All My Gettings

I'm a tv on dvd junkie. I seriously cannot get enough. To me, a weekend can rarely be better spent than watching an entire season of this or that. The trick, in my current situation, is to find shows that invite my family's participation. Well, this is in addition to the trick of finding shows worth the emotional and chronological investment. For instance, my mom and brother could not get into The Closer, despite it being totally hilarious (if you don't think a police procedural can be funny, you need to rent a few discs of this). Yet, at the same time, my dad balks over Veronica Mars. And Battlestar Galactica is out, because my mom won't attempt to watch sci-fi. We did all get into Psych, and Law & Order is a good standby for our evenings. Part of the problem is that my parents won't watch most PG-13 movies, so a lot of shows are "bad" in their eyes. That means I won't be consuming the Sopranos with them and Six Feet Under is right out. Hell, even Dead Like Me can't make the cut.

So, in my recent trying to find something new, interesting and relatively clean, I decided to try Gilmore Girls. I have some friends who are big fans, friends whose taste I trust. I had also heard that the dialogue is lighting quick and that they pack in more cultural references than any normal person could pick up on. I scoffed at the latter. I mean, sure, I may miss the popular music ones, but I'm pretty in-the-know. Surely the writers are playing to a denominator that is slightly below mine. Mercy was I wrong. I feel, at times, that watching episodes require the viewer to have handy access to wikipedia. The allusions are so dense, so fast and furious, so arcane that no one short of a demi-god could get them all. However, and here's why I think the show works so well, the jokes are throwaways. You never need to catch them all to follow the plot, understand the argument or even enjoy the show. Sure, it makes me feel sort of dumb, missing so many things that clearly I, as an educated person, should know. But, it's such a wonderful program that I'll keep watching.

Also, may I recommend the following:

• Zooloretto: Spiel des Jahres 2007 in which you're building a zoo. It's fun, not too time-consuming and a great combo of luck and strategy
• Interacting more with your coworkers: last week saw me out of my library a bit more and I had a lovely time of it
• Posting angry pictures of yourself on social networking sites. Apparently, this draws more interest than smiling ones.
• Not getting your hopes up that the LDS Church is becoming more progressive. They'll just crush you a couple of weeks later with a statement to the contrary.
• Brown bagging it