Category: Television

The power of addiction

I have a problem.

I don’t sleep. I belay eating. I forgo important domestic and feline upkeep duties.

Instead, I stare fixedly as I impulsively watch episode after episode of the West Wing.

It’s starting to border on the ridiculous. It seems as though it is impossible to only watch one episode. As soon as one finishes I have to start the next one, until I have watched half a season in 2 days (while still managing to put in 10 hours work as well).
And the irritating thing is that with nothing else to do in Nambour, Simone is watching episodes even faster than I am, and so she is both ahead of me (which for reasons of general stupidity annoys my sense of competitiveness), and also keeps on buying new seasons, which means that this is only going to end when either I develop the will power to stop myself watching (and I think we all know that’s not likely to happen any time soon) or we reach the end of the series, in about 3 seasons time.

In the interim I don’t really need sleep do I…

One season in one day

Last weeks I continued my first pay year trend of recklessly impulse buying DVDs that catch my eye, and bought online the first season of a british drama that I had seen half an episode of on TV about a year ago.

And as with my previous impulse buys I have not regretted it at all.

Well almost not at all.

You see British TV being what it is, the episodes are really high quality, but you only get 6 episodes per season (as opposed to American TV where you get twenty-something episodes a season, but half of them are crap, and the other half vary between tolerable and possibly rewatchable).

As such the problem arises that when you sit down with a season on DVD you end up watching the entire season in one go (as I did yesterday), and then you lamenting the fact that you don’t have any more to watch.

….maybe I can import the next season or two from the UK..

Wombat wombling

I was watching this thing on the ABC this afternoon all about a couple of guys who were doing PhDs in the alpine ecology of the Kosciusko National Park area, and they had some really cool footage of all sorts of animals running around in the snow. Kangaroos, Emus, Wombats.

Now wombats look cool enough at the best of times, with their cute little trundling and wombling around, but they really look cute running around in the snow, chewing on the patches of grass sticking through, and drinking from melt streams.

Creepy! Crawley! Bugs are cool!

I’ve been watching the David Attenborough series Life in the Undergrowth, which is all about the fascinating diversity of insects and arachnids (spiders and scorpions) and the evolutionary adaptations that they have developed in order to master all the world – wings, silk, armour, breathing without being in water, breeding without water.

It really is pretty cool the various things they have done in order to fill all the millions of little ecological niches that they occupy.

The whole thing takes me back to my childhood, where we used to watch nature documentaries all the time, which was always a strangely enjoyable family activity, despite the fact that it made me vastly geeky (and by extension in primary school, unpopular).

Celebrity confusion

It was very funny flicking past Oprah the other day long enough to watch her being utterly confused by the concepts of how the internet worked.

The guy who was explaining, who was using really basic terminology and analogies to explain the system, would explain how routers and network switches and DNS servers worked and Oprah’s brow just furrowed deeper and deeper. She seemed to kind of think that it all just went through the air, and had no idea how things (emails for example) found their way from their starting point to their intended destination.

Very funny to watch. Also very scarey when you consider that Oprah is apparently a pretty intelligent individual. Obviously not that tech savvy though..

Jack likes downhill

We had the Winter Olympics on last night and they had the downhill skiing on, and it turns out that Jack is a huge fan.

Well.. he likes intently watching the skiers and pouncing at the TV screen when it looks like the fast moving brightly coloured skier was coming close.

It really was most delightful to watch. The concentration was so amusing, and the leaping and jumping was a real hoot.

We really are terrible fur parents. Always talking about our little kiddy.. I mean kitty.. 🙂

Stroke ignorance

All the TV coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hospitalisation after his stroke has been something of a depressing reminder of the general ignorance within the average population of health matters.
Journalists, politicians, and well-wishers alike have been commenting on his condition and recovery progress as though they expect him to be back leading the country in a few weeks or months.
What they seem blissfully clueless about is that people who have major bleeds into their brains (and Sharon has had at least two from what I can tell from the new reports) are generally lucky if they return to being able to tie their own shoelaces, let alone leading a country.
The statistics on stroke alone are depressing enough: 1/3 die in at the time of the stroke, 1/3 die within 1 month, and overall only 10% return to living at home.

Edumication

Over the last couple of nights I have been showing Simone a bunch of episodes from the BBCs 7 Wonders of the industrial world documentary series.

I have of course seen them all before, but it’s still good to see them again, as the are really well done shows, about cool stuff, and highly intellectually stimulating as well, and Simone seems to be enjoying watching them for the first time.

We have also taken to watching David Starkey’s BBC documentary Monarchy on sunday afternoons, which reinforces that the english (and by extension the europeans) have a fantastically rich history, and almost all of it is profoundly messed up. It does make great viewing though.

Grumpy old folk

This evening there appeared on the ABC a BBC show called Grumpy old Women, which I had assumed was a follow up to another wildly funny BBC show called Grumpy old men, but it was not.

Instead, it was just plain pathetic.

Where the grumpy old men had fulfilled their claim, vocally proclaiming their dislike (in relatively equal measures) from mobile phones, fast food, modern music, contemporary politics, teenage fashion, and, well the list went on. The grumpy old women on the other hand simply seemed to solely winge about men. Oh, and claim that they were somehow inherently better than men (although with no particular evidence other than their whinging opinions).

It basically came across as a bunch of worn out womens lib veterans trying to justify their continued bitterness at the world.

Classic Cricket

A while back I watched a fantastic documentary on the ABC about the 1960-61 West Indies cricket tour of Australia. Today I was reminded of it, and went looking to see if I could get a DVD of it, and while I had no success on the DVD front I did find the website of the show, which in itself is quite a good read. Here it is:

http://www.abc.net.au/calypso/history.htm