Top Four

I don't own a TV. Instead, I have a subscription to Netflix and thus everything I watch must be out on DVD so I can watch it on my computer. It seems to be the better deal, anyhow. When I was home with my parents a few weeks ago, I found out they got TiVo and now were obsessed with recording shows and sports so there was "always something on". My father was watching a baseball game he was simultaneously recording. He explained to me that he had started watching the recorded version about a half hour or so after the actual start of the game, so that he could fast-forward through all the commercials, and by the end of the game, he would have roughly caught up with the game in real time. But as he clicked through the guides and channels as he explained, he accidentally clicked back to the real game, and ruined the whole complicated thing. "What's the point of watching the whole game if you can know what the score is later?" I asked. I forget what he said, and I don't have a good grasp on why you would watch sports on TV in the first place, but if I was him, I probably would have muttered something like, "Technology."

Here's a self-indulgent list of some of the entertainment I've been enjoying.

The Office

I'm referring to the BBC version. It is harder to understand than I expected, due to heavy accents and weird Brit slang ("round here we say birds, not bitches") but it's well worth the strain on the ears. There's nothing like a show that makes you feel like you're being tortured at the same time that you're about to die laughing. I watched it with a friend who actually screamed every five minutes. What I love about the show is that it's the pinnacle of modern tragedy. The office is supposedly all about "having laughs", but it also shows deep inequalities between gender, race, and class, plus the general tragedy of working a miserable job with an incompetent boss.
Tragedy is something that I don't think the new American version can handle. I haven't seen it, but I caught Conan's thing with the Emmys on YouTube, and I feel justified in judging it. The characters are cheap, accentless ripoffs of the original character. Tim's counterpart is named "Jim." How original. "Jim" is not cute at all.

Arrested Development Season 3
Just came out on DVD yesterday, I believe, and was celebrated by a marathon at the Black Sheep. I couldn't stay for the whole thing, as watching episode after episode of a really great TV show is like shoving an entire bar of Swiss chocolate in your mouth: It's really delicious and indulgent, but leaves you with sort of a headache and a feeling of regret because you somehow know you'll never have another bar of Swiss chocolate like that again, and you totally should have savored it. As this was Arrested Development's last season, it's completely like that.

Weeds
This show is in its second season now, and I hear it's hilarious, but alas I have no access to current Cinemax shows. I'm looking for someone to invite me over to their hooked-up house on a weekly basis.

Annie Hall
Sometimes it makes sense why Europeans are in love with Woody Allen and want to go to New York.