Antiques Roadshow

Watched some of "Antiques Roadshow" last night. It was a greatest hits show where they showed the most valuable antiques. Everything was worth over $100,000. I used to like this show a lot more before I was struck with a form of dirt poverty. If not poverty, then hitting .500 every month. Good for baseball, bad for recreation. Now it’s sort of insulting to see a spoon that’s worth $300,000. It’s nice to see that people appreciate old, well-crafted things, but a spoon shouldn’t be worth more than my life. I admit that I always wish for a big pay-off: I’m American, and I’m slightly disappointed when the number’s low.

But hell, I’m a Communist (in theory). A rug worth $500,000? It’s fine if you want to put it in a museum, but almighty there are people suffering right now and overvaluing a rug seems primitively trivial. In Thailand/Indonesia the problem isn’t about the number of dead, but the number of survivors, people who have lost family. Now children are being raped and sold into slavery from refugee camps. Terrible, incomprehensible, fuck. For those America haters out there, Hitler wasn’t American, Pol Pot wasn’t American. Iraq sucks but it doesn’t actually compare to some of the things that have happened on this planet. Which isn’t a lesson in moral relativity--if it’s not AS bad, it doesn’t matter. Just to suggest that America’s getting most of the blame now, but abuse is not an American problem, it’s a human problem. That’s a pretty patriotic sentiment from someone who thinks America actually is the problem. We are a rich country, we could do a lot more than we are with our money. We have a lot more $300,000 spoons.

On a lighter note, in Paris I used to watch the British version of "Antiques Roadshow," as well as the British version of the show "Trading Spaces." Kids would have their rooms redesigned and call it, "Brilliant." You have to trust a child who says "Brilliant." I also watched a show called "Ready, Steady, Cook" where two cooks are given household food like a can of tuna fish, a potato, and a bottle of ketchup and they compete to make a gourmet meal out of it. I loved that show. They should bring it here. I love watching anything made from scratch. I’ve watched a lot of "This Old House" and cooking shows in my life. Not speaking the language in Paris, I was grateful to hear some English. This led me to watching some very bad American shows. I thought these were shows that were too terrible to make it in the States and so were being given a second life in Europe. I was very surprised when I came back to find that "Ally McBeal" was actually popular.