The Stone Philips Effect
The dog days are here. I can tell, because I
want to scratch myself in odd places, and I circle the sofa before collapsing on
it for a wasted hour or two watching bad
television.
August is the best month
for bad television. You can see the junk that you missed during the rest of the
year, and your mind is in precisely the right kind of condition for it.
Why is that
so?
A number of reasons –
it’s the time when you begin to accept the fact that the yard work
you’d promised yourself to do since April won’t be done, the winter
clothes at the bottom of the basement stairs to be put away have contributed to
the well-being of the resident moths, and anything that does survive does not
have to be unpacked…just dragged back upstairs for the long stretch of
darkness and cold here in Minnesota, holes and all. You can write letters to
yourself in the dust on any table in the house, the kitchen looks like a Crime
Scene Investigation team has just ransacked the place, and Labor Day is fewer
than three weeks away.
Much better
with a cold beer on the sofa, and you can learn stuff. The other night on
public tv I learned about the Spartans, and Queer Eye For the Straight Guy has
me thinking “neatness really does count.” Baseball is always good
for a nap or two during the nine innings, but then I’ve known that for
years.
But the Big News for this
August is that I have both discovered and named a new television phenomenon
which I call “The Philips Effect,” names after Stone Philips, of
NBC’s Dateline program. Every time the camera opens on Philips, he does
this quirky little up and down nod, like a little kid….looks like his chin
is just falling down the last three
stairs.
It conveys a sense of
involvement, commitment, agreement with whatever random thought might be firing
up your neural synapses – did I leave the stereo on, what was the name of
that woman I met at last night’s art opening, boy, how about that navel
lint.
The Philips Effect became
particularly noticeable during the early stages of the present conflict in the
Middle East when correspondence waited to hear and to comprehend the questions
being thrown at them from Washington or New York. Now it’s leaked to
local news anchors, weather and sports people.
By golly, you can sit right in
front of the tv in your underwear and have a handsome or pretty television
person agreeing with you and encouraging you to agree with them by nodding a lot
at you.
Another tv discovery in
their constant drive to replace content with style. Maybe Robert Siegel and Bob
Edwards do it in front of their microphones at NPR, but I doubt it, what with
their relentless interest in
content.
The Philips
Effect…another reason to watch television. Yeah, right.
Posted: Mon - November 24, 2003 at 04:46 PM