Thoughts from the infirmiry

I spent most of Saturday on a couch, in front of a TV, full of cold medicine (me, not the couch). I jumbled down a few thoughts over the course of the day, now watch as I try to flesh them out into a half-decent blog post:

-Saturday morning television sucks. I know Dan mentioned the death of Saturday morning cartoons a few weeks back, but I had no idea how bad it had truly gotten. Between flopping down on the couch a little before 10 AM and the start of The American President at 2 PM, I watched - in no particular order - CTV Newsnet, a fifteen-year-old episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a NASCAR race, an Italian soccer game, and a twelve-year-old NFL game. My parents get literally hundreds of channels, and there was *nothing* that could hold my interest.

-Speaking of NASCAR, I seem to remember at least being able to tolerate watching auto racing as a kid, but I don't enjoy it in the least now. It's cars. Going around a track. Then they do it again. And again. How do people like this?

-The American President was a good movie. I'd never seen it before. It was written by Aaron Sorkin, who would later go on to create the TV series The West Wing, which I've been infatuated with for roughly a year now. The West Wing wasn't on any channel yesterday. Neither was Whose Line is it Anyway?, which is great to watch when sick.

-After the movie came a half-hour of one of the X-Men movies, which was a decent way to kill half an hour, then an episode of Scrubs. Then I turned on the Game Show Network, which has redeemed all of television in my books by airing the 1990s game show Supermarket Sweep, hosted by former CTV entertainment guru (and my distant relative) Tino Monte! Then the news and hockey until I went to bed.

-I also spent a couple of hours trying to sleep while listening to indie band Destroyer. I thought I'd like them better than I did, but they're good music for listening to while drifting in and out of consciousness.

-I think I've hopped on the Twitter bandwagon at just the right time. Normally I don't adopt technology until it's about to become obsolete (torrents, for example), but Twitter seems to be on a bit of an upswing.

-Three of the four cordless phones in my parents' house cause interference with my computer's wireless signal and disconnect me from the Internet if they're close enough. What are the odds?

-I guess I made a factual mistake in my complaint about news media not covering the whole wide world. When fires broke out in Australia last week, Jonathan Gravenor - the man who was CTV's short-lived Sydney bureau chief - reported from Melbourne on some sort of freelance arrangement. It's better than nothing.

-There seems to be a guarantee this year that if any member of my immediate family goes to a Kitchener Rangers game, the Rangers will win and Mike Mascioli will do something stupid.

Think that's all I've got for today.

--Ryan