophile, or rapist. "He was so respected by his community and on the police force". Ok, I will quit with that, the truth is I have had a few relationships I too would like to feign innocence about when I got that gnawing feeling in my gut.
Some of the titles of the shows are even great on their own. Now I have not watched them all, only some in my defense. Disappeared, Nightmare Next Door, Dates From Hell, Sins and Secrets, and my fave, Stolen voices, Buried Secrets. I personally think these are the A-listers. So when you are looking for a thrill, or feeling bad about yourself, turn on the ID Channel, and trust me, your life will seem almost magical in comparison. Since I am a channel surfer, and have a short attention span, I was flipping over to the Oprah Network OWN and watching "Ryan and Tatum, The O'Neals".
As dysfunctional as that was, it was not holding a candle to the ID Channel. So what's on tonight? well more couples who married the devil, it is, "Who The (Bleep) Did I Marry?" all day and all night. There were many Revolutionary War stories on today, as it is the American Independence Day, so I did channel surf through the History Channel and GeoDiscovery Channel, however it was a fest of dysfunctional TV for me and frankly since it rained, I enjoyed it!!! Happy 236th birthday United States of America!!
I can't watch those ID shows, though they can be kind of funny as you realize how ridiculous people can be sometimes. I didn't watch much TV on the fourth though I do confess to turning over to the Science channels Firefly marathon, and the SyFy channels yearly 4th of July Twilight Zone marathon. I love those old Twilight Zones I used to watch them with my dad when I was a kid. The episode I turned to had Burgess Meredith in it as a librarian, of course we know him better as the penguin and Mick from the Rocky movies.
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