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My friends Korby and Nancy were on Cash Cab this week… Awesome. They actually called me for the answer to the “SKOL” question, but the editors completely removed that from the show… so, instead, Korby looks like he completely pulled the right answer out of thin air, when, in reality, the answer was courtesy of my super quick and accurate google-fu. Korby, glad to be of help.. if this appearance nets you a girlfriend, you can add that to my tally too then.

Anyway… congrats to Korby and Nancy (oh, and the smiley guy Marvin too) on their rocking performance at Cash Cab.. Is it too late for me to get on Double Dare?

So yah.. I like TV. I like my Tivo. I like my couch. Together, they compose the triumvirate of happiness that is my living room.

“Shows I Watch Because I Actually Want To Watch Them”

The Office
Hands down, the best show on television right now. Yes, I loved the BBC original series, but the American version has taken the show to a new level. I love the breadth of the cast, and Steve Carell is, of course, a comic genius as Michael Scott. I fear, however, that the show is in danger of jumping the shark soon, though honestly, I didn’t expect them to be able to maintain the energy through a second season — the show’s writers mightly proved me wrong, so I look forward to it returning in the fall.

Heroes
Mutant super powers are cool. The main story arc (Save the Cheerleader, Save the World) isn’t as interesting to me actually — I just really like seeing all of the different manifestations of mutant powers and such.. Cuz yah, those are cool. This reminds me — The Tick was such a great show. Spoooooooon!

Friday Night Lights
Ever since my roadtrip through West Texas back in 2005, I’ve had this strange fascination with that whole region, so when Friday Night Lights aired, I had to watch. Set in the fictional town of Dillon, TX (and yes, FNL is meant to evoke memories of the book and the movie of the same name), it’s actually a damn good show about a high school football team in a small town. Sure, the show centers around football, but I wouldn’t call it a football show, per se, it’s much more about the town and the characters. Soundtracked extensively by the band Explosions in the Sky (so good!), FNL is melodramatic and cheesy, but damn, it’s good. Oh, and it sure doesn’t hurt that there are hot chicks on the show too. Critics love it, but the ratings don’t, so I don’t know if NBC will bring it back next year..

“Shows I Watch Because It’s Like A Trainwreck, and I Can’t Look Away”

The Hills
Yes, LC has grown up (a little) since Laguna Beach, and now has very her own show.. I honestly can’t believe that this is “reality tv,” since every episode is so perfectly crafted into a dramatic little unit. Unscripted? Perhaps. Reality? Probably not. But who cares, really? Again, the abundance of hot 20-something chicks seems to be a good formula. And I can’t really watch Laguna Beach anymore without feeling icky cuz I’m getting way too old for that.

The Real World
Speaking of feeling old, anyone remember the first seasons of The Real World? New York, San Francisco — wow, those were soooo long ago. Anyway, back in our day, it was all about following people around to their jobs and stuff as they tried to make it in these big cities. Then, apparently MTV got tired of finding interesting people to cast, and instead now just fills a house with a bunch of hotties and a hot tub. (ok, Jon Brennan wasn’t exactly “interesting” but he was amusing to watch as he did absolutely nothing the whole summer) Anyway, it makes sense cuz being on The Real World really is just a stepping stone to a lifetime career in The Gauntlet, Road Rules and C-List celebrity-dom. But yah.. the Denver season has just been non-stop fights, drunken sexcapades, and melodrama (one girl has a complete breakdown after she gets lost walking to the nail salon). USA! USA!

“Shows I Watch Whenever I Can Catch Them, I Can’t Tivo Them Cuz I Only Get Them Through My Cable Box That The Cable Guy Configured ‘Incorrectly’ So That I Get All Of The Premium Channels For Free”

Weeds
I heart Nancy Botwin. I seriously love this show. But, I have no idea when it airs because my Tivo has killed my ability to correlate temporal schedules with television airtimes. Oooooo! I just checked on the interwebs and the show is starting back up on April 1st (oops. the show isn’t starting back up in April.. reading is hard.) But yah, this show is truly great — go rent the first 2 seasons on Netflix. Mary Louise-Parker supposedly turned down a role on Desperate Housewives to do this show, and I’m sooo glad that she did cuz she’s da bomb. Zooey Deschanel is awesome in it, but I think she’s a guest star, but hopefully we’ll see more of her. And it’s on Showtime so they can swear and show boobs and stuff. And it has great music, including the theme song, “Little Boxes,” which was actually written about the houses in Daly City. See? You learned something today.

