Watching 'Jersey Shore' might make you dumber, study suggests

[iverglas]

6. our secret shame

In my household, it's Big Brother. It gets worse every year, of course, but we stick with it. Because you can sit there and try to figure odds and work out what factors can be controlled and what can't, and what lie could be got away with and what couldn't, and actually exercise the brain cells. I'm not really good at it because long-game strategizing isn't my thing (I hate chess), but it's still fun.

I actually got hooked the first season when all the players were naive newbies and not models cast for their looks (yech, most of them now, fake boobs on the one side and brawn over brains on the other). When Chicken George decided that the whole purpose of the game was for them to rebel and walk out, I could just hear Jean-Paul Sartre cheering from his grave. George had created his own meaning!

And like to cook though I do, cooking shows bore me to tears. For me, it's real estate.

Escape to the Country on a Sunday morning ... while I chop and simmer and bake. When I've exhausted the week's supply of EastEnders, of course!

And before that, on early Saturday mornings, I actually watch The Rifleman for a while. Nostalgia for my youth and my departed dad, and Saturday evenings eating dinner in front of the TV and waiting for the hockey game (at which point I found something to read). It always has a plot, with a moral, and lots of old stars to spot before they made it big. It sometimes even has women doing independent stuff.