How watching TV prepared me for life

As a child, I was often told watching TV was a waste of time. It was the "idiot box." My dad said that our eyes would become rectangles if we watched too much, something a little scary when you're 5 or 6 and watching "The Merv Griffin Show" after school.

Adults told me that you don't learn anything from TV.

Oh yeah? I beg to differ. I can make the case that TV shaped my life. Sitcoms like "Happy Days," "Sanford and Son," "Bewitched" and "Hogan's Heroes" taught me about conflict resolution. I learned how to be a man by watching "Rockford Files" and I learned how to gamble by watching "Let's Make a Deal."

Decades later, I still profit. The lessons I learned watching TV have guided me through life, as reliable as the applause that greeted Fonzie when he walked into a scene and say "ayyyyyyyyyyy."

Don't believe me? Check out these lessons:

Double-takes work. The correct way to express surprise is the double-take. Probably the best at this was Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show" – he mastered the google-eyed double-take anytime something weird happened. I still use that when someone catches me off guard. Sometimes, I go triple-take. Hilarious.

Problems generally solve themselves in less than an hour. No matter the problem, television difficulties got settled in one episode. The same thing is true in life. Most of my life issues have concluded in time for the final commercial break – except for a few times when a day ends with ". . . to be continued."

Most things are special. From the time I saw my first "ABC Afterschool Special," I was aware that in life and on TV, there are times that you encounter unusual circumstances to the point that it become "special." That's why, for instance, I said recently, "Today, on a very special 'Brad,' the lawn gets mowed," and Mrs. Brad wasn't bothered. She'd seen specials, such as the very special episode when I got sick and the episode when I got in a car wreck. The last one included a special guest star, our insurance agent.

Catch phrases are key. We all need catch phrases, something I learned from Jimmy Walker, Henry Winkler, Redd Foxx and even Jackie Gleason. I spent much of my life developing catch phrases. They change now from time to time, but my current catch phrase is "Brad says that won't work," followed by a glance at the "camera" (or whomever is near), with my eyebrows raised. Always gets a laugh.

Be suspicious of new people. On pretty much every show, the special guest star brought problems (see the mention of the special episode with the insurance agent, earlier). Because of that, I don't warm up to people much. I figure anyone who isn't a regular "cast member" of my life probably is just there to create tension for the "episode" that I'm living.

Foreign languages are easy. German isn't a different language, it's just English with a harsh accent. On "Hogan's Heroes," the characters  spoke harsh, German-accented English and the German people understood them. Same with French and Italian. Foreign languages are really just accented English.

Spinoffs are OK. Sure, my kids will move out and start their own lives. That's fine – it's like "Laverne and Shirley" or "Maude" or "Rhoda." It's not the end of anything, it's a spinoff and I'm glad I could help launch their "shows." But I still get the 8 p.m. time slot.

I am still "Dragnet" to their "Adam-12."

Could it go differently? Brad says that won't work. DOUBLE-TAKE!

Brad Stanhope is the star of "The Brad Stanhope Show." Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Password quandary is . . . confusing

Of all the things required in a digital world, there's nothing as difficult as passwords.

Not that it's hard to come up with them – that's easy. We use our kids' names. Our pets. A favorite year. A band or team. A nickname. A combination.

The difficult thing is mixing them up and remembering what password goes with what website.

How many times have you gone to a website and been asked to put in a user name/password combination that you created months ago? You might be able to figure out the user name, but maybe not.

And what was the password?

Did they require a certain number of characters? Did they require you to mix numbers and letters? Use at least one alternate character? Did capital letters matter?

Unfortunately, we're not always smart. I know that because I read SplashData's annual list of most popular passwords. The conclusion was based on leaked data (which might explain why "Target" was a popular password).

The top choices? You can probably guess. They might be yours!

But first, do you think the creators of the TV game show "Password" are angry that their show title has become a tech term?

You remember "Password." It was on both ABC and CBS and the host on both networks was Allen Ludden, who was married to the ageless Betty White. It involved celebrities and civilians on teams, which alternated efforts to guess the "password." If, for instance, the password was "mountain," the clue-giver might say "Rocky," "hill" and "big" in an effort to help their teammate. The point values dropped as more clues were given.

The best part was the voice-over when the password was revealed. It was a whisper, despite the fact that they added it in post-production and the competitors couldn't hear it if it were yelled.

"The password is . . . mountain," the voice-over man would say.

It led to a generation of people using that as a catchphrase. "The password is . . . dork," they would say when someone embarrassed themselves. (I know. I heard it plenty.)

Then came the age of technology and the need for user names and passwords. For some of us, the game show legacy lives on . . . every time I sign into a website, I whisper "the password is . . . " and then say my password (and hear Mrs. Brad say "dork.")

But anyway, back to the most popular passwords. What would you think are the top two choices?

They are "123456" and "password." Clever, right?

Based on that, we can presume that the most popular user names are "123456" and "user name."

So what should we do? Password experts remind us that we should change our passwords frequently (my alternate choice is "Match Game," which is ironic). They tell us we should have a combination of characters. There should be a nonsensical nature to them.

Of course, they don't tell us how we're supposed to remember them.

For me, it's simple. I've kept the same password for years – and it's easy to remember. And it certainly isn't "123456" or "password."

Promise not to tell anyone?

