Regular TV

I'm a terrible couch potato. It's a not-so-secret sin, a guilty pleasure. These days, I watch most of my video entertainment on my computer, rather than on my television. Given a fast enough connection to the Internet, you can get free video on demand. I just love it. I think when I get working again I am going to build a MythTV box and go nuts.

I don't have cable or satellite. (They cost money, which is currently in short supply.) I just have plain old Chicago-area broadcast TV, which is free.  I don't watch a lot of regular TV these days, except for Sundays. Sundays I can get my fix of foreign detective shows on MHz Worldview's International Mystery. What a great show! It's not available online. WYCC Chicago carries it on channel 20.3. I get to watch Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander in subtitled Swedish, George Simenon's Inspector Maigret in subtitled French, Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano in subtitled Italian... you get the picture. Every week, you get detectives in a foreign land chasing the bad guys. I just love it.

How cool is this: French police get to drink on the job. I love when Inspector Maigret (played by Bruno Cremer) orders une bière or cognac while working. This is normal for him, as normal as eating cassoulet. In the USA, cops aren't supposed to drink on the job.

My absolute fave is Tatort ("Crime Scene"), which is in German. The episodes currently being shown are with the detectives Max Ballauf and Freddy Schenk, who are in the kripo ("kriminal polizei") in Cologne, Germany. They chase murderers. As the characters in The Wire used to say, they are natural born po-lice. They even arrest an elderly fugitive nazi murderer in one show, which gives them bonus points in my book. I am jealous of them because they have easy access to currywurst and unpasteurized beer, even while on the job.

I don't like all of the shows. There's a show with some Italians running around in it (OK, it's titled La Omicidi) where the only cool thing is the bad guy, who wrote Dante's La Divina Commedia on the walls of his cell in prison, and is smarter than everyone else in the whole world. Then there's the current guy, Inspector Coliandro, who seems to be a doofus who bulk orders more yoghurt than even the guy on Burn Notice could eat. I'm not the only one who is less than thrilled with Inspector Coliandro. MHz Worldview sent me this in a email:

Inspector Coliandro: Second Time's the Charm?
Many of our viewers had mixed feelings about the premiere of Inspector Coliandro last month. The tone of this series is different than some of our other offerings, but give it another chance. You may like the second episode better. Inspector Coliandro: Into A Trap, Sunday, February 21 and Tuesday, February 23 at 9PM ET/PT

OK, let's give the show another chance. So, it's Sunday, time for the show. I sit and watch some of the news from Germany, which is on before International Mystery. The video is just fine. The opening for International Mystery comes on. The video is just fine. Inspector Coliandro comes on. The video is now "borken". Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. The video is shifted down from the top of the screen, which cuts of the bottom of the video frame, while leaving an empty black bar at the top. The subtitles are conveniently invisible because they are in the cut off portion of the frame. Aw, snap! Can't these idiots center the video on the screen?

To be fair, if I could find the remote for my wonderful set top converter box I may have been able to fix the problem. Maybe. The first episode, which sucked by the way, had flawless video. The second required knowledge of Italian. Maybe the third time's a charm. We'll see.