If you thought your only TV viewing choices were reruns, reality TV, and campaign coverage, think again. Hulu.com has popular excerpts and full-length shows available to watch online.
There are shows that are currently on TV: House, Chuck, Monk, The Office, Heroes, and several others. There are also some great shows from years ago: St. Elsewhere, Picket Fences, The Bob Newhart Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and many more.
I've been watching WKRP this morning and have been amazed at how it's still funny and relevant after almost 30 years. I wonder if I'll feel that way about any of the shows on now in even 10 years.
If I want to relive the '80s (although, really, who would?) I can watch The A-Team or Fame. And there's plenty of shows from the '70s from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Kojack (the original one, but they have the one from 2004 too.)
The excerpts from Saturday Night Live are sortable by season so you can watch scenes from back when it was funny (your pick as to when that was...for me it was only the first few seasons - pre-1980.)
The shows do have commercials but they are very limited: not as frequent, as many or as long as on TV.
There are only a couple of listings in this topic but both are for services in the UK. In the US we usually leave this sort of nonsense to morning radio talk show jocks.
33 Curious Histories and Esoteric Studies from the Library of The People's Almanac is a list of interesting publications. Some are interesting only because they make you ask, why would someone bother writing about that?
One title made me laugh - Why Bring That Up? . It's "A guide to and from seasickness by the medical director of the New York Intestinal Sanitarium."
Another listing had me confused for a moment. (I know, not an unusual state.) The 23rd publication on the list was supposed to be "[t]hirty-three examples of sentences that include all twenty-six letters of the English alphabet." The only problem was that one of the examples given was, "Very careful and exact knowledge should be emphasised in adjudging a quadrant." The British publishers changed "emphasized" to "emphasised" and made the sentence no longer fit the category.
Visit their site for more lists or information about their books.
The AMA has an ad campaign about how one out of seven people don't have health insurance. They lost my attention when they got to the part about "a son with a heart ailment". It's not that I don't have sympathy for a family with that kind of medical problems, it's that I was wondering why they even bothered to put a bike helmet on the kid if they weren't going to have him wear it correctly. (They = the AMA and the ad company.)
Okay, I'm cynical enough already that my first thought when I saw this commercial was that the AMA wanted us all insured so that doctors could be sure of being paid. Dumb crap like the bike helmet being worn incorrectly is just an extra annoyance. It looks as though someone wasn't paying attention.
I was listening to an NPR report about the Consumer Electronics Show. The reporter was talking about going for a ride in a car to see a demonstration of WyMax. I was becoming interested in that technology until she said that the wireless signal remained strong no matter how fast they went. Then I became more interested in the car. (In order to have the potential to outrun the WiFi signals the car has to be able to travel faster than the speed of light.)
C2 Taser w/Laser Sight, Black Pearl BodyPopular in this category:
#20 in Electronics > Office Electronics > Electronic Organizers
I'm sure it would make everyone get organized very quickly. Once the twitching stops.
Indoor smoking bans just went into effect in France and Portugal. In Portugal, the man who is responsible for enforcing the law was seen breaking it - "Antonio Nunes, president of Portugal's food standards agency, was photographed by the daily Diario de Noticias smoking a cigar at a casino on the outskirts of Lisbon." His excuse was that he wasn't aware that the ban applied to him casinos.