This morning Ed was watching “Millionaire Matchmaker” on Bravo. I became aware of it from the other room where I was on the computer. Why is he doing this? I moaned to myself. Why? Why? He said he was fascinated. Also, he said, the matchmaker, being professionally Jewish, was exactly the sort of Jewish person he could not stand. (Ed is Jewish.) He also said the guys who were the millionaires were the sorriest bunch of guys he’d ever seen. I said, if you have money and a decent personality, you don’t need this program.

Meanwhile, this got me to thinking about the quality of programming out there and the fact that a great deal of it is pitched to the young and younger. When I was a teen I listened to adult programs on radio (we didn’t get a TV until I was 19 – I do believe my brain development owes a lot to this fortuitous omission). The stuff I heard did not cater to my unformed whims and I aspired to “learn up” in order to understand it and in doing so acquired an adult frame of mind. Now that programming for the young is a standard for all other programming, the result is a lot of adolescent minds running the media and this includes the TV news people and anchors, who chortle among themselves as if their sophomoric humor has any relevance and is at all interesting.

Another thing that goes on when you have programs for the young is that some interviewer is asking a sweet young thing about herself and she responds in a sing-songy way that other young people have used. She has copied it because it seems to her this is the way you should sound if you are in the public eye. It goes TaDA taDA taDA ta duhh and this is repeated for every sentence. That’s as close as I can get in print. It is annoying and rivals the Valley Girls for sounding insipid.

If I had children, I’d take them abroad and they could learn to sound stupid in another language, then I’d bring them back and their English would be intact as a communications tool, devoid of uhs and ers and "I'm likes" and "So okays". It says here.

xx, Teal