TVSquad

Due to chronic illness, Greg Page, the one in yellow, has announced his departure from The Wiggles (read the statement, watch the video message). He's been suffering from orthostatic intolerance, which is a condition related to blood pressure, and hindered him from performing onstage. The rest of the Wiggles have been going through a tour with a replacement, understudy Sam Moran, for their usual yellow leader. Page plans to focus on managing his health.

Okay. Well. When I heard about this, I seriously died a little inside. The Wiggles was one of those few children's programs that I thought my toddler cousins should watch. None of that irritating Lazytown nonsense, thank you. The show is reasonably funny (I distinctly remember laughing for about two straight minutes at some face Murray made in one episode... and that crazy Jeff, always fallin' asleep) and songs are always fun (in high school, my friends and I would shout parts of "Hot Potato" to each other in the hallways. We were the coolest kids in school, let me tell ya). And sure, this doesn't mean the break-up of The Wiggles, but the absence of Greg's familiar face is still tremendously unfortunate.

By virtue of the fact that I have both 1) two young boys aged five and under and 2) a bevy of cable channels to choose from, I wind up watching a fair amount of children's programming. Some shows are better than others, and some versions of shows are better than others. For instance, I don't mind Jo-Jo's Circus but want to tear my ears from my head during Dora the Explorer. I also could spend an hour laying out my feelings that Steve was by far the superior host of Blue's Clues.

What I had never really considered, though, was the effectiveness of the logos for each show. Thankfully Jason Spector has done so. He's looked at factors like design, emotional effectiveness and accurate representation of the show itself when analyzing the logos. For the sake of fairness he's excluded ones for shows like The Wiggles that contain the characters since they're too straight-forward and can skew things like emotional connection. Go read the whole thing for yourself.

I have a job for you. I know that it's Sunday, and you're probably sitting in your pajamas watching the hilarious antics of Meet the Press, and I know you're tired after Adam asked you to count all of the remotes on Saturday (I have about 10 in total). However, this is important. I want you to count the number of televisions in your house, apartment, or yurt.

Personally, we have four televisions at Keller Steading; one in the family room, one in the playroom, one in our bedroom and one in the room that used be my home office but has now become my (soon to be) three-year-old daughter's room. This was to avoid any murder between her and my 5-year-old daughter, whom she previously shared a room with.

The TV's in the family room and the playroom get used fairly frequently, although the one in the playroom is used mostly to play DVD's and videos of The Wiggles and Lazytown for the kids. The bedroom TV used to be run frequently until our twins were born last month. The least used television was the one in my home office, which was used on occasion to watch DVD's and play video games.

Add to that my desktop and laptop computers, which can be used to play DVD's and downloadable television shows from places like iTunes, and I have a total of six 'television screens' in total. This is coming from a person who had two televisions in his house when he was growing up:  the big floor model that only had 13 channels and the black-and-white portable with the rabbit ears that was used when a storm hit and the cable went out.

So, how many televisions do you have, and do you think that it's too many? Include your computer monitors and laptops if you use them to view DVD's or downloaded television shows. Go ahead, I'll wait.