Surfing

I started watching the Red Sox...but Colorado's coming back, and I don't need the stress. So I've flipped to A&E and my lone TV addiction, The First 48. It's not that I'm a big fan of blood and guts; it's that I love stories about figuring out puzzles. One of my favorite movies is The Hunt for the Red October, which is partly about Jack Ryan's efforts to figure out what's going on.

The show follows homicide detectives in various cities--Miami, Memphis, Dallas, Detroit and Cincinnati--as they attempt to solve murders. (The title refers to the fact that if the detectives fail to get a solid lead in the first 48 hours after the crime, their chance of solving the crime is cut in half.) The fact that a good 1/3 of the episodes I've watched take place in Miami--and which show the real Miami CSI make it impossible for me to watch CSI: Miami. The irony is that reruns of CSI: Miami air on A&E right before the (relatively) real deal.

In a lot of ways, The First 48 is the anti-CSI; as far as I can tell, it gives some sense of the reality of police work. Among other things is it gives some sense of the grind of police work, as you chase down often dead-end leads, and it shows that, more often than not, DNA is irrelevant. And even when it is relevant, it takes a long, long time for comparison. There is no database that will give you a fingerprint match--the database will give potential matches, but the technician needs to examine the potential matches to make a firm determination.

I'll be checking back to see how the score of the game goes...but I'm not staying up. I'll find out what happens when I wake up in the morning.

The Day After

So I stayed up for the game. I think it was a good call, all in all.

Staying up for the post-game stuff? Not so much...maybe. It depends on whether or not it would have made a difference, going to bed at 11:30-ish, versus 1 AM. Would I still have been awake at 2 AM? Maybe. Maybe not. I'll never know.

What I do know is that I'm probably not going to watch the weekday World Series games--I can't do this night after night. I can't do it one night. Will it be on the radio? I could do that. Well, only if it's not a radio broadcast of the Fox telecast. I can--mostly--ignore McCarver and Buck if I have something to look at.

If they're all I have, I'm doomed. Not since my youngest sister was four have I come across so much talking to such little point. I'm waiting for the day one of them says, "You know, if the sun comes up in the east, we'll have daylight." I'm no baseball expert, so you know it's bad when a professional announcer says something and my reaction is, "Ya think??"

Mind you, if that's the worst thing I have to complain about, I'm a very lucky person, and I know it.

Loon

I am a loon. A loon, I tell you. I am going to stay up to watch the Red Sox and Cleveland Indians, even though I have to be up very early tomorrow morning.

Well, okay, maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe I'm just being honest with myself. Because the reality is I'm not going to be able sleep. So I might as well just stay up and watch.

(On a side note, I have a blog purely about my reading experience. It's here.)

Love Those Commercials

I don't watch that many commercials--I'm a fan of clicking away from them. However, I've seen a couple of them lately that I really enjoy.

In the commercials, a slightly disreputable person approaches a stranger in a public place and asks the stranger for his or her help with a money issue, promising a giant payment if the stranger helps. All the person needs is the stranger's bank information to deposit the reward.

I'm a little fuzzy on the details--the appeals are essentially the text of scamming e-mails that have gone 'round the internet for years...and which still claim victims. The reason I love the commercials is that the stranger catches on, pulls away from the disreputable person, and then the voiceover says something like, "Doesn't sound so good in person, does it?"

For once, the voiceover isn't an exaggeration. The shadiness of the proposition, the weird unlikeliness of it, is clearer when you have a person saying it.

So, today, those are my favorite commercials.