Ox Notes: June 4, 2009

I'll get the bad news out of the way first: TV is bad for infants and reality show contestants.

Everyone knows that it's bad to use TV as a baby sitter, but a recent study reports that infants' language development suffers just being in the room with an adult watching TV.

TheWrap.com posted a two-part article about the dark side of participating in reality shows. Part 1 highlights eleven successful and unsuccessful suicide attempts by reality show contestants. Part 2 features commentary by mental health professionals.

In happier news, Bravo announced that the sixth season of Top Chef will take place in Las Vegas. EW interviewed Season 5 contestants Carla, Fabio and Jeff about life after Top Chef.

With Alec Baldwin already a star on 30 Rock and Daniel Baldwin joining his brother, Stephen, on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!, Variety's Brian Lowry speculates that NBC really stands for "No Baldwin Control."

In Dancing with the Stars news, Season 8 runner-up Gilles Marini had shoulder surgery on Tuesday. The trophies belonging to Season 8 champs Shawn Johnson & Mark Ballas are already broken.

Variety has a great article about the death of TV theme songs. These days, network shows devote as little as ten seconds to opening theme music.

The Variety article prompted me to search YouTube for great TV themes. I found this compilation of ten cartoon theme songs from the 1980s. Of the shows featured in the video, the only one I watched was Jem, and I still remember all the lyrics to its theme song. The rest of the songs are pretty epic, even if all of the cartoons seem to involve space robots: