Your Own "TODAY" Show

I don't know if you've heard anything about this, but in February of 2009, if you don't have cable tv or a converter box to fool your television - and that's only fair, since your television has been fooling you for years and years - you will LOSE YOUR SIGNAL! Nothing but static.

Well, most people either have cable or could get it, and for the rest, those converter boxes can be made cheaper with a coupon that you can get free for the askin'.

But let's say you don't want cable, don't want to pay for it, and the whole converter box thing is just too doggone complicated. There's no need to panic. You can have all the benefits of TV right in your home.

For instance...NFL football. Go get a couple of jerseys for the teams playing in the big game. Listen to the radio. Reenact all the big plays in your cavernous living room. Benefit: free exercise!

Any sitcom based in any workplace: Get those wiseacres and smart Alex* at the office, store, plant or potato patch to sit around insulting each other for 13 minutes. Then have one of them take you aside and confide in you about a personal problem: broken heart, missed opportunity for promotion, pierced thorax. Three minutes. Then, for the next three minutes, gather the gang around and discuss how to help the hapless one: fix 'em up on a sure thing date with an overly libidinous member of the opposite sex, sabotage the person who actually got the promotion by hijacking their blog and filling it with obscenities directed at the boss's spouse, transplanted right pleural cavity. For six minutes, put the plan into action and watch the ensuing hilarity. Break for a final commercial for a stool softener or Viagra, then come back for a winsome, wistful wrap up scene, after which everyone goes home happy.

Alternate sitcom: have the youngest person in the family come home and say with big wide eyes that he heard someone in school was a drug user, or one of the people in the neighborhood has an alcohol problem, or someone's parent has become a practitioner of an alternative lifestyle. Have everything come out just peachy at the end, and call it a "Very Special 'Palin's Place' " or whatever you decide to call your show.


Your Own 'Today Show': Have Bud and Sis and Crazy Cousin Annie and Good Neighbor Alvin come over for breakfast. Constantly say the magic "Today Show" mantras:

--- "We're back right after this" (are you back or are you not?)

--- When someone else has finished speaking, say loudly, "Bud! THANK YOU!!!"

--- When Sis has finished talking about how four different people in this very block have recently suffered a pierced thorax, frown a little, and then say "Switching gears now..." before launching into a story you heard about an English farmer who can play "God Save The Queen" on his whistling lung. This demonstrates that you appreciate the severity of the other story, but enough seriousness this early, ya know?

---Be elaborately formal for no reason: call someone "Mr." when their first name has always been sufficient.

---Everyone talk at once!
(* stolen from Ring Lardner)