Two Days In A Row!

Watchin’ The Tube On A Saturday

Yesterday was pretty laid back. Put the final touches on an appeal from arraignment court to the general trial court and then started on cleaning off several months accumulation of stuff from the ol’ desk. My desk is one of those ‘U” shaped numbers with the computer monitor in the middle of the base of the U. This gives me writing/stacking room on either side. This also means, that there is a fair amount of dead space to the extreme front right and left corners where low priority stuff tends to accumulate. Like training monographs, pocket part updates, bar journals, loose-leaf updates, etc. Part of the problem is I’m the clearinghouse for all the incoming library related stuff. Like half a dozen updates for the court rules pamphlets. Now the double sets (i.e. state and federal) are easy. I get one, my secretary gets one, and the library gets one. Three show up, I hand out three. The state only subscriptions are a bit harder. Anyway, I actually made some inroads into the various stacks.

Today, other than a load of laundry, has been devoted to watching old TV shows on DVD. Finished off the first season of Hill Street Blues and started in on the first season of X-Files. Now, I was a big fan of Hill Street when it first aired and managed to watch most of the episodes up to the point where I started law school. But that’s still over 20 years ago. Watching these episodes is just amazing -- you can see the beginnings of any number of conventions that have become so common in TV dramas that they are approaching the status of clichés. And then there’s the story and the acting. What a delight compared to so much of current TV fare.

After finishing Hill Street, I started on the X-Files, which I didn’t watch, other than one or two episodes here and there, when it first ran on Fox. Odd. Very much a series of slightly connected stand-alone episodes in this first year. And, surprisingly, not all that interesting. Other than finding out what weird damn outfit the consume designer is going to inflict on poor Gillian Anderson this time. My God, the woman is, like 5’3” and they insist on putting her in these pant suits with legs suitable to wear over waders and shoulders padded out to the point where she looks almost square. No wonder it took Mulder years to make a move on her.

I was watching a really bad episode involving NASA, the space shuttle, and the “face on mars” and efforts by some sort of ET to sabotage the shuttle program by either possessing COL Belt, the former astronaut who was in charge of the program and making him do nasty things (or maybe forget to do good things) or by becoming some kind of smoke wraith and actually flying up to orbit and physically damaging the orbiter. Query - if it can do that, what the hell does it need with Belt? I had to ask myself, how did this survive for almost 10 years on Fox when Firefly barely aired 10 episodes? (I only count the first pilot “Serenity” as one episode even though it aired as a two-parter.) Maybe the X-Files picks up a bit more substance in the later seasons. Maybe it picks up in the second half of season one. I guess I’ll find out.