soap_opera raze you never thought you'd find a friend in the second longest-running american soap in history, your eyes glued to a blinking black box while you eat german potato salad from n&d and drink iced tea with a quote burned into the belly of the bottle cap. in the months before the start of your freshman year, you follow the machinations of a mob boss and his scheming wife. you watch alan quartermaine drown himself in alcohol and dream he's a corpse still breathing inside his casket. you root for lucky and elizabeth, so young and in love, and swoon as they slow_dance to bryan ferry singing the shirelles. and when the writers conspire to pull them apart and recast two pivotal roles with actors who look pretty but aren't a patch on their predecessors, you throw your remote at the screen and scream, "you're just like all the rest." 250112 ... epitome of incomprehensibility When I was a kid, there were soap opera recaps in the Montreal Gazette. That vanished with most of the TV schedule grids, with the personal ads. (A dull horoscope stubbornly remains. The comic strips have also changed for the worse. Fast falls the second age of Middle Earth.) Anyway, I think I liked reading short summaries of 10 or 12 soap operas better than I would have enjoyed watching just one. The best were the supernatural ones with no context. "Zane turns Alice into a vampire, but he loses his psychic powers when Myrtle steals his amulet." And surprise! someone always gets pregnant with someone's baby. (It'd be more surprising if someone got pregnant with no one's baby. "No, it's not yours. It's not mine either. I don't know how it got there.") 250112 what's it to you? who go blather from