Late Night Polish TV
In my bedroom there is a small television. This lil television was a gift from a friend when I learned life lesson #2537 - Why NOT to place plants above brand new large televisions during the height of hockey (and therefore telly watching) season.1 This particular set comes in very handy as I can watch the BBC World News whilst falling asleep and nod off to soothing proper English accents. If, for some reason2, I do not sleep before the news is done, all sorts of hell can break loose...
Last night... after finishing the expectedly teary biography of Dusty Springfield, I turned on the wee telly. Flipping through the eight or so channels of non-Spanish speaking programming (mostly infomercials or ridiculous dating shows) I settle on a very soothing voice and close my eyes. I've settled on Polvision™. Polvision™ 3 does not mean staring at poles planted in the ground like some form of public art but instead is television programming for the large Polish population in Chicago. One always hears about town "Did you know that Chicago has the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw?" I mean it... we hear this often. This statistic always confuses me... why Warsaw? Why not Poland as a whole? Secondly, where did this statistic come from? After googling this I find through The Free Dictionary entry on Casimir Pulaski that I am not the only one who doesn't know where this stat comes from.
Enough of this census nonsense... I'm trying to sleep and listening to the beautiful sounds of a polish sitcom4 when my near-sleep state is interrupted by what sounds like a circus clown has entered my bedroom banging on a plastic toy drum. In the midst of the bang-your-head-on-a-low-overhead-sort-of-physical-comedy-ha-ha-ha that's going on, the sitcom has taken a break for what appears to be a Dali inspired silent cartoon (full of circus music). Public television is full of all sorts of oddities but I had to rub my eyes several times to make sure I was seeing this cartoon right. There were sleeping children being sewn up into pillowcases and locked in barns, birds implementing extensive pulley systems to get boulders from a quarry, old men falling asleep (um dying?) in fields while small children could not wake them, kids building a stone wall around themselves to keep out lil black birds (which they and a lil green bird constantly taunt with handfuls of birdseed)... I half hope I was dreaming and that lil Polish children are not raised with this sort of scary animation on a regular basis.
1 apparently... when overwatering a cute lil bromeliad and the water runs INTO the face of the telly... you can short out the entire electrical supply and kill the television! who knew?
2 oh... a reason like the fact that i have horrible bouts of insomnia when under large amounts of stress... or that I spent far too long watching the DNC last night and therefore missed the BBC world news all together.
3 i really doubt that ™ is necessary but it amuses me.
4 for some reason ridiculous potty humor sitcoms seem glamorous to me when they're in a foreign language.