$50,000 because it's so shiny!

Normally I flip right past PBS when I'm searching for mindless entertainment on T.V., although occasionally I get sucked in for five mintues by something like Sunday's documentary on Ayer's Rock. (I like the weird intensity of the photography in PBS documentaries. Everything is sharply focused and brightly colored in a way that normal television is not, and I don't know why.) But for the most part, I find that PBS lives up to its reputation as the most boring channel on television.

Last night, however, I was baking chocolate-chip cookies and looking for a little background noise, and I made a very important PBS discovery: Antiques Roadshow is, as far as I can tell, the television equivalent of pot.

Seriously. First of all, everybody on this show acts like they're drugged. There's lots of inappropriate laughter, and they keep mentioning the bright colors and patterns. Anything that's shiny gets particularly close attention. Swirls and curliques seem to blow people's minds. Most convincingly, everybody speaks in that weird, floaty voice you only hear from people who are spaced out of their minds. And psychics. Hm, I guess that's the same thing. People begin making wild plans with absurdly slow diction. "Iiii can get fiiiifty thooooouuusand dollars for thiiiis soooooup tureeeen? Amaaaazing. Iiii'm going to goooo hooome and put sooooup in it!"

You watch this for long enough and you start to get a contact high. You feel very mellow, sort of blissed out on the slow voices and the bizzare pattern of the $8,000 rug some woman's had in her attic for the last 25 years. Your head lolls back on the couch and your eyes slide half closed. The abrupt scene changes seem normal because you immediately forget whatever it is you were looking at before. Eventually you get to the point that you just want to have a cookie and go to bed.

So Antiques Roadshow will be my new drug. Actually, it will probably serve to keep me from ever trying pot, because I know the first thing I'd want to do after I got high is watch Antiques Roadshow just to see what that would be like, and if that ever happened, I'm afraid my brain would explode.