We're flying home today, so I'll be back at you soon.


Since I've been in the land of a hundred channels, today's rerun is about our one little TV station in Seychelles:

Bratz? What the heck are Bratz? Bratz buzz is happening all over parenting sites and once again I'm out of the loop, in the cold, behind the curve, insert the new cool way to say old and uncool > here. What I'm picking up third, fourth and eleventh hand is that these are dolls of some sort, and although an ethnic diversity has been attempted, the marketing uses sex to sell toys to tots. Am I close here?

I could look these up on the Internet and learn more, but frankly I don't care. I don't have to care. I live beyond marketing.

Does that sound like a little slice of heaven? It is.

Although cable TV is coming to Seychelles, beginning an insidious creep around the island with tentacles not yet feeling their way up secondary roads, many, like us, have just one television channel, SBC. Unlike US TVs, our models, like those in Britain and many other countries, don't come preprogrammed, so you can pick the number you receive on. (We get SBC on channel 2, but my in-laws put theirs on 7. It's a personal thing.) Where on your remote you find the programs doesn't matter at all, however ... they will be hit and miss (the station will be going off the air for hours at a time), well past their sell buy date, and usually sloppily dubbed into French.

An hour of CNN in the mornings, followed by an hour of BBC constitutes an entire morning of programming. "Go do something else until lunchtime" is pretty much the message. Until a few years ago, SBC went off the air every evening at 7:30, telling people to eat their dinner, and then return at 8:30 for more entertainment. At around 11 pm, folks were told to go to bed just before the closedown sequence would run and the screen went black for seven hours. Nowadays, it's almost continuous from noon until 10 or 11 pm with hits like "Wiseguy" (in French) and South American soap operas.

We're not complete rubes, however, and have seen the entire first seasons of "Desperate Housewives" and "Six Feet Under" on DVDs that circulate from one household to the next, as one family's Amazon purchase is a community boon. The kids have been given a "Dora the Explorer", a couple of "Barney" and "Bob the Builder", so we get some of the TV-related references, but most go over our heads.

What we don't get at all are the commercials. I have heard of "Spiderman Simulated Web Goo", but have no idea what it could be. I know there's a new Playstation thingy about to pounce on the planet (or has?), but don't understand the significance. Sam, at three, has never seen an ad for an action figure of any shape or representation, and although he has heard of Superman and Batman he has no idea if either or both can fly.

We have no fast food franchises, no hypermarkets, no toy store chains, and my kids are happy as clams when we hit the beach and I unpack their fun stuff... an empty formula tin, a plastic scoop, two empty coconut shells and a magnifying glass.