dragonlady7

So people keep linking to those Symphony of Science videos. The other day I sat and watched them all, and realized, as I re-watched two of them, that I wasn't really that interested in the music: I was watching them because I wanted to hear what the people were saying. So I looked through the site and found a link to the Carl Sagan miniseries Cosmos on Hulu, and clicked the link, and watched an episode. (I'm up to here by now.)
Oh my goodness! You can just... you can just watch TV shows on your computer!!
I mean, I knew in theory that you could do that, it had just never occurred to me to type www.hulu.com and see what happened. OMG! You just... you just click the thing! And it... and it plays! A whole episode!
I know, I know, you are all crying out a resounding utterance of DUH. But I don't ever think of these things. I haven't had a television in years and even when I did I wasn't much good at using it. (I'd sit in front of it while it was on, but it would basically never occur to me that Oh, hey, it's six o'clock, I should go turn on channel x and see my show! Mm not so much; I'd just turn it on when I was bored and be annoyed that nothing good was on. I'm not so good with scheduled programming.) And I had just sort of assumed that if I wanted to watch TV I'd have to deal with TV on its own terms. I thought you had to install something or subscribe to something or whatever to use Hulu-- I'd never looked into it because I don't care about television and am so thoroughly out of touch I wouldn't know where to start. So anyway, I was shocked to discover that you just... do it, without a registration or a login or an installation or a subscription or anything. I'd just not been interested enough to explore it before, assuming there was nothing I'd want to see on there.
Yeah, I know. Duh. Whatever.

So anyway, I started with the last episode, Who Speaks for Earth, but after that figured out how Hulu categorizes things, and started with #1 and have been working my way back. It's so absorbing. Carl Sagan is a muppet, though. I'm pretty sure he only has that one blazer. I finally looked him up on Wikipedia but they didn't explain why he apparently spent his entire adult life in a beige corduroy blazer. Which is fine, I mean-- if you're a genius, wear whatever the hell you want. But the muppet hair and the muppet voice combine to make him extremely appealing to me. I just want to snuggle him and have him tell me about the universe. Poor Carl.
I can't remember if I've seen any of this series before. Mostly, the music is great-- it's just Holst's The Planets, which I had an LP of as a kid and have on CD now and listen to sometimes because I rather like them (especially the Jupiter one, which was the theme song of some NPR/PBS radio show when I was a kid), and then assorted other things like Adagio on a Theme by Albinoni, which isn't by Albinoni at all-- but sometimes it's this hokey synth stuff that sounds just like every special I had to watch in school as a kid. It's oddly... soothing. Hokey, yes, but soothing. And deeply reminiscent. So I don't know if I've seen any of it before.

So that's how I've been spending my evenings-- huddled in my homemade Snuggie on the couch staring raptly at pictures of planets while Carl Sagan's Kermit-like dulcet tones lecture me on the basic principles of astrophysics. (Note: he never actually says "Billions and billions!" That was the Tonight Show parody, which I have not seen, as I haven't found it. My cultural knowledge is heavily Wikipedia-edited.) I suppose I should thank Symphony of Science. Or curse it, because I don't have all that much free time and didn't really need it sucked up into this.

I have today off, which is unprecedented for a Sunday. Unfortunately I have had to turn down the offer of a ham dinner, because I have practice tonight and if I sit down to eat at 6, I will vomit copiously when I get to practice an hour and a half later. I am going to make a big lunch today, though, because I HAVE TODAY OFF OMG. I never ever ever ever get a weekend day off, can never spend time with Z, can never be lazy, can never call my family or go on an outing with Z. I'll probably squander it sitting on the couch with my cosmic muppet show, but oh the possibility...