Welcome back, TV

I forgot to mention some fun news in my last couple of posts: we finally got our TV working. Our friend Sami came by last weekend to see our apartment, catch up (she's been on the road a lot for her work, and I hadn't seen her in a while) and pass on her old VCR. I mentioned in some past posts that one of the former tenants had pirated cable to the building -- who knows how it works, but it does -- but we couldn't actually get it to work because our TV and VCR are both so old that they're not cable-ready.

I had resigned myself to getting a new TV in the post-Christmas sales. Walt had even convinced me that we should get a flat screen one, an idea I had bought into by rationalizing that we'd amortize the cost over several years (the reason everyone convinces themselves that they deserve something overpriced). But now, with Sami's VCR, we are actually able to watch TV using her VCR as a tuner. It's pretty exciting: we haven't watched TV for a long time for a whole bunch of reasons (too long and boring to go into here), so just turning it on and plopping down to some dumb programming was really fun.

I have to say, though, that after a couple of hours of watching the bloom has definitely faded from the rose. I've never had cable before, so I was looking forward to the additional channels (especially the Food channel). The Food channel, except for that horrible Emeril Lagasse, is fun to watch -- but in general, not suprisingly, there's no correlation between number of channels and quality of programming. In fact, I've realized that it's primarily the same bad shows, there are just more of them (and in some cases, like those awful shopping channels, they're far worse).

But overall, it's still kind of fun to have a TV again. I watched The Fifth Element last weekend, and even with the commercials, I still enjoyed it. It's nice not to hunch over Walt's computer at the kitchen table to watch a DVD on a 12" screen.