“Shows I Watch Because I’m Too Lazy To Delete The Season Pass Off Tivo and That Piss Me Off After I’m Done Watching”

LOST
Ok LOST. You had me riveted for the first season. I credit you for letting the networks know that America still wants smart dramas with complicated plots (without you, perhaps Heroes and FNL would never have made it past the pitch). But, YOU SUCK. I’m tired of watching you with your stupid plot twists and conspiracy theories. And WTF was up with last night’s stupid episode where I wasted a whole hour watching 2 completely new characters. I mean, seriously, where are all of these extra people coming from? I’m really getting annoyed with watching a whole episode and really just being frustrated at the whole thing. And we’re all gonna find out that this whole thing is just a dream that Walt had while napping on the plane ride to LA. You suck, LOST. I hate you.

24
Ok.. 24 is also starting to piss me off. First off, I’m kinda getting sick of all the torture. Really, think of something new to do, please. And yes, for the previous seasons, I’ve been willing to suspend disbelief for a whole bunch of things. I mean yah.. Jack runs into a room full of 30 bad guys, and is able to shoot and kill all of them. Ok, sure. It took you 5 minutes to get a court order from a judge at 3am? Sure, whatever. I’ll let that one go. But, Jack is able to kill one of his captors after being held in a Chinese prison for 2 years by BITING HIM IN THE NECK!?!? Come on. Next thing we know he’s gonna start having super mutant powers to bend space & time… oh wait.. ok, maybe that’d be cool. But seriously, this dude has had like 6 really bad days already. I think season 7 should be the day that Jack just did nothing but sit around. Maybe go to Home Depot. Bed, Bath and Beyond, if there’s time.

So.. one of my favorite shows when I was growing up was Tour of Duty… it ran for 3 seasons, and followed a platoon of soldiers through the Vietnam war… So, I was pretty excited that Sony decided to release the entire series on DVD last year, which I then bought for Andy for his birthday since he was a huge fan of the show too.. We used to have to tell our mom ahead of time what TV shows we planned to watch that week, since she didn’t let us just “channel surf”, so.. Tour of Duty was one of those shows for sure..

Now, I understand that re-watching shows from your youth sometimes doesn’t really withstand the time. Like, when I saw MacGyver again a few years ago, man, I really didn’t realize just how cheesy that show was. But after a few decades, MacGyver looks soooooo cheesy.. And what’s up with the re-use of like the same asian actors over and over and over agian?

Anyway, back to the Tour of Duty DVDs.. I noticed something was wrong when I first started watching the show.. The theme song for the show was “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones, and it was such a perfect song to open every week’s new show.. On the DVDs, that awesome song has now been replaced by this cheesy, generic tune. Yuck. So, from the very first second that we started watching, it was all wrong.. I watched a bit of the first season, and then.. put the DVDs away for almost the whole year, and tried to start watching them again today.. I realized now that it wasn’t just the theme song that they’ve replaced.. but ALL of the period music from the original series has been replaced by super cheesy generic music. AAARRGH. How f’n frustrating is this?!? The show is marginally watchable now, but man, with the original music intact, I’m sure it would still be awesome..

If you don’t think music makes a difference, here are the two intros…

With generic cheesy music

And.. with the original music

Hmm.. which is better? (damn, that stones song is good)

Anyway, someone actually has put together a petition to convince Sony to release Tour of Duty with the original music, but I dunno.. maybe they don’t really care, they already have my money. And, would I buy the whole series again? I dunno. Argh. They should let me upgrade the crappy version that I bought already.

Ok, I’m done ranting.. but honestly, it’s annoying to have 14 DVDs that you don’t even really want to watch.. Serves me right, I guess I should have just Netflixed it.

I’ve had the Akimbo now for one month, and so far so good…

Content continues to improve, they’ve added the BBC now, so that’s pretty cool. The main thing I watch regularly is the music videos — it’s weird that there’s no cable channel that plays music videos anymore (or at least one that I get — yah, I know there’s M2, but I don’t get that). I’m hoping that they’ll continue to add more channels, since access to content is really what they’re selling here. As the number of subscribers continues to grow, they’ll have more pull with the content providers; which is why it’s great to see that Akimbo is looking for beta testers for Windows Media Center… So.. if you’ve got MCE, go sign up and check it out!

