Who said TV made you stupid?

Although I could have been more productive this vacation week (hey, collapsing an old blog and creating a new one from scratch should be considered productive...), I feel that all those hours spent in front of the TV this week was time well spent. I got to see Daphne finally fall in love with Niles on Frasier (my, that was a moment). I was thrilled upon discovering that AXN is replaying the entire 2nd season of Alias and so I can catch up on all the episodes I missed. I daydreamed I was with Padma (oh, so gorgeous, sigh) in Spain and Megan in Somalia in Discovery Travel and Adventure. I whooped with joy discovering that I was right in my guess that Cordelia was the big bad invincible demon in Angel (now I'm dying to look for the episodes I missed, argh...). The problem about watching all that TV, I would get hungry watching everybody eating.

My favorite hour of TV this week so far has been Discovery Channel's docu on Cleopatra, shattering all these myths about her being merely an irresponsible seductress. First of all, she wasn't drop dead gorgeous; she was the third daughter of Ptolemy the 12th and so inherited the Ptolemaic schnozz. But, man, she had presence. She was the original magnetic personality. Secondly, she didn't seduce Caesar just so she can be said to be sleeping with the most powerful man in the world, she did it for her own political purposes - to secure her throne in Egypt and to hold conquering Rome at bay. As scholars have discovered, it wasn't essentially a seduction, it was more a meeting of two ambitious political minds and although the sex must have been great, it was only secondary. She had successfully raised her country from the debt that plagued her father's reign and she won the love of a people who were originally against her (because she was Greek, not Egyptian, and because she was a woman).

I love that they discovered all this about Cleopatra. It only reiterates how women have always had a bad rep all throughout history; the great thing though is that while the general view of Cleopatra has always been the Roman view of her, which was necessarily-for-the-Romans negative, the Egyptians loved her and to this day believe she was one of the greatest rulers of her country.

Another useful thing I found on TV was this band composed of Slash, Duff and that rather healthy drummer from Guns N' Roses and Scott Weiland (who strangely looks nothing like himself - must be the drugs. Or the withdrawal from drugs). I know it must be redundant for me to like their music, but I do. I'm going to sniff around for the CD next time I find myself near a record store. I guess quitting my record label job was all I needed to rediscover music again.

One thing I wonder about TV - when is this reality TV thing going to end? It boggles the mind why they would rather come up with more and more and more of that crap instead of prolonging seasons of Roswell and Angel.