Color theory! Now there is a lost art. 98% of the posts on this forum have no clue - white + black + gray, gray and more gray is the extent of their repertoire. Meanwhile if you look at what real designers are doing, color is in fact being used in new and contemporary ways but knowledge of color relationships is prerequisite This has nothing to do with taste and fashion, its how humans are hardwired to experience color. Yes exact shades/tones of color may go in and out of fashion but not colors themselves. When I read a so-called "pro" on this forum declaring she "hates" orange, for instance, that raises a red flag. Real designers love color, all colors, and none would write off or "hate" an entire section of the color spectrum. IMHO the problem is that by making design into infotainment, they had to dumb it down and make it more about emotion than fact.

I don't think there are all that many people watching the real estate shows. But they are so cheap and easy, that you only need a fraction of the viewers to make it worthwhile financially for the network. And if you've got people watching them because there's nothing else on, it brings up the numbers. Sarah's old shows might be 10 times as popular. But if HH costs 10% to produce, even if you only get 20% as many viewers (10% actually liking it, and 10% indifferent) , you're actually making twice as much money. Plus, they can probably produce 5 HH shows in a week. I have heard that there are hundreds of episodes already filmed, just waiting to be aired. The only hard part of creating one of those episodes is finding people who want to pose as "buyers". And everyone and their dog wants a few minutes of TV time. What we need is a new channel to come along, producing new original shows, stealing the viewers who watch HH only because there's nothing else on.

In 1955, we moved from Long Beach to Fremont; then two years later back to Long Beach; then a year and a half later back to Fremont. Zoris and go-aheads were terms we had to learn when we moved; I know there was a third term in California for the rubber sandals, but I'm not sure now what it was (perhaps thongs). In any case, even if we'd used thongs years earlier in California, it was one of the mysterious terms we encountered when we moved to Connecticut in 1965 (like gross and other words I no longer recall. I always assumed zori was a Japanese word, and after all these years, the Internet says I was right about that. Growing up, a soda was always pop with ice cream in it (LOL). In my childhood, sodas were something on the menu that we never ordered and thus never understood. We did drink root beer with ice cream, but that was always a root beer float. When I went to college, my friends had discussions about regional words and pronunciations (how many different vowels in Mary, merry, and marry?). We also debated the general terms for carbonated beverages. I ended up adopting soda to refer to fizzy drinks, much to the bemusement of my parents and brother -- and later my co-workers in the Chicago area.

Like Jakabedy, I watch the HGTV house hunting shows quickly too. I like hearing the bio of the person/couple at the beginning and I want to know what they claim their budget will be (usually it is X-Y range and you can count on the realtor starting at Y+ cost houses :). I FF through the long list of what they want, because who cares? l confess I rarely watch the classic first time buyer couple with zilch to spend episodes. No offense, but I just don't care all that much about seeing $100K starter homes in Buffalo LOL. I skip the commercials, I skip the 'debate' on which house. So basically, those half hour episodes are about 15 minutes of watchable. Love all the oceanfront/Caribbean/island house hunter shows but skip through the travelogue bits-I live in the subtropics so I don't really need to watch the giddy middle aged Ohio transplants take their first snorkel tour, jet ski run, nibble at the fruit market or drive along the island agog at the vegetation! and the ocean! and the sunshine! On Property Brothers I skip the tour of the dream house they can't afford because again, who cares? I skip the obligatory cutesy sequence in which the couple shows up at the newly purchased house so the wife can giggle while she ineffectually swings a heavy hammer at a kitchen cabinet or tile wall and then acts all googly that she's so little and frail and incompetent that nothing happens (aside-still a mystery to me why women on home fixer upper shows all seem to think that's so cute and adorable). I like the section in which the contractor brother discovers grave problems in knocking down every wall, or that the entire house is falling apart structurally. Skip commercials, and voila you have a 30-ish minute episode. House Hunters Renovation? I make a game of figuring which house they pick by scanning the teaser at the intro, then I skip right over the other houses they look at because (all together now) who cares? Skip the googly kitchen bashing that goes on there too and once more, an hour becomes 30 minutes. As for whether they are realistic, of course not. But I'm not watching them as cinema verite. If I want that I can cast my mind back to projects I've done on my own house. I watch that stuff for entertainment and mindless relaxing tv, and for me it works quite well.