So.. my new akimbo player arrived yesterday.. The Akimbo is a set top box that downloads video content from the Internet.. whoohoo!

The akimbo looks at home in my stack of gear underneath the tv.. It matches almost perfectly with my dvd player and Sony TiVo (which I got over the philips TiVo way back when because it was prettier). It’s as if all of these set top box designers went to the same sleek silver design school or something. The TiVo remote and the Akimbo remote seemed like they’re related… funny. The Akimbo currently hooks up with S-Video — no component video or HD yet, but that’s coming soon.. It would be awesome to have more HD content right now, since I’m getting sick of watching “Beavers” over and over and over again on INHD. That’s beavers of the animal variety, you pervs.

Upon setup, I did run into a vexing problem with my Netgear router.. For some reason, the router interfered with my access to the akimbo site, and I switch to a different router… Supposedly a firmware upgrade will fix that problem, but it seems strange that it would affect access to the servers at all, when other sites worked fine…

Anyway, once I solved my network problems, setup was a breeze.. I started adding content to the download queue.. whoohoo! Akimbo has a bunch of channels that you’d typically recognize… the History Channel, National Geographic, etc.. as well as a bunch of channels that I’ve never heard of, but look interesting.. Just last week, they’ve signed a deal with MLB to get compressed games, so that’ll be cool when that starts showing up on the Akimbo.. You’re able to add downloads to your queue really easily through their web interface, so that’s pretty cool to be able to control the box that way… I sure do wish there was some way to load my own video content on to the Akimbo though..

So far so good.. I’ll report more as I use the Akimbo more, but so far it looks pretty sweet…

Increasingly so, I cannot work in a quiet environment.. there are multiple theories as to why I seem to have an onset of ADD, but that’s probably why I definitely prefer IM to the phone or even email..

Anyway, I work with the TV on in the background as a nice way to quench the ADD part of my psyche — today, Tom Cruise was on Oprah today — just in time for sweeps week.. I really don’t usually watch Oprah, but honestly, the only other thing that was on was an episode of Macguyver with Teri Hatcher in it. I highly recommend against watching re-runs of Macguyver, since it makes you realize just how lame of a show it was (I swear it wasn’t so cheesy back then). Macguyver re-runs don’t hold up to the test of time.. and the fact that they recycled like the same 3 asian actors through every episode really started to get annoying.

So yah… back to Tom. he seems REALLY jazzed about dating Katie. I mean.. REALLY REALLY REALLY jazzed.. like almost in a Howard Dean, Tana from the apprentice, “Yeeaaaaaarrrrgghhhh” kind of way.. Overly excited.. He spent most of the first 45 minutes jumping on the couch and pounding on the floor, exclaiming how much in love he is with Katie. Oprah asked if he and Katie were going to get married and he hinted that they were discussing it all. I mean, yah.. she’s really hot/cute and all, but this whole thing still stinks of a badly orchestrated PR stunt.

At the end of the show Tom ran backstage and dragged a sheepish Katie out to meet everyone. She looked absolutely terrified, like a girl who’s PR agent told her that she’d be dating Tom Cruise for a little while. I mean.. what do they have to gain? It’s not like they have new movies to promote, or that they’re filming Mission Impossible 3.. oh.. wait..

Damn, those two can act.

Anyway… thanks a bunch to defamer for photoblogging the whole show…

I tivo’d today’s final rounds of the Masters, so I could watch whenever I wanted…

So, I’m watching the match, which was awesome… DiMarco was doing a great job on keeping right on the heels of Tiger, despite great breaks like Tiger’s awesome birdie on 16… They get to hole 18 and.. “bu-boop!”

Tivo had stopped the recording before the Masters was over.

Man.. I was so pissed (after watching 4 and a half hours of the masters) to find that tivo had stopped recording the masters RIGHT before the 18th hole. Um. yah, so I didn’t get to see DiMarco tie Tiger, nor did I get to see the playoff. Grr.

Yah, yah.. I know that I should have told tivo to keep recording after the scheduled time, and blah blah blah blah.. But, it didn’t record, and I’m mad. Tivo should really figure out a way to figure out when to properly stop a recording. Hmm.. now that I think of it, maybe they have in the newer tivos — and since I have a series one tivo, this complaint is moot. Well.. in that case, they should let me transfer my lifetime series one supscription over to a new tivo.

Well, tivo was good for one thing..

it allowed me to replay tiger’s snot rocket. eew.