Plinky asked, “Com­mer­cials these days: Most­ly enter­tain­ing, or most­ly annoy­ing?”

Emp­ty adver­tis­ing sig­nage

How would I know? Seri­ous­ly, who watch­es com­mer­cials? Most of what I watch is online, and I don’t pay atten­tion to the ads or they’ve been edit­ed out. If I’m with my daugh­ter she has some ser­vice that lets her even pause live tele­vi­sion for a bit, then fast-for­ward through the com­mer­cials. Oth­er­wise, ad time is a good time for read­ing or get­ting up for a stretch.

I real­ize that some peo­ple con­sid­er com­mer­cials to be enter­tain­ing enough that I’m told they watch the Super Bowl just for the new ones that are launched then. I’ve nev­er been that bored. There’s always some­thing to read, sing, play, stitch, or learn with­out seek­ing out adver­tis­ing!

Plinky asked, “What do you think of real­i­ty tele­vi­sion? Do you watch any real­i­ty TV shows?”

Cat watch­ing him­self

I don’t watch any real­i­ty TV shows, and I detest every one that I’ve seen except The Sing-Off. Even with it, all I care about is lis­ten­ing to the music. I can’t stand the non­sense with the judges, the “let’s take the con­tes­tants to a school/senior center/etc.” seg­ments, or any of the “mak­ing of” bits. The per­son­al­i­ties usu­al­ly detract from the music, if you ask me.

All the oth­er real­i­ty shows seem to require arti­fi­cial dra­ma of some sort, which is dis­gust­ing and child­ish. Who wants to see that crap? Not me, for sure. I don’t like con­flict between peo­ple in my per­son­al life and I don’t want to see it between strangers on tele­vi­sion with­out a real­ly good plot and way bet­ter act­ing than any­body on any real­i­ty show is capa­ble of.

I use the tele­vi­sion for enter­tain­ment, which means escape. I want to see some­thing that’s hon­est­ly fic­tion­al and very dif­fer­ent from my real life or any­thing I’m like­ly to encounter, so I watch foren­sic dra­mas, police procedurals/mysteries, and sci­ence fiction/fantasy shows when I do watch tele­vi­sion.

Do any of you maybe record Doll­house? We don’t do cable, so Katie and I have been watch­ing it stream­ing on Hulu. This com­ing Fri­day’s episode isn’t going to be streamed, though, and we don’t want to miss it. Any chance of some help? Pret­ty please?

It’s fair­ly amaz­ing how much you can find to watch online now. Legal­ly! I used to get the CSI DVDs from Net­flix when they were released each year, and watch the whole sea­son in a marathon. Now we watch all three CSI shows on the CBS web site. The same goes for NCIS and Numb3rs. While the site says you can see full episodes of The Men­tal­ist, I haven’t found a way to do it. ABC has The Unusu­als and Cas­tle stream­ing. Burn Notice, Chuck, Bones, and Lie to Me are all on Hulu.

There’s anoth­er show we watch once every few weeks, um, Leg­end? Leg­ends? Some­thing about a Seek­er. I can’t han­dle more of it than that, because the plots rely heav­i­ly on stu­pid­i­ty. That’s too annoy­ing, and while there are pret­ty peo­ple run­ning around in nice scenery, it isn’t enough to make up for the stup.

Com­cast keeps send­ing more and more plain­tive offers, try­ing to get us to sub­scribe to their cable TV and tele­phone ser­vice. When we did sub­scribe to cable, we did­n’t get around to watch­ing much. We don’t chan­nel surf or just leavve the set on for noise, so it was wast­ed mon­ey. I sup­pose if we’d also got­ten a Tivo or some­thing sim­i­lar, we would have record­ed the shows we watch. But we did­n’t, so we still watched them online when we did watch them.

We can still use the tele­vi­sion to view shows, thnks to a nifty cable Sam pro­cured. That’s bet­ter than watch­ing on a com­put­er mon­i­tor, and we can watch togeth­er. (It isn’t much fun watch­ing alone.)

