TV

Even Though The Hallmark Movie Channel Has Betrayed Me, I Have Learned A Lesson

/ Ally Bean / 20 Comments

WHILE I HESITATE TO ADMIT that I’m aware of anything as sappy as The Hallmark Movie Channel, I feel that I must share with you, my gentle readers, how they have betrayed my forgiving nature.

This is a straightforward story in which I was willing to overlook their sentimental twaddle basic programming because every afternoon they were showing The Good Wife, an award-winning TV show that I’ve always wanted to see. 

In fact, I had even begun to arrange my day in such a way as to make certain that I caught at least one episode of The Good Wife, a modern-day TV show that features a strong female lead in difficult situations that she handles without Prince Charming rescuing her.

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Screen Shot 2014-06-25 at 5.14.46 AM

Above is the Hallmark Movie Channel schedule for The Good Wife in which we see that the Hallmark Movie Channel just stopped showing The Good Wife.  * bippity boppity boo*  It’s gone.  Wave bye-bye.

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FURTHER, I’LL EVEN ADMIT THAT last Friday afternoon when I viewed what has now become my last episode of The Good Wife, a well-paced finely nuanced TV show, I was so thrilled by the cliff hanger plot line that I spent moments of my weekend looking forward to seeing the next episode on Monday afternoon.

But it was not to be.  No, when I sat down on Monday afternoon to watch The Good Wife, a smart TV show filled with legal issues and moral quandaries, it was not there.  Instead, The Hallmark Movie Channel was airing…  [ready for this?]… Diagnosis Murder, an old-time TV show, starring Dick Van Dyke, that I vaguely remember as something my mother used to watch way back when.

I’m hurt by this betrayal;  I won’t lie.  But mostly it confirms my suspicions that cable TV’s death is closer than we think it is.  Thanks to The Hallmark Movie Channel I’ve now learned for certain that web-based programming, like Netflix or Hulu, is the way to watch TV shows when your life is busy– and you can’t dork around with cable channels.

An Observation On The Unintended Consequences Of The Behavior Of Elderly In-laws Who Watch The Weather Channel

/ Ally Bean / 14 Comments

Not covering any new ground here, but needs to be said.  Love is a strange thing.

Every time the Weather Channel shows bad weather where we live, my in-laws, who live hours away from here, phone us to make sure that we’re okay.

At age 80+ they do not believe in calling a cell phone number because they believe that talking on the phone while driving a car is dangerous.  And because they do not know if either one of us will be in our car when we answer our cell phones, they leave a message on our landline answering machine.

The messages are all about the same.  First, they say our names, then tell us who is calling.  Then they hang up without telling us why they called.  No good-bye, just click and the line goes dead.

It is from this pattern of behavior that we have come to know when bad weather is headed our way.  The lack of concrete message is the clue.

Because we both are too busy to spend much time in front of the TV this sort of non-message phone message has come to be our own special, personalized form of the Weather Channel.  And we love it.

And them for doing it.

Links For Eggheads: Health & Beauty Edition

/ Ally Bean / 18 Comments

… because information is FUN dammit.

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[But before I begin, an aside:

When I find something interesting online I try to keep the link.  I do this because I adore it when I go to someone else’s blog and find that he or she has taken the time to curate a list of links, so once in a while I try to do the same thing here.

Although now that I think about it, I feel a bit like Sheldon Cooper presenting his lame video podcast series, Fun With Flags.  But I have no Amy Farrah Fowler here to help me, so this is all different from that.

Right?!!]

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√  to look your best in photographs (and you know that you want to), go here.  USEFUL.

√  to get a better grip on your own sanity, go here.  PROFOUND.

√  to change your arms from lunch lady to gym rat, go here.  INSPIRING.

√  to style curly hair so that you don’t look like a poodle gone wild, go here.  HOPEFUL.

√  to understand why you trip up when you attempt to make changes, go here.  INSIGHTFUL.

√  to have a toned tummy while living a crunch-free life, go here.  DOABLE.

√  to keep your happy heart healthy (which we all know is a good thing), go here.  IMPORTANT.

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Odds & Ends

/ Ally Bean / 10 Comments

::  The daffodils that we planted last autumn are up now.  Known as Gigantic Stars, they have been a rousing disappointment.  The bulbs that have managed to bloom are a whopping 8-10″ high.  Whether we planted them wrong [ain’t hardly likely] or whether the winter took its toll on these bulbs [could be possible], I don’t know.

All I know is that tall beauties, they are NOT.

::  A few months ago I bought a Clarisonic Mia 2.  It’s a rechargeable,  face-washing device.  Rather cute, actually.  I’d read about it and wondered if it was worth the price.  Well I gotta tell ‘ya that for me, it has been great.  In fact, when I went to the salon for a haircut the woman who has cut my hair for years commented that my skin looked so much clearer.

So there you have, proof positive that this device is worth the cost.  😉

::  I am a lousy ironer.  Z-D, on the other hand, is a marvelous ironer.  So last night, while watching the final March Madness game, Mr. Man was ironing his pants.  While doing so, unbeknownst to him, a stink bug was inside a pant leg and Zen-Den ironed the stink bug– thereby killing it.  Mr. Man didn’t squish the bug as much as he flattened it, meaning there was no stink.

The things you learn…

::  Over the weekend we finished watching Torchwood.  [Spoilers, Sweetie]  The last year of the series, Miracle Day, took place in America and was a darker story– much less Dr. Who-ish.  I enjoyed it, if only to see Wayne Knight [Newman from Seinfeld] play a heavy [figuratively] and to find out that Captain Jack Harkness is, indeed, indestructible.  But there was lots of violence & blood– and a disturbing, but believable, plot line that did not reflect well on the human race.

I’ll be thinking on this one for a while.

[Hello FTC!  I think that you know by now that when I recommend something I have not been given this something by the manufacturer.  No, I’m just saying, in my opinion, I liked it.  So we’re good FTC, right?]