The Richter Scale^®

I love being mindless at the end of the day as much as the next guy, and television or movies are a great way to escape the pressures of daily life, especially as a precursor to sleep. The boob tube slows one’s brain down and gets it away from worrying about reality.

Unfortunately, I find much of prime time TV to be annoying and more mindless than even I can stand. I also don’t like all the incessant commercials - and yes, I understand that the revenue from commercials ultimately supports the production of future episodes of television shows. I also don’t like having to be available at precisely the time the show starts (which becomes even tougher where I live because in the winter when the U.S. is on Standard time, we are an hour ahead - makes for late TV watching - a 10pm EST show is on at 11pm EST here on Bonaire).

You may respond “well, why don’t you just TiVo the shows”?

But that question exhibits a certain ignorance and lack of awareness of the world outside of the U.S.A.

I’m here on the island paradise of Bonaire where there is no zip code to plug into a TiVo box, and a TiVo box can’t dial out to a local number to get the latest program guides for Bonaire (which, face it, is a 110 square mile fly speck surrounded by water, offering a blend of legally and illegally received TV transmissions, by a population of around 12,000).

I have two TV feeds here at my house - cable TV (a hodgepodge of U.S., South American, and Latin America-oriented U.S. originated channels) and TDS - terrestrial digital TV beamed over from neighboring Curacao, offering more of the same. Typically at least one of these is not working. In other words, service and reception are rather unreliable. (A nice way of saying they suck.)

I also have a PC with Windows XP Media Center Edition installed, and I’ve cobbled together a moderately functional program guide for that, but running that system at night requires hundreds of watts of power because without the air conditioner running in the office where the MCE PC is located, it would likely overheat and I would lose my computer to a meltdown.

So, with the exception of our near religious viewing of the latest episodes of Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy (which we watch regularly mostly because it follows Desperate Housewives), we tended to play TV Russian Roulette - watching the least bad show of what happens to be on when we turn on the TV and hoping we don’t die of inanity overload.

But lately, we, like many others no doubt, have recently discovered the joy of TV shows on DVD - whole seasons of such shows in an affordable collection!

Our current favorite is Roswell - a three season show about attractive teenage aliens and their human friends living in Roswell, New Mexico - home of the mystery shrouded and fabled 1947 crash of a weather ballon / space ship. Great characters, decent plot twists, and not too intellectually “deep”. There’s enough romantic interaction to captivate the female half of a couple, and enough alien power display and alien-guys-trying-to-figure-out-women comedic content to satisfy the needs all but the most action movie jaded guy.

We’re about a third of the way into season 2 of “Roswell” now, and vastly enjoying the ability to not even have to fast forward past commercials, and starting and stopping at any time, on any DVD equipped TV system in the house.

With the kids, we’ve started with Star Trek - The Original Series so we can give them a sense of some of the TV origins of things like Star Wars (one of their obsessions at present).

Next on the list to consider buying are Lost - The First Season, and “24” - the Fourth Season (managed to watch most of the other three seasons on live TV, but just couldn’t manage that with the fourth season.

So hurrah for TV series on DVD!