Some of our (cool) neighbors turned us on to the Showtime show Dead Like Me. We’ve only watched the pilot so far and although I really like it, watching the show makes me incredibly tense. It’s not distressing because it’s about an angsty teenage girl who dies and becomes a grim reaper – I like that part. No one warned me about the fact that the show stars Mandy Patinkin. I cannot relax whenever that man is onscreen. He could sing at any minute. And he wouldn’t just sing – he’d sing showtunes. I like the show, so I’ll keep watching. But I may need someone to prescreen it so that I can get a pre-show vocalization report.

On the subject of television…is there anyone in the known universe who doesn’t know that TNT shows Law and Order 900 times a day? I ask because TNT is now airing Alias season 4 (which I have not seen) and key pieces of information on that show are sometimes conveyed in non-english dialogue. This means that key pieces of plot information are conveyed via subtitles. Consequently, when TNT takes up the bottom quarter of the screen with an opaque ad-bar for Law and Order the viewer, and by viewer I mean myself, cannot see the subtitles. It’s very, very annoying. In fact, a lot of key visual information is conveyed on the bottom quarter of the screen, so this is annoying even when there aren’t subtitles involved. People have dvrs and skip the commercials, TNT, deal with it. Just deal with it some other way.