From approximately 1978 until 1996 I watched General Hospital. Really I watched all the ABC soaps. The line up was Ryan’s Hope, All My Children, One to Live, and General Hospital. But General was the king of them and the only one I could see everyday due to the fact my parents enforced ridiculous rules - like you have to go to school during the day. 

(This is what I looked like in 1981 apparently unaware that my face was being attacked by my glasses. I was clearly in the grips of some sort of Ice Princess Hysteria when I picked them out.)

I really remember picking up with General when Bobbie was pretending she was pregnant with Scotty Baldwin’s baby. Luke was a side character who owned the Campus Disco.  As well versed as I am in those old storylines I have no idea what’s happened on the show in over ten years. Life has gotten in the way of my General watching. Oh course what I’m really saying is I don’t know how to work my VCR/DVD. And for me watching soaps is like eating potato chips, I can’t watch just one.

Anyway I was a nut for those soaps for literally decades and haven’t seen them again since. Enter You Tube. The other day I was suppose to be taking down the Christmas tree and feeding people who live here. Instead I watched this and this. Apparently You Tube is teaming with clips from my classic soaps! In the what, two years, since began to visit You Tube to watch guys lip syncing in front of their computers or beauty contestants messing up the answer portion of the pageant - I never thought to look up my stories. What was I on? I was blind. This is brilliant. Watching these clips is like re-reading Flowers in the Attic. I’m in 1980s heaven.

This might become a problem. I’ve got stuff to do. But just one more, maybe I’ll look up the time Luke and Laura solved the code for the Ice Princess, or the time Scotty showed up at the wedding, or maybe when B.J. died, or when Anna and Duke did the tango. And yes that’s Nurse Jessie in the Richard Simmons teaches areobics in the hospital cafeteria clip!

 Oh oh. Paging Dr. Gail Baldwin (the Psychiatrist). My parents may have to step in.  It was the only thing that worked in 1981. 

My sister Robin over at Befrazzled has written a hilarious rant about email forwards. If you’ve ever been annoyed by a forwarded chain email this one’s for you.

Anyway if you get email forwards that are funny or cute that’s one thing but you ought to know there are others that perpetuate rumors or worse they’re phishing for your email.

So the next time you get an email that warns you about something or asks you to forward a warning to everyone you love, stop, go online and check at Snopes.com. Snopes runs down the rumors, scams, and myths on the internet. It has a quick what’s new section and even better you can type things in like “black lab puppies.” Find out if the urgent plea to adopt the adorable puppies is real or rumor.
http://www.snopes.com/snopes.asp

Be careful out there.

RR

P.S. I asked for pics of holiday decor, ‘ya ‘member? Meanwhile, no tree here yet! I’m so behind.

     A while back we rented Cinderella Man. This movie had only recently come out on DVD. Halfway through, we were engrossed but at this point, Paul Giamatti’s face pixilated and the movie stalled out. We pressed play. No, the DVD player did not comply. We’re not afraid of technology so we knew there was a way around this glitch in the matrix. We headed to the scene selection portion of the menu. We found the scene where Paul Giamatti was saying something inspiring or maybe discouraging to Russell Crowe, whatever, that’s beside the point. We got to the same spot via the menu and dang, Paul Giamatti’s face was just a mess and all skippy.
        Fine, we’ll skip to the next scene. We’re not so stupid that we can’t follow your average movie plot, even if we do miss a scene. Half the time we shout out how it’s going to end before it does anyway. That’s the game, who can blurt out the end of the plot first. Being right isn’t really the issue. Guessing what the ending should be is the point.
        But I digress.   As we bypassed the Paul Giamatti scene we then had Rene Zellwegger pixilated and then Russell Crowe frozen in mid-training sequence. We ejected, we wiped off, one of the kids blew on it, maybe there was a stray dust particle causing the problem. We tried again; we’re not quitters for Pete’s sake. We put in the disc again and again, totally fouled up DVD.
        No dummies we, it was determined this was a bad disc. No saving it. So we returned it and the rental place gladly replaced the disc free of charge. The second disc crapped out at the climactic ending. We went back again for a replacement. (Okay my husband did this, when I say we in regards to replacing DVDs I mean him.) We watched the remainder of The Cinderella Man in peace on the third DVD.
        Ah, but if only this were an isolated incident of momentary inconvenience. We’ve gone through two DVD players since this incident, we’ve rented umpteen DVDs and I swear every fourth one has a flaw, a defect, a bug, a something. We now watch movies in clenched anxiety for the skip or the glitch. And as soon as we see the little skip or pixel we can predict the ending of this DVD with certainty. This DVD is somehow tainted and we’ll have to run out to get a replacement.
         It’s not the movies but the medium. Yes I hate the DVD as a method of watching movies. Sorry we’re not supposed to hate things, I strongly dislike the behavior of every fourth DVD we rent. And this is not the rental place’s fault. We love our rental place and the people who work there. And we love movies. Our kids love movies and will watch the same one a million times in a row. No this me declaring that I think this DVD technology isn’t for us. If it works well for you, I support your right to enjoy the DVD as a medium for movie watching. I just miss my video tape. So maybe I am technologically challenged.
        Think back. Do you remember your first VCR? Those video tapes were darn near indestructible. The worst that would happen is you’d pull them out of the machine and a little tape would be exposed so you’d put your finger in the sprocket and wind it up. Then you could pop it back in and replay it. Speck of dust, not a problem, we wiped mayonnaise off of a tape and shoved the sucker back in the player and watched it.
        Just push PLAY and RECORD and you could record Thirtysomething and all was well. Have you ever tried to record a show on a DVD? Format Disk, Record, do some finish move and then you have a DVD that you can’t re-record on. I think I had recorded every episode of Northern Exposure on top of every episode of Northern Exposure and that was just fine.
        Sure the time thingy was always blinking 00:00:00, but I digress.

So is this only happening at my house?