Saturday, April 23, 2011

Sexy Crying Parents vs. The Weather Machine

There was a storm on Tuesday so the NBC affiliate in Memphis canceled the season finale of SEXY CRYING PARENTS (formerly the shoe factory show) so they could show off their weather machines, which they must have paid a lot of money for because they drag them out and coo over them all the time to the point of incoherence. If the actions of the NBC affiliate saved a life, that is great and I am all for it - even if it happened DESPITE the confused, overlapping bellowing of the weathermen and the insanely blinking psychedelic lights of the weather machines. There is something sick and unseemly about the way the weathermen on that channel fawn over and caress their weather machines for hours and hours at a time without shutting up or saying anything helpful. They have one weather machine with a name like "FUTURETRON" - I mean, it is almost that. Were you to hear the real thing, which I can't recall, you would know I am not trying to be funny. The FUTURETRON tells us what the weather MIGHT be like an hour in the future. Sometimes the weathermen get on each other's nerves and bicker, especially when there is an old weatherman and a younger upstart weatherman, as was the case a few months ago. The young weatherman kept trying to panic everybody and the old weatherman kept telling him to calm down, the worst was over and everything was fine. But the younger weatherman - who, by the way, was just a nattering, disembodied voice coming from nowhere, like a nightmare of the old weatherman's to which we were mysteriously privy - insisted that something horrible could happen at any moment with no warning! It was very stressful and the old weatherman was really fed up. Come to think of it, I haven't seen him since. The other local channels somehow manage to get out the weather bulletins in ways less lurid and bizarre. SEXY CRYING PARENTS was moved to 1:35 on Thursday morning so I dvr'd it, which meant I was able to fast forward through all the parts where people were "dealing with their emotions," which was the whole show. I forgot to tell you there is one parent who doesn't cry (pictured). He is cool and wears a hat and the tears don't fall out of his eyes, they always just tremble and quiver wetly there on the verge, plus he pokes out his lip. For the first time in weeks we had some brief scenes at the shoe factory. The groovy young boss's office has a picture of a skull with devil horns drawn directly on the wall! That is some crazy shoe factory all right.