Not About Veronica Mars

I had planned to be writing a lengthy post about how incredible the first season of Veronica Mars has been (or, alternately, how badly the show dropped the ball in the final episode of its first season) today. However, when I got home from filming the graduation show last night, I turned on the tape and was confronted not with the revalation of who killed Lilly Kane, but with the annoying couple from Survivor losing some kind of race.

What's amazing is how consistent this problem has been over the years, and how completely I have failed to get any better at it. I succeed in taping shows maybe 1 out of 3 times. And in fact, the blow was softened a little by the whole situation being so entirely predictable. I knew that when I turned that tape on, I wasn't going to see Veronica Mars.

So this is the final straw. I have made the decision to step into the 21st century, and get some kind of tivo contraption. Even if that means that I can no longer pay my rent, at least I'll be living on the street with tivo.

I did succeed, by the way, in taping Z-Channel: A Magnificent Obsession monday night, which I've been watching bits and pieces of. Really excellent documentary on the indie proto-HBO channel you used to be able to get in L.A. This is worth watching, if for no other reason, for the glimpses of so many films you've never heard of that get you salivating from the eyeholes. Like Madchen in Uniform, which, as far as I can tell, is a 1931 movie featuring a full-on lesbian love story. Or Le Magnifique, a French comedy about a guy writing a spy story and imagining himself into it. At one point, Quentin Tarantino talks about working at the video store, and watching a bunch of out-of-print movies, and finding that they were all taped off Z-Channel, which made me realize that that is most likely where all the obviously bootleg tapes of stuff like Nightmare Alley and Skidoo and The Unknown that I got from Jerry's Video Reruns come from.