CALL ME SNAKE

For years we’ve been told that TV viewing, especially when it’s “excessive,” may be hazardous to your health. Yesterday, in fact, our daughter came home from school with a sheet instructing us to feed our children at least five servings of fruits and vegetables each day, limit TV viewing to two hours per day, and engage in at least one hour’s worth of physical activity daily. (The sheet suggested we’ll need to increase our children’s TV viewing by nearly an hour per day, but that’s beside the point.)

Of course, none of this occurred to me at 11:19 p.m. when I raced upstairs from my office to catch the weekend weather report. The weekday weather report is important enough–as I want to know whether I’ll be biking with my children through rain, snow, sleet, or hail–but the “weekend weather report” is even more important since it concentrates on the “weekend weather” which we’ve all be trained to put on a pedestal as if the daily weather hardly matters a whit. It was, as I said, a mad rush upstairs. I was cutting it very close because in a second there’d be a commercial before the second or third sports announcement came on. I turned on the TV and then crouched down to the cable box to set the channel. Then I sat down on the rug in an awkward manner–I believe the cat came by around then, throwing me off. The result being that I did something weird to my knee in my haste to turn the TV on, probably something to do with the cartilage. I iced the knee last night but it still hurts, probably enough to louse up my handball game this evening, but not enough to keep me from playing. (The pros in the NBA have to learn to “play through pain,” and so does every amateur handballer over 50.)

So now I know, firsthand, that TV viewing can be hazardous to your health, because if I hadn’t been so anxious to watch TV last night, none of this would have happened. And we, instead, would have been talking about something unimportant like Scooter Libby implicating our commander in chief in another lie or, if you prefer, another “cold-blooded, premeditated mispresentation of the truth.”