"Do you have any british dramas over here?"
"They don't do very well. We had Inspector Morse, Red Cap and a touch of Frost for a while, but they just weren't very popular."
"Why is that?"
"The US attention span isn't very long."
"WHAAAT???!!!"

So I spend the next five minutes back pedalling and some time later apologising to R. and offering to hit myself over the head with a three pound mallet. She is still mad at me.

It was extremely insensitive and stupid of me to make such an over generalization. But two things have emerged from this of interest.

The first being that one of the reasons I married R. is because of her extraordinary, nay inhuman, ability to get over and through my occasional lapses of judgement. I know I do stupid things. I recognize and apologize for them, so I don't need to be reminded of them from now until doomsday. R. gets this, and usually eases up pretty quickly. Partly, perhaps, because I don't do anything really wrong.

Anyway, when it was clear she was still mad at me this morning, although I didn't say anything, I realized in the car on the way in that I was getting mad at her, for continuing to be mad at me. Where's the logic in that?

Didn't take much figuring it out:
Anger is a means of deflecting pain.

By being mad at R., I could stop beating myself up for the stupid comment and instead switch to being annoyed at someone for still being unforgiving about it. Interesting.

That was one thing I discovered. I also reread the study I used to back up the comment I made.

And from that, I can offer a Public Health Warning: Don't stick your kids in front of the TV for hours on end.

The US does have more channels than the UK, all vying for your attention. The BBC in the UK makes you pay a license fee, so they don't have to advertise. ITV does advertise, but they don't have much competition. So generally speaking the TV stations in the UK don't have to 'grab' your attention. That's not to say that there isn't plenty of crap on. It does seem that they are moving to more glitzy, quick motion, jump-scenes-every-2-seconds kind of shows, and that does not bode well. So yes, the US does have more (significantly more) ADD cases than the UK right now (around 7 million diagnosed, god knows how many more undiagnosed) but the UK is not far behind if the trend continues. Is all the above just me Bullshitting, or is there evidence to support this? Well, this reportsuggests there is. Here's a quote:

In one epidemiological survey conducted in England, only 2 children out of 2,199 were diagnosed as hyperactive (0.09 percent). Conversely, in a study in Israel, 28 percent of children were rated as hyperactive by their teachers. And in an earlier study conducted in the United States, teachers rated 49.7 percent of boys as restless, 43.5 percent of boys as having "short attention span," and 43.5 percent of boys as "inattentive to what others say."

The figures may be misleading. But the gap, even if you double or quadruple the UK numbers and half (or quarter) the US numbers, is still phenomenal. And according to a study released this week, TV does appear to be at the heart of the matter.

So your mother was right. Too much TV watching rots the brain....

As for me, I will continue to apologise and try and make things up to R. Because it is one thing to be right. It is quite another to be happy...