Lucky Day

I love the library booksale table. They have weeded paperbacks, hardcovers, children's books, and sometimes even AV stuff there for a quarter or a dollar apiece. They're trying to get rid of it to make room for other stuff. Most of it has library barcodes and stuff stuck to it, but some doesn't--I presume those are anonymous donations that they didn't actually want to keep. Sometimes I go to it with a philosophy of "If it's SF, I'll buy it." Other times, not so much. I've picked up books there that I've never read and may never read. Every once in a while I even find a CD there that I've listened to and want.

Yesterday almost all of the CDs there were children's albums, with one exception, a non-barcoded CD called "Australia" by somebody named Howie Day. Never heard of him. I looked at the song titles--no, not children's, looks sort of alternativy, but it's hard to tell from just the titles. Oh, what the heck, it's just a buck, I'll buy it. So I bought it.

I'm listening to it now, with a healthy feeling of serendipity, enjoying it a fair bit. I searched for him on The All-Music Guide and discovered that this is his 2002 debut album, and that he was born in 1981. Musically...well, I'm not good at dancing about architecture, but it's alternative singer-songerwriter kind of stuff, but not as sparse as some of that stuff can get. The only thing that pops to mind is Greg Garing, not exactly a household name either; the AMG review namechecks Dave Matthews, among others. But anyway, I'm liking it, and glad I picked it up.

This Ain't No Party

"24" started tonight, with a two-hour season premiere. On FOX. Which we don't get, because apparently in Edmonton(and how much of the rest of Canada, I don't know)only ABC, NBC and CBS warrant basic-cable status, and we reverted to basic cable some time ago and haven't gone back because we don't have time to watch more than what's on basic cable anyway. Generally American shows are carried on Canadian channels as well, but this year that seems to be sliding--we have to watch "The West Wing" on the American station, and put up with the jarring discordance which is American advertising. It's really quite a staggering difference. And "24", which has been on a few different channels over its three seasons, is also not carried by anybody.

If we'd realized this enough in advance, we might have taken the plunge and gone for a higher tier of cable. Which might have led to a slippery slope of never moving from in front of the TV set, or accumulating 35 hours worth of backlogged shows on tape. If I'd even realized it was going to be on tonight instead of tomorrow night, I might have asked somebody else to tape it for us.

As it is, the season premiere's already half over. They started the season late so as to be able to show it nonstop, with no weeks off, and they never did have much for reruns. So unless one of the Canadian channels has picked it up to start a week or two or a month from now, or whatever, we're screwed.

It's true that the new TV this season has already been overwhelming. "Lost" is definitely a keeper, "House" is still holding on, and we've probably even given up on "Desperate Housewives" because we keep missing it. (We're just not used to watching weekend shows.) And we're trying out this new "Medium" show, too. I don't hold out high hopes for that one, though.

But I'm annoyed at not even having the choice on whether to watch "24", because FOX is placed out of our reach and the Canadian channels aren't picking it up. It just gripes my butt. Maybe eventually we'll have to watch it on DVD, like the first season of "Desperate Housewives". Maybe this will give us more time to watch Buffy Season 5(which is going quite well--already it's overmatching Season 4). Maybe I should be using this time to work on rewriting The Shadow & The Flame or finishing "The Soul-Stealers" or The Man In The Suit Named Everett, or do something constructive. But I still feel like I got a raw deal.