Waiting for it on DVD

I am an unabashed lover of renting TV shows on DVD from Netflix. One drawback of waiting for things to be released on DVD, but the advantage is that you can binge on back-to-back episodes with no waiting. Or for the even more extreme way, you can wait until the entire show is done so there you do have to deal with various hiatuses of the show throughout the year. This was/is my plan for watching the show Lost, which at some point I will do. I loved Lost during the first two seasons and then during the third season there was a lot of hiatuses throughout the season and I forgot plot points (which you really can't do for that show). The reason that I am thinking about this is that I am working my way through 2 TV shows at the same time. The first is Friends which is more for a nostalgic reason but there are parts of the show that hold up really well (i.e. the Beach episode at the beginning of Season 4 is still funny). The second show it the Battlestar Galatica reboot that SciFi made a couple years ago. I never watched it in real time but I always heard good things about it so I decided to bite the bullet and start watching it. And I have to say, so far I am really enjoying it. The show is way more emotional than I thought it would be. The casting it really good, I'm really enjoying Mary McDonnell. There is a total ringer in the cast (for me anyway) in Jamie Bamber, who I love as Matt Devlin on Law & Order:UK (and he was in the Horatio Hornblower movies on A&E, that I weirdly loved as a teenager; Ioan Grufford, I'm still in the tank for you but don't let anyone talk you into any more Fantastic Four movies). And now that I don't have cable, I'm loving Netflix more that ever!

Low Stakes Creativity

A few weeks ago, my roommate and I were at Hobby Lobby and ended up back by the paint-by-number kits. And so spurred on by generally goofiness, we decided that we should all get a paint-by-number to do together. After looking over all the options (there were a lot of animal ones), I picked out a Impressionist-like vista of a Japanese style garden/bridge. So I've spent a lot of hours over the last few weeks working on it (usually with my roommates) and yesterday, I finally finished it. And here it is:

Theater etiquette

I've been going to the AFI Silver theater for the past 3 weeks and so far everyone I've shared the movie-going experience knows to be quite in the theater and not use their phones. Apparently this is not the case at the Alamo Drafthouse which is a theater is Austin with a strict no texting/cellphone use policy. A women used her phone to text and was asked to leave the theater. She followed this up by leaving a nasty voicemail with the theater complaining about being removed from the theater. Then the Alamo Drafthouse used the voicemail as a PSA about theater etiquette. And it is awesome (though there are swearwords).