Hospital TV.

During my medical sojourn last week, I found that you can learn things from the TV the hospital provides to help pass the time. Mainly, you can learn that daytime TV is an irritating way to pass the time. Still, I had nothing to read and no juice on the cell phone until my wife brought me books and a charger, so it was more engaging than looking out the window.

I can't say I wasn't warned. A friend of mine was undergoing cancer treatments last year, and while he was able to stay at home through most of it, he was unable to do anything beyond watch the tube. I believe he said he had memorized episodes of Bonanza and The Twilight Zone and that Wilma Flintstone was starting to look good to him.

Thankfully, I only had a couple of days to deal with it, from Sunday afternoon through Tuesday evening. I can see how it would make you crazy. Even the all-news channels, or maybe especially those; the constant chewing of the same Bone Du Jour is insane. Apparently there was nothing much in the world of note last Monday except for the Roger Stone sentencing, because all the news channels were on it constantly.

Ah, but the cable TV provided by the hospital had soothing channels, with calming music and video clips from nature. Well, the most educational thing about that was that I couldn't stick with them very long. You'd think a guy in pain, who'd just been through a major pain crisis, would want nothing else on but that channel and the back of his eyelids, but no. No wonder I suck at meditation.

So what did I like?

Well, as I alluded to yesterday, I watched America's Funniest Home Videos on Sunday night. What made that educational was how my attitudes had changed toward people falling during the previous 24 hours. You just fell down the stairs! Go get an X-ray! You have no idea how this can come back to haunt you, you fool! My previous reaction to people falling on AFV was the more lizard-brained Ha ha him fall funny.

On Monday there was a Catholic priest in the little chapel downstairs, and I was able to watch Mass on CCTV. I liked that, although the sound quality was pretty bad.

I picked up a tidbit on the History channel, one that had nothing to do with Ancient Aliens. It was a neat little documentary on Air Force One that the channel ran on Presidents Day. I knew some of the history of the planes assigned that name, but amid the data was this: the name of the country painted on the plane's exterior is meant to simulate the typeface used for the name of the country as it was seen -- for the first time -- on the Declaration of Independence.

Cool.

Other things I leaned came from watching most of Return of the Jedi, which I have not seen in a very long time. And those things were numerous. They include:

1. The movie begins with the worst rescue plan I have ever seen in the movies. I can't even tell what they were trying to accomplish, sending people into Hutt's Hut in dribs. To infiltrate and then take over at a signal? Obviously not, since everything went to hell immediately. It made no sense at all. If R2 didn't have enough space to hide a lightsaber in his chassis, the galaxy would have been screwed. Even then a lot of dumb luck was required. Almost any other plan would have been better. 
2. Mark Hamill was a pretty bad actor. I don't know if he got any better. I haven't the new trilogy and I don't care. But Harrison Ford was pretty bad, too. He looks stoned through the scene where we learn the plan to attack the new Death Star and he is revealed to now be General Solo. If 1970s Steve Martin had been cast as Comic Relief Solo, and played the part the exact same way, people would have thought it was a hilarious spoof. 
3. Retroactively speaking, I hear that Leia was supposed to do all kinds of Force stuff late in the third trilogy. This makes perfect sense, as she's revealed to be a Skywalker. And yet, although Darth and Luke can sense each other's Forceishness in real time across space, neither of them had any idea that the Force would be strong with that princess, too. Was this addressed?

Anyway, by the time we got to the Ewoks, I was about to be whisked out of the room for injections. Some people loathe the little Space Teddy Bears, but at least for those pre-CGI days, they were pretty convincing.

I also saw enough (ten minutes) of Matt Damon's The Great Wall to realize that, whatever faults the Star Wars series might have, if you put them all together in a bag they might still weigh less than the faults in The Great Wall. What a waste of Willem DaFoe.

All of this hard-won knowledge would have been avoided if i'd had more than an 8% charge on my phone.

Maybe I should have spent more time staring out the window. Sure, it's a modern, dull building, and it looks drab and tired although it opened in 2011, and February is not much to look at -- but at least the skies were blue.

Question: Did someone determine that tan and brown are great healing colors? Because that's the sum of the whole color palette in this place. Does it help keep people relaxed and compliant?