Thursday, May 29, 2014

Million Dollar Morons

My kids are weird.  Whereas most children their age spend their uncommitted time engaged in such useful pursuits as texting, playing video games, or listening to music, mine watch television.  Which doesn’t seem so weird unless you consider what they’re watching. 

 
Normal kids between roughly six and fourteen years of age tend to gravitate toward the panoply of programming offered by Disney and Nickelodeon – your typical mindless drivel which appeals to the automobile restricted segment of the kid population and includes such favorites as Austin and Ally, iCarly, and Big Time Rush.
 
Conversely, I routinely find my two daughters raptly engaged in the various reality-based programs featured on the Food Network and HGTV.  As a concerned parent, I want to know what my children are watching.  After all, I don’t want them exposed to unhealthy, age-inappropriate ideas concerning home décor, or worse, have them begin making food choices ill-suited to my wife’s culinary skills.  As a consequence, I often find myself watching these shows along with them. 

The cooking programs aren’t of great concern in that my daughters have such blasé, unadventurous palettes that they are disinclined to sample any dish which doesn’t contain their two favorite ingredients – peanut butter and jelly.  And while many of the home improvement and real estate oriented programs are benign, I do have concerns about certain of the HGTV offerings such as Million Dollar Rooms, Amazing Water Homes, and Extreme Homes. 
 
Each of these tends to feature an insanely wealthy couple searching for their own personal Shangri-La.  Less intriguing to me than the bizarre dwellings, however, are the equally odd couples who own or want to buy them.  The duos often feature a troll of a man who has used his extraordinary wealth to attract a much younger woman way out of his league on the attractiveness scale.  For the most part, the women have the intellect of an eggplant and are doing all they can to spend their much older husband’s fortune before he dies and the prenuptial agreement kicks in.
 
 
These men will do almost anything to keep their partners happy because they know they have no other shot at an intimate relationship with a woman of equal caliber or such a high social security number.  As a result, they get towed around by the nose, looking as clever as cardboard, while their women commiserate with the real estate agent over the insufficient size of the indoor pool, the ill-conceived heliport, and the awkward position of the afternoon sun as it strikes the life-size statue of Zeus. 
 
It’s no wonder these unlikely bedfellows are attracted to homes matching their quirks in that most of the featured dwellings seem to have been designed by eccentric lunatics with no budgetary constraints and certainly no sense of proportion or style.  Can we truly consider a person sane who is desirous of living on an island, has enough money to buy Guam, but instead chooses to build his dream home on a flat patch of dirt in Oklahoma City which he then surrounds with a moat?

Enough is enough!  I’m left with no choice but to insist that my kids start watching SpongeBob, Finneas and Ferb, or Alien Surf Girls – anything that won’t warp their suggestible minds and distort their expectations of normalcy.  In the meantime, I’m off to catch the new episode of Dog with a Blog.  Pets are so brilliant these days!