Solved Mysteries!
One night, a young man became hungry in his quiet Northern California home. He heated up home-made soup from his recently-cleaned out refrigerator. He posted a note as usual on the internet, and sat down to finish his dinner.
The next day, that young man was sick. With a deeply cramped stomach and much time spent on the toilet, he was lead to wonder, what had happened?
We will show you this dramatic reenactment of the food he ate that fateful night:
Thanks to a tip from a reader of his web site, we have managed to unite this young man with his senses. They alerted us to this note, from the evening of his damning meal:
"For dinner, five day old spinch soup cooked from the bones of three chickens dead more than ten days. Poured over stale toast. A savory feast."Another mystery solved, thanks to trackbacks.
The five day old chicken put the fix on me. I've spent more time on my toilet today than I've spent talking to any of my good friends in weeks.
So I bought some ginger ale. And fired up my Tivo. I have a satellite, and a device that records TV shows. Still I don't watch more than two hours of TV a month. Sometimes I wonder, why bother? Then I sit down on my couch and discover that I have an entire night's worth of UNSOLVED MYSTERIES
That's right, my blessed magical TV hard drive recorded episode after episode of this fantastic television. Why bother with anything high-brow? I want grim pablum. Give me cheap thrills, mystical experiences, dangerous strangers, and intercessions from concerned citizens. All moderated by a melodramatic host passing in front of flaming candelabras hovering in the darkness.
Unsolved Mysteries has been on long enough now that half of the episodes pass through the cliff-hanger into the resolution - previously aired segments spark someone's memory - their tip leads to a family reunion, or the capture of a murderer. The Unsolved Mystery cameras are on-hand to film the public service. Fantastic! You get all the chills of seeing a mysterious crime, and some satisfaction from knowing that a concerned viewer solved the case. (You might think of these calls as TrackBacks, and the show evidencing crime solving through Social Networks!)
Plus the show is broadcast on Lifetime, the television network for women, so I am inundated with advertisements for yogurt drinks and healthy snacks for kids and weight loss treatments. The advertising is foreign - it's an all around yummy media meal! With a large side order of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.