Louis C.K. "Chewed Up"

I watched this comedian on Comedy Central last night. He was hilarious. I thought strangely amusing (but no, not exciting) his little bit on date rape: a woman he dated who wanted him to force her to have sex with him. But he touched on a lot of topics, including what it's like being a white male (difficult to complain) and why his own kids are so annoying.

The Boys in the Band (1970)

Not to be confused with And the Band Played On. It's a play from the liberation days about gays which was Off Broadway and successful and was later made into a movie. It's actually quite a good one.

The Ecologist (magazine)

I only just found out about this British magazine which has a lot of excellent articles about saving the environment by reducing your carbon footprint, etc. As it happens, in June, the magazine is going completely online and dropping their print edition. Man that's not very convenient, but perhaps more ecological.

The Man of My Life (2007)

A story with an interesting premise which goes to the question of whether men are more compatible with other men as friends. Seems obvious probably this is true. And then goes on to the deeper question of whether they would bond rather more intimately, while it still being a platonic interest. This happens while one man is happily married and straight with kids, and the other is a swinging single gay guy. The men in the movie bond to the extent that it even disrupts the married man's sex life. This is taking it a bit far I think, but overall it held my interest. The movie is in French and has a very French tone. It is a very intellectual movie and -- being written and directed by a woman -- not macho or homophobic.

The NYTimes review provides more background and interpretation.

Zinwell HDTV converter box

I have an old vcr which still works fine. Of course, I could buy/subscribe to Tivo, but I just want to tape a few shows. So I bought the Zinwell box from Amazon which has a programmable timer and of course I had to buy a UHF splitter for my antenna, since my TV has an HDTV tuner already. The cost of the box exceeded the $40 gov't coupon, but just by $10. The tuner is actually more sensitive than my TV tuner, and it flips channels more quickly and also shows the program information. Picture quality from the box only SDTV, but after saving to VHS format, it looks about like something from that old tape technology. One great thing is that the box only uses max of 1.3Watts in standby. (My TV is like 40Watts in standby, so now it's on a wall switch.) Okay, so it takes a programming degree -- something I pretty much have from school -- to get the whole thing to set up, but now that it's done, VCR and box turn on at the same time. Presto, I now have completely *free* time shifting tv watching. But I still have to watch the Daily Show online. Oh well, you can't have it all.

Jay Leno is moving to 10pm, but until then I can get him on tape. One less reason to stay up late. Perhaps I'll be watching more tv now?