Wait. Sorry. That's Home And Away. Neighbours buses in some brunettes as part of Australia's cultural correctness laws.

Good lord. I was just drafting a "No, you're thinking of Home and Away" response to the first paragraph. dw knows his Aussie soaps.

Cultural observation: American soaps generally have only a passing resemblance to real life. Everyone is dressed in designer clothes. Everyone sleeps with everyone else, eventually. Money is only an object when a character is being forced to become a hooker.

British soaps are gritty-realistic. Set in a working class area. Broad range of body types and age groups. Most characters are struggling to get by.

Australian soaps feature storylines like "Timmy gets a haircut".

WWE: soap opera for men. Relevant sexes are goodies and baddies. The central concern of who's sleeping with who is replaced with the question of who's beating the crap out of who. Such (non-wrestling) women as there are manage the difficult trick of being both two-dimensional and inflatable.

American, British, and Australian soaps summarized in one sentence.

American: Erica Kane awakens from her contract renego, er, COMA to get married for the 1,807th time.

British: The body is under the patio.

Australian: KYLIE!

dw knows his Aussie soaps.

It's what I get for watching tea-time British television. Occasionally, I wonder how different TV would be if Vanna White and Carole Vorderman had been switched at birth.

Money is only an object when a character is being forced to become a hooker.

and every soap has one! and usually, it was out of town amd some old customer comes into town and tries to make a "purchase", and someone finds out and tries to blackmail her . . . it will get more interesting when you have the male hustler.

Okay, on Bones: I'm still loving the lab guys. This week's corpse is, for some reason, really grossing me out.

The topic of the third lecture, in early November, will be "Diagnosis and Treatment of So-Called Clinical Depression with the Hubbard Mark Super VII Quantum Electropsychometer".

If it weren't for the "So-Called" in the title. I'd be laughing and laughing. But there are few things I hate more than asshat crackpot dickweeds who don't think depression is real.

The fourth lecture is "Neuroanatomical Changes Resulting from Chronic Methamphetamine Abuse: Can Narconon's Sauna and Niacin Treatment Program Help?"

Sure, if by "help" you mean "kill them DAID."

I was addicted to Eastenders for about five years. I'm not sure why.

I got better when I moved out of my parents house to go to college and had no cable.

It's a weird little blip on my TV history.

(I did watch some soaps because my sister watched them, but they weren't ever more than an idle fling. Eastenders was appointment TV.)

(I'm a little ashamed of this. Thankfully, all I can remember about the show is how very grey all the colors seemed to be.)

Aw, man, what wouldn't I give to be sitting in the back of the room with Teppy at Cruise's third lecture. It'd be so bitterly, articulately lovely, like the pharmacological/depressive activist version of sitting between Dana and shrift at a con panel discussion.

Australian: KYLIE!

Ah, it's been well over a decade since she graced Ramsay St. Undoubtedly its most famous resident, though.

Aw, man, what wouldn't I give to be sitting in the back of the room with Teppy at Cruise's third lecture.

Oh, we wouldn't be in the back row -- I'd be lunging at him onstage, to rip his pancreas out with my teeth.

And you'd be posting bail for me.

I need a good definition/explanation of what filk is.

Who wants to hook me up?

Who wants to hook me up?

Bonus points for defining filk using a filk.