Bingo!

And just like that another baby blanket is finished! My worries about an insufficient amount of yarn turned out to be unfounded. Although I don't have a lot of leftover yarn, it wasn't a nail-biter of a knitting conclusion for the project. I'll post a picture tomorrow.

As I usually do, I had the television on while working on the blanket this evening. I've already given up on the Reds for this season, so I didn't feel like I had any great obligation to keep the channel tuned to tonight's pounding. Instead I checked out what sounded like a magnificently terrible idea: National Bingo Night.

Honestly, I decided to watch for the kitsch factor than any genuine interest in the show. It's why I'll probably check out the first episode of this fall's surefire train wreck Cavemen, a race relations comedy featuring the Cro-Magnon characters from the GEICO commercials. Televised bingo? Seriously?

Several years ago while bored out of our skulls taping high school graduations, another guy and I came up with the idea of World Championship Board Games as a TV event. I had come across ESPN2 airing a Magic: The Gathering tournament, which inspired us to propose other brilliant programming ideas. (I think our other idea was Can You Grill It? The point of this hypothetical game was to guess if an item could or could not be grilled.) Little did we know that televised poker would become a big deal years later. Now a network is devoting an hour to interactive bingo. Unbelievable.

National Bingo Night is the perfect show to knit to. It requires paying very little attention to what is happening unless you're playing along. (Even then, I suspect you could manage both.) There's not much of a need to look at the TV, which is a benefit for those like me who still spend an inordinate amount of time watching the needles instead of the monitor.

It isn't a good show. The host's voiceovers are pretty obviously edited in after the fact and not something he's saying on set, and I could feel myself getting dumber being in the same room with a TV displaying it. Yet it was transfixing in a way that game shows can be. It isn't destination programming--I can't see people recording this--but it's a strangely watchable option if nothing else is on.

*shudder* Sitting at home on a Friday night knitting and watching bingo on TV...could I sound more like a grandmother?