The password is . . . AllenLudden.

Now you know, so it's time to go change all of them to "MatchGame!"

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Daylight saving time, Rubio, Oreos and more

Time for me to clean out my notebook on the shortest day of the year. Literally. Today is a 23-hour day, since daylight saving time starts.

This is the best of all days, including Christmas, baseball opening day and the day the new phone books arrive on my doorstep, confirming that I am still alive.

It's the perfect combination of anticipation and a dramatic change in rhythm. The start of daylight saving time (and once again, why not call it "standard time," since it covers nearly eight months of the year) makes it still sunny at 6:30 p.m. When the 8-to-5 workers of the world come home, we have a few extra hours of daylight every day.

It's also the start of the ramp up for summer. With daylight saving time comes warmer weather, baseball spring training, car windows rolled down and barbecues. And summer re-runs, like "The Mac Davis Show."

Daylight saving time. The best day of the year.

On to the topics du jour . . .

• In case you're wondering, the other top days of the year include baseball opening day, the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, Thanksgiving, Mrs. Brad's birthday and that day every other year when the Giants win the World Series.
• Who will win "The Bachelor?" I say Lauren, but that's just a guess.
• More TV: I get reminded of how old I am every time I watch an episode of "House Hunters" and am impressed by a home – only to hear the people on the show talk about how old it looks. For instance, when did ceiling fans go out of style? And why?
• If you want to be confused, go to the store to buy Oreos. There are 50 different flavors. How did that happen?
• More Oreos: What happened to Hydrox, the old-school, low-budget alternative?
• If Marco Rubio drops out of the Republican presidential race, I'll be OK. Not because of his politics, but because I have repeatedly called him Ricky Rubio, the name of the Minnesota Timberwolves point guard.
• More NBA: If Stephen Curry retired today, he'd do it as the greatest shooter in NBA history. But a Curry retirement would also surprise his teammates and his fans, since there is another month left in the regular season.
• If you told the teenage Brad that a long beard, skinny jeans and shiny shoes would be stylish, I would have laughed so hard that I might have split my leisure suit.
• Mrs. Brad had left-shoulder surgery recently, which means one thing: There's a new southpaw arm-wrestling champion in our house!
• No one asked, but I consider people who named directional states lazy. North Dakota? South Dakota? West Virginia? North Carolina? South Carolina? There's no reason that they couldn't come up with a new name, is there?
• Along the same lines, is  York, Pennsylvania, the "old" version compared to New York?
• Why didn't Liza Minnelli star in a remake of "The Wizard of Oz?" It would have been much more dramatic, if that's possible.
• I can't formulate a great answer if someone asks me why it's OK to eat beef, but not to eat horse or dog meat. But please don't tell my dog.

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Dogs, mankind: 40,000 years of love

I thought I had an "old dog" story from my childhood: Calico, the leg-humping beagle who would have turned 50 last spring had she not been taken too soon.

Calico was old. She lived to be 15, despite being obese and hideously out of shape.

But it turns out that Calico was far from an old dog. So was George Washington's dog. Or any dog from the time of Jesus (think there was a generation of dogs named "Judas" in the late first century?).

Heck, a dog in ancient Greece can't be considered an old dog.

That's because research published in the journal Current Biology suggests that dogs were "man's best friend" as far back as 40,000 years ago.

Our relationship with dogs goes back 400 centuries! That goes back to when (according to my estimate) your great-great-great-great grandparents were alive.

The old-dog theory comes from science: An ancient bone discovered in Siberia.

Without getting too scientific (which would require me to learn), researchers say the Siberian bone shows that dogs and wolves split long before originally thought – with dogs becoming pets.

In that way, the dog-wolf split is like your aunt and uncle, who have been living apart for a decade, but still came to family events together, acting like they were a couple. Finally, they admitted that they lived in different places.

Dogs and wolves now admit they split up.

There was no real reason given for the dog-wolf split, but one scientist said it was because of creative differences. A rival group of scientists insist that it was due to Yoko Ono.

I think that's just unfair. I suspect dogs and wolves were simply forerunners to Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth. Or Jim Harbaugh and the 49ers. They just had to go different directions.

But that doesn't really matter. This does: Dogs appear to have been close to mankind 40,000 years ago, which goes back to the year 37,885 B.C., three years before Betty White was born.

A young Betty White may have had a dog!

Like many scientific discoveries, this timeline is an estimate. Scientists can't say for sure when humans began domesticating dogs, but sources say that further evidence suggests that an ancient man named "Grog" had a dog – there are drawings on a cave wall of a stick figure with a sad face picking up dog poop. "Grog hate poop" is written in ancient text.

Is that true? I'm not sure. But I'm not not sure, either. It's possible.

If you love your dog, take heart. Humans have loved dogs for a long time.

We have 40,000 years of telling them to stop barking, 40,000 years of arranging for someone to watch them while we vacation (or hunt/gather), 40,000 years of taking them for walks, 40,000 years of saying (in a variety of languages) "who's a good dog?"

If that seems like a long time, consider what it seems like to dogs.

Since they age seven years for every year we do, it is 280,000 years to them.

Or, in dog terms, "more than two."

They still haven't learned how to count beyond that after 40,000 years. That's because you can't teach old dogs . . . . Well, you know.

So did Grog.

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.