If you have Tivo and are reading this then I'm sending you telepathic death rays

Cable TV. Before I moved here, I never would have willingly paid for cable. I worked too many long nights and let's face it, who the hell wants to watch daytime drama. Besides, the shows I like I have on DVD anyway. But when we moved here, it became a necessity. I don't speak hungarian and I don't work and it's 10 degrees out with no snow and so BBC and BBC prime are all I get. The rest is weird. And not good weird, just weird. Completely foreign.

Technically speaking apart from paying $15/mo. extra for HBO, we have the best (and I am playing it fast and loose with the term best) cable package available in our part of the country. It is 53 channels of shit. They "upgraded" for 2006 and as a result made it much, much worse. They did away with the best channel, PaprikaTV, a channel dedicated to the art of cooking and replaced it with 4!StoryTV, (seriously) which I'm pretty sure is pirated as most of it appears to be 10 yr old Entertainment Tonight. Do they not understand that the only conversations that I can grasp concern food? Why would they do that? Why?

The bonus to the whole upgrade is that it remains the same price (woohoo) and we now have a Chinese channel, a Greek channel, one Spanish, one Russian, a bunch of German, some Italian and an entire channel devoted to telenovelas and Thalia. Thank god for arrastrandome!

I realize that watching TV in Hungarian is inevitably going to improve the ridiculous accent that I have going but really, one needs a break and a chance to understand the slang being slung about. So when I reach that point, I switch to BBC and catch up on WHAT REALLY IS HAPPENING TO THE WORLD, then I switch to CNN international to see what is purported to have happened in the world (and because once a week The Daily Show is on an) and finally I come to rest on BBC Prime. This station is amazingly bad, English Drama is sickeningly bad with the exception of Trading Places, the English version of the American show. Two couples pick a room they want to remodel and a concept for the room and then they move into each others' houses and redecorate within a modest budget. This is a great show. one half hour a day it's good, the rest of the time, bad.

Those of you who have the chance should see Cavegirls. Modern day, ruthless, clique-y girls set in the stone-age. Completey ridiculous. I was mesmerized by the flinging about of half naked bodies with purposely ratted-out hair. maybe I'll be watching this next week...