TiVo

After waiting for a week for my male-to-male USB cable to finally arrive from Amazon, I was thoroughly disappointed to find that my old Linksys WUSB11 doesn’t work. Perhaps it’s because the little guy got fried sitting in the garage at some point in the last few years. Perhaps it’s because the antenna was snapped off when it was attacked by a cat. Who knows? So I caved and just bought one of the TiVo-approved wireless devices, the NETGEAR WG111 Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter. I found one used on Amazon for only $17 so hopefully that will solve this problem once and for all.

There is a slim chance that you may not have realized yet that I am a technology geek. In case there’s any doubt, let me explain to you what’s been driving me batty for a few weeks now: My wireless TiVo system.

In our two-person, two-dog, two-cat house we have two Dell laptops, two DVD players, three iPods, two stereos, a Playstation2, three TVs, three DirecTV receivers, and two TiVo boxes. (We actually have three TiVos, but one is in the garage because I don’t feel like paying for TiVo service in the guest room.) Of course we also have Verizon DSL coming in through a wireless network to connect everything.

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Where does the year go? This one is almost over so it’s time to start doing some wrap-ups. Thanks to TiVo I have gotten to watch a ton of the tube this year, and there has been some excellent stuff to see. Here’s my picks for the top ten shows of 2006. Feel free to argue, but remember that I’m always right.

Wife Swap / Desperate Housewives (ABC)

Don’t vomit just yet. If you haven’t given either of these shows a chance, I’m telling you that you’re missing some of the best “scream at the television” action there is. Both shows are essentially hour-long exercises in watching women act like complete and total retards. There has not been a Wife Swap yet that didn’t have me at some point shaking my head and wondering seriously about the viability of our species. Are there really moms this stupid on our planet? And I am completely done with any Terry Hatcher plotline they can throw at me, but otherwise Desperate Housewives is seriously embarrassing, addictive fun. It’s a bummer that they killed the slutty-hot ex-lover in the supermarket fiasco.

Grey’s Anatomy (ABC)

Now that E.R. has finally gone off the … what? It’s still on? When will that show die? Good Lord! It jumped the shark ten years ago! Grey’s Anatomy may never achieve the excellence of the first two seasons of E.R., but McDreamy and McSteamy and the gang are way more fun than even the Clooney days of NBC’s doctor show were. The writers got us to care about Meredith’s slutty little existence and — with the exception of one exploding-man episode — have been able to avoid the repeated helicopter-train-earthquake-stuck-in-Africa “must see” hijinks of E.R. We all feel bad about Denny, but Alex is a good guy at heart, right?

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Anybody out there notice a trend? It seems like the quality of shows has suddenly gotten much better in the last two or three years. My TiVo runneth over. That’s how I can tell. I can’t remember a time since the early 90s when there were so many really, really good shows on the tube. I’m glad that I have DirecTV now — getting the major networks affiliates from different regions means I can catch the East coast feeds for some, so I can TiVo shows that are supposed to be airing in the same time slot. Here’s a quick list of some of the shows that have me hooked right now.

• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
• Friday Night Lights
• Entourage
• Rescue Me
• Law & Order
• Dexter
• Six Degrees
• Scrubs
• Boston Legal
• The Office
• Grey’s Anatomy

Remember sniglets? Rich Hall invented the word to describe words that aren’t in “the dictionary”, but should be. It was one of his sketches on HBO’s Not Necessarily the News. It’s very hard to believe that was 20 years ago.

There should — there must — be a sniglet that describes what happens once you have become so used to Tivo that you find yourself increasingly often wanting to Tivo everything else in life. I find myself constantly wanting to pause and rewind the radio, people in meetings, traffic, etc. (I’m guessing this is the main premise of Adam Sandler’s new movie, Click, by the way.)

But that’s not the point of this entry. Sometime in the early 00s I took part in the Neurotic Fishbowl’s “Burn It” blogger CD exchange. One of the songs on one of the CDs I received was The Twilite Kid by The Afghan Whigs, or by Greg Dulli, or by The Twilight Singers (depending upon which web site you believe). I fell in love with the song and listened to it exclusively for weeks. It’s a tremendous song.

(This was way back when iPods didn’t exist yet. There was no iTunes. I actually (gasp!) listened to it on repeat on CD.)

About a month ago Denis Leary was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart promoting the new season of Rescue Me. This has got to be the best show on TV now that the Sopranos has jumped the shark and West Wing has gone the way of the dodo. (Entourage is a close second.)

Towards the end of his interview, Leary flashed a copy of Powder Burns, the latest CD by The Twilight Singers, saying that it’s a great album and everyone should buy it.

I said to myself — after using Tivo to rewind it and freeze so I could see the album again, “Hey! That’s the band that did that great song from three or four years ago!” And it was. Is. Whatever. Anyway. It’s an awesome CD. I fired up Limewire and grabbed it that night. The best song on the album is called Bonnie Brae.

Last night I finally watched last week’s Tivo’ed episode of Rescue Me. Damn! The ending will blow you away (if you haven’t seen it yet). If you’re wondering what the awesome song was at the end, during the climactic conclusion, it was Bonnie Brae.

Of course I’m writing all this while listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, so maybe my opinion can’t be trusted.

This is the sort of thing that makes me glad I have TiVo. The Discovery Channel is starting a new series: Deadliest Catch, about Alaskan deep-sea crab fishing. The tagline is $140,000 for 5 days’ work is a job some men would die for. And some do. (I’ll ignore the dangling preposition.) How can that not spark your interest?