David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published Dec. 23, 2003

Dora The Explorer preempts Vlad The Impaler

Keeping up with the Nielsens can be a lot of work. In some ways, it's even tougher than keeping up with the Joneses.

I don't think the Nielsen folks knew what they were getting themselves into when they enlisted our family's statistical help recently. TV viewing is, shall we say, slightly skewed in our house. It's not terribly well-rounded anymore, and I'm not sure access to our viewing habits is worth the factory-crisp $10 bill the Nielsens sent us for our trouble.

Even though we pay nearly $50 a month for cable access, we have but one channel. It's called Noggin, and it broadcasts a seemingly endless stream of kids' shows like "Dora The Explorer," "Bob The Builder," "Connie The Cow" and others. I'm not sure why most of the characters on this network are named Someone The Something, but that's the running theme. I'm waiting for animated features about Alexander The Great, Ivan The Terrible and Vlad The Impaler.

Friends of mine have sworn up and down they receive dozens and dozens and dozens of channels that feature a wide variety of interesting subjects like news, sports, entertainment and even something my friends call movies. I just shake my head in wonder. I vaguely recall that we used to get other channels, but that was a long, long time ago. I have a faint recollection of a man named Peter Jenkins ... or Jennings ... or Janson ... or something like that. I also remember a guy named Sipowicz. Does any of this ring a bell with you? And how about a contest called football? That word, football, sticks out in my mind for some reason. Maybe I'll Google it some day.

So when the Nielsen people asked us to be a Nielsen Family, we gladly accepted. Filling out the TV diaries would be a snap. We'd just mark down Noggin at the beginning of the day, indicate which times the TV was actually powered on, and that nice, crisp headshot of Al Hamilton would be all ours. Easy money. Cha-ching!

Perhaps I should clarify the Noggin situation a tad. It's not like our 2-year-old watches TV all day, every day. She actually gets bored with it pretty quickly. She'd rather do almost anything else -- playing outside, coloring, flipping through books, beating her little brother senseless, you name it.

The problem for us adults is that even when our daughter is preoccupied with other things, she has an uncanny ability to sense when the TV is on and NOT tuned to Noggin. Many's the time I've peeked in on Anna and Phil playing happily a few rooms away, seemingly out of earshot, and I've tiptoed to the TV, turned it on and changed the channel to something called CNN. Is that the right name? For a few blissful seconds, I gulp in what few headlines and leading stories I can, but before I can get fully apprised of the day's events, here comes my cathode-ray-sensing 2-year-old.

Shocked at what she sees, she acts as though she's never seen a TV in her life and sweetly inquires, "Is Elmo on?" By then, the 11-month-old has toddled in and wants to be brought up to date on what he's missed in the last eight seconds.

"Daddy wants to watch TV for a minute," I tell my two young conspirators, knowing full well that my viewing time is over.

"OK," she says, clearly dejected. As a way of expressing her dissatisfaction, she picks a fight with her "little" brother, who, although he's about 20 months younger, is now nearly her size. Add his increasingly stable footwork and thickening muscle mass to the equation and the fights are no longer one-sided. It's a safe bet that someone is going to cry (the only question is which one), and my afternoon's TV viewing is done practically before it began.

I'm sure it won't be too much longer before my "other" channels come back to our TV, but for now Noggin rules the roost. I may not know who the Democratic frontrunners are from day to day, but I can tell you with 100-percent certainty whether Swiper The Fox pilfered Dora The Explorer's backpack in Monday's afternoon episode. That was the episode in which Attila The Hun had special cameo role as Tico The Squirrel.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.