Making Yourself Happy...

When all the world is dark, where do you turn for a slight brightening of your small slice of reality? I turn to what some may consider mundane and maybe even a bit evil. I turn the television and on-line poker.

No matter how bad of a day I’ve had, watching TV always seems to make it better. At first I would say it’s the easiness of watching TV that draws me there when I need entertainment. I did grow up with that square box babysitter after all. But I take another slant on the worldly view of TV as evil and mindless. For me it stimulates my mind as I see all the different things that I may never have seen if it weren’t for that invention of Mr. John Logie Baird (what did we do before the internet?).

I do enjoy a drama or comedy but most of my time is spent watching nature, home fix-up, gardening and history shows.

One of my current favs is Mythbusters. For years my friend Lynne and I have been the guardians of truth as people send us urban legend after urban legend in e-mail or in story form from our friends, family and co-workers.

Snopes.com defines Urban Legend like this:

"Myth vs. Legend

Though these two terms are often used interchangeably, they have separate and specific meanings to folklorists. Both myths and legends are stories with casts of characters and plotlines followed to their conclusions, yet their core elements are different. Myths are tales about the acts of godlike or supernatural beings and/or magical animals which serve to explain the creation of the world or how certain elements of our world came to be (e.g., how the raccoon got its mask) and take place in the far reaches of time (often expressed as "In the days when the world was new"). By contrast, legends are accounts of purported incidents involving ordinary people in more recent times. Although both types of stories are told as true, they are not necessarily believed to be literal truth by either the tellers or their audiences.


· Urban legends are a specific class of legend, differentiated from "ordinary" legends by their being provided and believed as accounts of actual incidents that befell or were witnessed by someone the teller almost knows (e.g., his sister's hairdresser's mechanic). These tales are told as true, local, and recent occurrences, and often contain names of places or entities located within the teller's neighborhood or surrounding region. Urban legends are narratives which put our fears and concerns into the form of stories or are tales which we use to confirm the rightness of our world view. As cautionary tales they warn us against engaging in risky behaviors by pointing out what has supposedly happened to others who did what we might be tempted to try. Other legends confirm our belief that it's a big, bad world out there, one awash with crazed killers, lurking terrorists, unscrupulous companies out to make a buck at any cost, and a government that doesn't give a damn. Folks commonly equate 'urban legend' with 'false' (i.e., "Oh, that's an urban legend!"). Though the vast majority of such tales are pure invention, a handful do turn out to be based on real incidents, and whether or not something actually happened has no bearing on its status as an urban legend. What lifts true tales of this type out of the world of news and into the genre of contemporary lore is the blurring of details and multiplicity of claims that the events happened locally, alterations which take place as the stories are passed through countless hands. Though there might indeed have been an original actual event, it clearly did not happen to as many people or in as many places as the various recountings of it would have us believe. "

Before discovering Snopes.com which tracks Urban Legends and is a quick reference for anyone wanting to see if that e-mail Aunt Judy just sent you about why you should boycott Wal-mart is true or not, Lynne had turned me on to the books of Jan Harold Brunvand which are collections of some of the classic Urban Legends and de-bunked them.

Mythbusters takes it one step farther and actually tries to prove the claims of these same Urban Legends. If you like good TV and have a wondering (and maybe wandering) mind then you need to catch this show on The Discovery Channel.

Ok you thought I would be able to write a post without some gay content, but alas another reason I watch Mythbusters is to gaze with lust on two of the regulars GRANT IMAHARA and TORY BELLECI.















And check out Dirty Jobs and the hunky Mike Rowe: