SWEET Robot Love!
For many children, growing up in the 80's meant having a big, white satellite dish planted in your back yard providing you with a fair amount of shade, but also making the summer job of mowing the lawn a bit more difficult because the riding lawn mower just would not make it under the beast. (You also had to be careful not to trim too close with the push mower or you'd end up cutting some wires at the base of the dish with the blade causing the robotic arm that adjusted the sucker to no longer function, then you'd either be stuck with the dish in the same position to view only a limited number of stations--which defeats the purpose of having a dish to begin with--or you'd have to go outside and manually adjust the dish to find the stations you wanted. Ask me how I know.) Having a satellite in my back yard in the 80's teamed with a descrambler ensured that I overdosed on hours and hours some of the best televisioin programming in history.

There were not many children in my neighborhood that I found interesting. This means that I spent a lot of time alone. I did not mind so much because it allowed me time to feed my addiction. One of the best hours ever on tv was weekday afternoons on WGN from Chicago. They broadcast two of the best shows: G.I. Joe and Transformers, Monday-Friday on Galaxy 1, channel 3. G.I. Joe was great. After each and every violence-filled half-hour episode, a buff, often top naked male fighter, delivered an important message for life: "Don't play with downed power lines!" or "Be careful when building a tree house. It might fall on you!" The Transformers were what they were and did not try to hide it: A violence filled half hour of entertainment that was going to sell millions of plastic toys.

Because of nostalgia, I decided to try and find some old episodes of Transformers online, and, with luck, I found the first and second episodes to download (probably illegally). Oh, what joy! I viewed them yesterday. I'd forgotten all of the love in that show. I was a little taken aback when the first scene of sweet robot love took place in episode two. "Where is the Love?" Spike and Hound found it one day out on the rocks. Ouch!


Looking back, I think that it was beautiful that no one ever made an issue of robots loving humans and humans loving robots. Love was love, and that was enough. It conquered all.


More than meets the eye.

(Having a satellite also exposed me to much more than the Transformers and robot love. I saw much more than I probably ever should have seen as a child or at any age. Maybe that's why I'm so warped today. Mother, remember the time you got fed up and unhooked the descrambler--not just an electronic device but a practical lesson in ethics and honesty-- because you wanted to chunk it, and when Dad tried to hook it back up, all that would come on the tv screen was: "Hi Asshole. Have fun."?)