I’ve been pretty busy lately, but all of my obligations are fitting neatly into the space of my day, like little Tetris blocks of obligation. So I’m getting lots of things done — which is good, but it leaves me with little time to do the things I want — things like watching TV.
Luckily for me, my cable television company (despite having horrible video compression ratios that make everything look like it’s on YouTube) provided me with a DVR (note from professor Charlie: Digital Video Recorder). The magic of a DVR is that it allows you to open a TV schedule and select a show that you wanna record. And any time that show comes on, the DVR will dutifully perserve it for the ages.
Anyway, last night I was freakin’ swamped with stuff to do, so I went to record Top Chef Chicago so I could watch it later. But I couldn’t! Disk Drive Full, said the DVR. I’d just cleared a bunch of shows from the queue a week earlier — I couldn’t imagine what could be clogging the bowels of my poor DVR.
When I checked, I realized that — months ago — I had set it to record Tales from the Darkside whenever the show came on. Luckily for me, yesterday was some kind of Tales from the Darkside marathon on the sci fi channel. So my DVR recorded eighteen episodes of this wonderful eighties b-horror TV! Sadly in the process it erased a Mars Volta concert (in HD grr…) and Spielberg’s Munich, but who cares!
So this post is just a very convuluted way of telling everybody how awesome Tales from the Darkside is. Just yesterday I delightfully delved into the wonderful world of TftDS (as us fans refer to it in shorthand), watching the first of the many episodes to which I now have instant access.
The episode was about a collections agent who worked from home, angrily calling slackers to demand payment. One day she’s going about her duties in her expensive Manhattan condo (with central air and a giant stereo system), when she starts getting phone calls from a debtor that had recently died! This freaks her out, and the ghost won’t stop calling. Anyway, an Angel of Death, posing as a city worker, comes on behalf of the dead to wreak revenge on the collections agent. See, it turns out that the collections agent, by way of her incesant phone calls, had driven this poor laundry lady (with a brain tumor, by-the-way) to suicide. In the end, the angel of death decides to show mercy on the collections agent by not killing her, but by instead transforming her into her victim — an old mexican woman with a brain tumor living in a run down tenemant with overdue washer and dryer payments.
Must-see-TV indeed!
sigh…
Posted by charlie 