One Day in Teletubbyland, Something Appeared From Far Away
Thanks to certain people, not to be named, a fair share of the evening television in this house is real-estate shows like House Hunters International and Property Virgins, plus all the remodeling shows where people turn rec room dreams into stratospheric HELOC balances, then a nice man tells them that their home is now worth sixteen billion dollars more than it was before the show cut to the final commercial break. Seeing these shows now is very strange, like Blanche Dubois acting like she’s still the mistress of Belle Reve, or like the guitars and Christmas crackers appearing to a wondering and clueless Dipsy. We all figure the Teletubbies live in a post-apocalyptic world, after all. Radiation made the rabbits that big and it doesn’t do to think too much about what lies over the hill, beyond the carefully controlled environment maintained by the disembodied voice. Whatever it was so horrified the Sun Himself that he regressed to the point where he could take infantile mirth in the few survivors’ innocent abreaction to stray wonder and strangeness: the anachronistic objects materializing out of rifts in spacetime, the strange transmissions lighting the screens in their bellies. It’s on those monitors we should watch the otherworldly house-porn shows, until the signals cease. If it turns out we can’t digest Tubby Toast, we can subsist, for a time, on the rabbits. Big hug!
Comment by Thoreau —
January 14, 2009 @ 11:12 pm
I saw one of those shows, before the final bursting of the bubble, where people about to default on their loans were given money to remodel so they could drive up their property value and, um, something. I don’t understand how having a higher property value will help you if you owe a certain amount of money and the interest rate on that loan is about to go up and bring your monthly payment to a level you can’t afford. What are you going to do–borrow against the equity to make payments on the old loan, and pay the new loan at whatever the prevailing interest rates are?
It’s just sad.
Of course, some person who ought to be smart said to me at a Christmas party “Oh, you should buy a house!” I tried to explain that I don’t have a down payment. This is a physicist, so he understands basic math. He got this blank look on his face like “Why do you need a down payment?” I asked him if he’d read a newspaper in the past few months. He still didn’t get it.
Comment by Doc Nebula —
January 15, 2009 @ 12:41 pm
This is, without a doubt, one of most twistedly brilliant (or should that be brilliantly twisted) things you’ve ever written, or, really, that I’ve ever read, anywhere on the web.
Now you make me yearn for an Alan Moore Teletubbies graphic novel.
Comment by Dave Allan —
January 15, 2009 @ 1:20 pm
I take this to mean that the Unqualified Kitchen’s cabinets will remain unaltered a while longer.
Comment by Jim Henley —
January 15, 2009 @ 1:21 pm
Actually, we redid our kitchen a couple months ago! On the cheap, mind you, but we redid it.
Comment by dhex —
January 15, 2009 @ 2:16 pm
lots of people make jokes about the teletubbies and acid but let me tell you brother once you see the homosexualist pagan agenda spelled out in flesh and lies for you with a giant baby sun god overseeing a pangendered non-genital future…it’s not so funny.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
January 15, 2009 @ 2:55 pm
Well, the party’s over…for now. But I know my fellow Americans too well to think that we will be chastened by the current crash for more than a few years. Bubbles are irresistible, and in a few years’ time we’ll all be ready for the next one, just like the TTubs, crying “Again! Again!”
Comment by joe from Lowell —
January 15, 2009 @ 3:12 pm
You mean the Teletubbies died?
You’re mean! You’re mean!
Comment by joe from Lowell —
January 15, 2009 @ 3:18 pm
Oh, no, Uncle Kvetch. That’s unpossible.
When people lose money through overly-optimistic financial practices, it thoroughly educates and incentivises them, and society as a whole. It’s only the mean ol’ government creating moral hazards that every interrupts this pattern – you know, like how the awesome welfare state of the 19th century made everyone who lost money in those bubble-induced depression whole. That’s why they keep happening, you know.
Comment by dhex —
January 15, 2009 @ 5:21 pm
oh joe don’t ever change.