I'm subject to the Sunday Night Blues, but Monday morning is seldom as bad as the prospect of it. At least at work no one begs me to turn on another episode of Caillou. Count yourself lucky if you need an explanation. He's the title character of a PBS children's show, available on demand through Netflix, that features shapeless but tirelessly cheerful parents, playful grandparents, a little sister whose spats with Caillou are the occasion for sermonettes that quickly achieve the desired effect, friendly firemen and boat captains who invariably let Caillou steer, and a jingly theme song that on the hundredth hearing will put you in mind of Munch's most famous painting. Watching the show I sometimes wonder whether to be as good a parent as Caillou's I also would have to suffer a certain infantilization. One of the lies relating to parenthood concerns how it's FUN and REWARDING to play for hours on end with people four years old.
My real reward is usually Sunday evening's new episode of Mad Men, where beautiful women have been known to sleep with slack old grotesque men in order to land the Jaguar account for the firm (and gain a five per cent share in it). Colleagues, meanwhile, hang themselves in their offices. It's hard to imagine a helpful explanation rolling off the lips of Caillou's daddy. Relief! We, however, have Direct TV, which is subject to losing its signal when a storm goes through, which is what happened at precisely 9:07 p.m. Central Daylight Time yesterday. Aaarrgh! To bed early with Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk, a reasonable substitute.
More bad news for weekends: Click and Clack, hosts of NPR's Car Talk, have decided to stop making new shows. All devotees have their FAVORITE CALL EVER--mine concerns the fellow whose dog, riding shotgun, succumbed to a bout of car sickness and vomited all over the dash. Some of the juice seeped down through some vents, with the result that, even after several aggressive cleanings, use of the heater elicited an odor that put his passengers in mind of aged, warm puke. The idea of the show, consistently realized to humorous effect, is that the hosts would have a lot of fun with the caller's car question before dispensing what gearheads assure me is really good advice. They had more fun than usual with this fellow before advising him to sell the car--in the summertime.