I generally excuse my TV watching habits by saying things like "I love PBS documentaries" or "I watch a lot of the History Channel". It makes me feel like a psuedo intellectual to have such high brow tastes.
So, I have to tell you about a new TV show I just found on The History Channel. It's called Pawn Stars and it's a reality show set in a Las Vegas pawn shop. The pawn shop is a family owned business, and besides the family being characters, it's interesting to see how a pawn shop figures out how much they can loan on a given asset, or how much they can buy it for.
A customer will come into the shop with some prints that have been appraised at $3000. They want $2500 for them. What the customer doesn't realize is that the appraisal is an insurance appraisal for replacement value. Replacement value is NOT fair market value.
The pawn shop has to tell the customer, I'm sorry, I can't give you more than $1000 for them- there aren't a lot of buyers out there for your prints, and I have to leave room for my own profit.
The show also passes along information like how to spot a fake Rolex, or how to tell if something is REALLY old, or just made to look like it. And I'm tellin' ya- they just don't teach those skills in school.
My other big TV news is the purchase of a Roku Player. If you have a subscription to Netflix with a "watch instantly" option and a wireless internet connection the Roku player lets you instantly watch movies on your TV.
This has opened whole new worlds of TV for me- watching all of Leave It to Beaver episodes IN ORDER, watching Pretty Woman and Caddyshack over and over....this has to be pretty close to TV heaven.
And if you're wondering what all these pictures have to do with TV- well I listed a bunch of stuff on Etsy with the Roku delivering constant entertainment as I typed.