I’ve been on a video spree over the last month or so, get­ting caught up with all three C.S.I. shows. We also fin­ished watch­ing sea­son 2 of Torch­wood, and real­ized that some of it would­n’t make sense unless we get caught up on Dr. Who.

Annoy­ing­ly, all three C.S.I.s end­ed on cliffhang­ers. I do hate that. I would keep watch­ing next sea­son any­way, so why the tease? They’re all very well estab­lished. And one episode of C.S.I. Mia­mi had a “spe­cial scene” that was only avail­able on the offi­cial website–and it isn’t there any more! What are all the view­ers who did­n’t view it in real time sup­posed to do? I found a descrip­tion of the scene, but it was­n’t as good as actu­al­ly watch­ing it.

Sam is always amazed that I can watch that stuff. Hon­est­ly, the vio­lence and blood do both­er me, espe­cial­ly when there are ran­dom crimes. For some rea­son, it does­n’t both­er as much as some oth­er things, maybe because I take off my head­phones so that I don’t have to hear some sounds, and I gen­er­al­ly avoid look­ing at the bod­ies too much.

The part I like is the puz­zle, fig­ur­ing out how a crime was com­mit­ted and who did it. I know the shows are incred­i­bly unre­al­is­tic in many ways, from the fact that real crime scene inves­ti­ga­tors almost cer­tain­ly do not go run­ning around with guns to arrest crim­i­nals to the real­i­ty that nobody can be pro­fi­cient in every sin­gle type of foren­sic analy­sis that needs to be done. Actu­al foren­sic labs are almost always under­fund­ed, so get­ting evi­dence gath­ered, processed, and ana­lyzed in hours (as the shows often depict) is pure fan­ta­sy. Real foren­sic labs don’t usu­al­ly get the equip­ment they need reg­u­lar­ly, and they cer­tain­ly don’t have the lat­est and great­est toys of every sort in handy forms that every sin­gle tech can car­ry in his kit “just in case” he ever needs it at a scene.

I can sus­pend my dis­be­lief that much. And I can almost ignore the non­sense of “trac­ing an IP address to an email address” to get a crim­i­nal’s iden­ti­ty in sec­onds. It’s Hol­ly­wood.

I watched the first episode of The Clos­er tonight, since I’ll have to wait until fall for more C.S.I. I don’t like cop shows as much as foren­sics shows, but I was intrigued by Kyra Sedg­wick­’s per­for­mance in some pro­mos I saw a few years ago. Her “Atlanta accent” is atro­cious, but the char­ac­ter is inter­est­ing. I don’t know why the “big plot twist” that was obvi­ous to me in the first few min­utes of the show would take a bunch of pro­fes­sion­als days (appar­ent­ly) to fig­ure out, though. Maybe they’re too gen­der-bound? Who knows.

I sup­pose that if we had cable and I hap­pened to run across The Clos­er, I would watch it again. I think I’ll find anoth­er foren­sics show the next time I’m bored enough to go look­ing for view­ing mat­ter, though.

Nope, not Sun­day. Most­ly. Well, maybe some­times. Damned ear­worm!

I was try­ing to be Very, Very good today as I wrapped up my assign­ments for the semes­ter. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I got com­plete­ly dis­tract­ed by the fact that I had­n’t done a bloody thing with Pagan Par­ents since adopt­ing the site. I got it work­ing at a min­i­mal lev­el, so it should be easy to add con­tent now.

Hint Hint: Con­tent! I need con­tent! Col­lab­o­ra­tors! Seri­ous­ly, if you have opin­ions about par­ent­ing as a pagan, or you know of resources that I should link to, please let me know. If you know some­body who might want to write an arti­cle or blog with us there, have him or her con­tact me.

Dex­ter. Katie bor­rowed the first sea­son DVDs from her boyfriend and we start­ed watch­ing them today. Now I don’t want to stop.
You have to have a fair­ly mor­bid sense of humor to appre­ci­ate them. I was afraid they’d be too gross, but it’s no worse than CSI.

It’s a very Scor­pio series.