Weekend update

This has nothing to do with the Mayan calendar, but I think it must still surely be a sign of the end times.

I got behind on my usual blog reading this week due to just being too busy and working more than I rightly should.  Also my internet service was out for a while last night, which was a real drag.  However it was back at full force this morning and I did nothing but rest today.  Finished watching the anime series "Claymore."  Well, I gave it 3 stars.  It started out with a halfway decent story and had some character development but the last half or so was pretty much just anime action without any real story.  I read up a little about the original manga, and I think it would have been better if they'd more closely followed the manga and maybe made 52 episodes instead of only 26.

My wife's grandfather passed away this week, not unexpectedly since he'd been in declining health for a long time and had spent the last year in a nursing home.  We inherited one of his few remaining possessions:  a 26-inch flat-screen TV that he'd purchased about 3 years ago.  So now I have a good TV in the bedroom, which is where I watch most of the shows that I like but no one else does (anime, for example).

The old TV I was using was the one I bought when I was truck driving, and it was a very small (15-inch, I think) conventional CRT model.  The color had gone off some time ago and all the reds had pretty much shifted out, which made some things look kind of strange.  For example, black & white shows were more of a purple-scale than a grayscale, and I didn't watch them.  I think the last B&W thing I watched before it went bad was Nosferatu, and that was quite some time ago.  So anyway, now I'm going to hit some of the old shows like the complete run of Twilight Zone.  I hardly ever watched the show when it was rerun when I was a kid so most of it will be new to me.

I did see the one with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Taylor, the one with Burgess Meredith when his glasses broke, the one with the good-looking woman who was the weird one because everyone else looked like monster pigs, and especially the one with the doll.  You know which one.  That one gave me nightmares when I was a kid, probably because I already had a very strong aversion to any dolls larger than an action figure G.I. Joe.  I still don't like dolls.  They creep me out.  Also there was one with the guy who played Sargent Carter on Gomer Pyle that I remember spooking me quite a bit, too, way back then.  I think I also saw the one with Captain Kirk and the gremlin, but I'm not sure.  I did see the movie version with John Lithgow.

Also I just saw that Netflix now has the entire run of Rawhide, so I'm going to watch at least a few of those.  I've never seen any of the shows with Clint Eastwood and I've always wanted to see those.

Another nice thing about the new TV is that it's big enough that I can now read subtitles, so it will be much easier to watch the subtitled anime from Crunchyroll.  I might even watch "Le Femme Nikita" again now that I can read the subtitles.