"Fortunate Flipping:

Has this ever happened to you?

You flip around the channels, and you come to a movie – a movie you like, a movie you don’t like, a movie you never heard of and don’t know if you like or you don’t like – and it’s the strangest thing.  I wonder if there might even be a name for this phenomenon.  There should be.  It happens often enough to deserve one.

Here’s what I’m driving at.

You flip to a particular movie, and when you get there, they are at precisely the same spot as the last time you flipped to that particular movie.  It’s as if they were waiting for you, or something.  Or there’s an “app” on your TV you accidentally pressed called, “Book Mark.” 

“Hey, they are piling into the car, and driving to Vegas.  That’s exactly what they were doing the last time.”  It’s like an unpaused “Pause.”

You flipped away, the movie said, “We’ll hold the spot for you”, and exactly the same thing is happening when you come back. 

Have I explained that enough times?

It kind of feels like I have.

Anyway, what happened to me last night is the upgraded version of that.  I flipped to two channels, and what I discovered when I got there were two things I wanted to see, at the exact spot I most wanted to see them.

That’s exciting, isn’t it?  Worthy of italics?

Or is reflective of the depressed “Excitement Level” in my overall life?

Anyway, here’s what happened.

I flip to PBS (the American Public Broadcasting channel), and there’s the English murder mystery I watch, Death In Paradise – where a transplanted “White Guy” solves all the homicides for the clueless inhabitants of a Caribbean island.  (“Sarcasm intended.”)

There I am, arriving at the biggest moment of the Season 8 “Story Arc”, the character “Florence”, leaving the island – and the series – after her fiancée is killed, and she herself is shot in the stomach.

In the close to tearful “Goodbye” scene, “Florence” is so emotionally unhinged, she actually touches her crime-solving boss “Jack” on the top of his hand.  This is an enormously big deal.  You can tell, because they do a long “Extreme Close-Up” of “The Touch.” 

What can I tell you?   “Florence” is memorably leaving the series.  And I saw it two times! 

Just because I was flipping.

(My hope is that Caribbean-born “Florence” transplants to England, where she solves all the homicides for a clueless, all-white police force, in a show entitled, What Are You, Stupid?  But I satirically digress.)

Then, my televiewing luck got even better.

I flipped to another personal “reliable”, The Westerns Channel.

And there’s Red River, my favorite western. *

(* I first typed “my favorite movie”, which, quite possibly, it is.)

Not only have I flipped to my favorite western.  (And quite possibly my favorite movie.)  But I have arrived at my favorite spot in the whole movie!

Is this a fun evening, or what?

Two playful competitors, “Matt Garth” and “Cherry Valance”, – each reputedly “good with a gun” – exchange “hardware” so they can examine the other’s “tools of the trade.”  At which point, “Cherry Valance” memorably opines,

“There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun – a Swiss watch and a woman from anywhere.”

And as if that weren’t quotable enough, Valance insinuatingly adds,

“Did you ever have a good Swiss watch?”

Can you believe it?  I came in at that exact moment?

Maybe I was just lucky.

Like a fisherman, casting his net,

I flipped through the channels,

And I caught me two “Big Ones.”