"I said I'm going to look into your cult problem"

Watching:

Of course the first thing a terrorist will say to the man whose been chasing him all around the world is to state where he comes from and how long he's been chasing terrorists, because naturally this is something that guy wouldn't know, and of course a glorified death squad commander is a natural first choice to lead a police unit with no clearly defined limits to their power while they operate on US soil, and of course a man will climb through the roof of a car in a gunfight to take up an unprotected position rather than go through the open door where he'd be protected by armed marines, of course a disciplined marine officer in full dress uniform still has manly stubble, of course a police officer will pull a gun on someone without identifying himself first, of course civilians five feet away from automatic gunfire will be surprised when gunmen appear moments later, of course a man who's just been shot through a window will outflank two running men with a head start through a shanty town, of course a man who's just found a sexually abused minor locked in a closet will insist on taking her in his manly arms instead of informing a female SOC officer, of course an Asian tourist liason has contacts in the Asian mafia, of course a Hawaiian of Asian descent has a leg to stand on when he accuses a white dude of not being local, of course there's nothing wrong with two grown men bribing a small child with candy and stuffed toys, of course the only two Hawaiians on the team are related, of course in a show shot in Hawaii - a state inhabited largely by Asians of Japanese descent - and arguably a good place to find Hawaiian actors those two Hawaiians are played by Koreans, of course a young girl will respect her father's absence from her life to be a policeman, of course it's integral to the plot that the only female officer on the team has to strip to her underwear on a mission, of course a police mole will recognize one of the very few Hawaiian officers on the Hawaaian police force immediately even though he only has a grainy cellphone photo to work with of her covering her face and she hasn't left the police academy yet, of course there's no need to find out who that mole is, of course you can drive a van through a wall, of course you can miss four people standing less than three feet away when you empty a clip from a fully automatic weapon, of course a 'clean' front business for people smuggling has a container in front of the office with about fifty illegal immigrants in it, of course those people getting found by police is just what they wanted after going to all that trouble and spending all that money to leave China, of course the people smuggler is actually a deeply conscientious family man whose marriage is invalidated by his being arrested and his wife and US citizen son will be deported as a consequence, of course all smuggling ships dock beside ramps, of course low-key smugglers carry automatic weapons when docked in a US port, of course there's room to drive a car on the deck of a cargo boat, and most importantly of all, of course Spike from Buffy can do an Irish accent.
Scholars of the English language may notice a subtle tone of mockery in my post, but despite that, Hawaii Five-0 is entertaining crap from the writers of Transformers and Star Trek that might have taken itself a bit too seriously but doesn't and an affable cast including him from Lost and her from Battlestar Galactica (though in fairness, I don't hold it against her) helps on that front. The theme tune (I couldn't find the proper remix from the show, but the above vid is more or less it) is, of course, compulsory, but a bit out of place in its cheesy brilliance even though the rest of the show is about good-looking pigs shooting at explosions.
It's good fun, but as laureates may have gathered already, not brain surgery, and if it was actually an objectively good show I probably wouldn't have liked it half as much - there's only so much of a straight face you can put on female cops in bikinis having beachside kung-fu throwdowns, after all.

Do you think you could ever be a husband to her? I mean, what can you offer her? Companionship? Love? A man’s love?

Watching: Blake's 7 - only thirty years too late and the first thing I ever knew of this series was when a tv show about old sci-fi mentioned it as SPOILER!! "the show where they all got killed in the final episode", but hey - I get there in the end. It's all right, as it happens. Money was clearly spent on some set dressing and location shooting/costumes, yet quite a great deal more money was clearly saved on special effects. There's also a terrible habit of just throwing exposition at the viewer, like characters sitting on a sofa explaining their evil plans for civilization that hinge on censorship, or Blake sitting Avon down to watch a power point presentation of what happened in the previous episode even though Avon was not only present during events but central to them - but all told, it's okay fluff.
Clash of the Titans - this here remake movie is stupid. Really, it's utterly, utterly stupid and composed of nothing but sequences where things jump towards the camera, which as a visual gets old if you aren't watching in a 3D cinema, which I imagine the vast majority of the audience won't be. I can watch any old shit, mind, so this didn't really offend me and I quite enjoyed it, but it's a ham-fisted, sometimes visually incomprehensible beast. Cool Kraken, all the same.
Steel Dawn - a Patrick Swayze favorite round these parts, it's basically a post-apocalyptic kung-fu version of Shane. Dumb, no-budget, and acted by a bunch of trees, but still likably daft and a good reminder of those heady days when 'low-budget' didn't automatically mean A LOAD OF SHITE and film makers got around their shortcomings by being entertaining and knowing a bit about their craft. The first Terminator, for instance, was a low-budget effort (and far better than the soul-less and bloated sequel whose appeal I've never been able to comprehend), as was Monster Squad, Night of the Comet, Ghoulies, American Ninja 2, Phantasm 2, Warlock, Showdown in Little Tokyo - shit, I could go on for ages just listing complete tosh that's inexplicably entertaining despite itself because someone somewhere along the line decided to apply a little TLC to a concept.
Covert Affairs - I have often wondered what would happen if they reversed the Jennifer Garner road to success and instead of starting out in a good tv show about a female spy before graduating to success in terrible films, an actress started out in successful and good films before moving on to shit television shows about a female spy and clearly Piper Perabo and I are on the same wavelength, because after making The Prestige, she's taken a demotion to this 'so awful it's entertaining' tv show that also stars several other tv no-marks I quite like and him off Jake 2.0. It's basically Alias if you tuned into Alias for the first time and Alias was exactly how you expected it to be (especially the pop songs that play during the end and lots of girly doe-eyes made to some point vaguely off-camera because the main female is feeling inadequate in a man's world) rather than a tv show about a woman who hits a wall and decides the best course of action is to not feel bad but to instead solve that problem immediately by using fancy gadgets for a bit and then shooting Arabs before going home and drinking alcohol until the next episode starts.
Rookie Blue - the more I watch the tall brunette in this attempt to do any acting at all, the more I expect the camera to pull back and reveal the whole thing to be a 'show within a show' where everyone is deliberately spouting the most deliberately cliched lines they can in the most unconvincing way possible to convey that they're playing a terrible actor reading from a banal script, and if that actually comes to pass about ten episodes down the line, then this becomes officially the best mindfuck on soap opera viewers ever committed to television - but I'm going to lay money right now that this will not be the case and this really is all there is to it: bad actors, poor drama, and not a speck of playfulness or genre awareness in sight.
But I keep thinking "any minute now, the camera will pull back..." Quite baffling.

Consumers respond to requests for their impressions of Windows 7...

Watching: Secret Life of the American Teenager - in theory, a tv show aimed at teens that talks frankly about their sex lives and passes no judgment is a great idea, in that general consensus is broadly that they absorb this kind of shit anyway so it may as well give something back while they lap it up indiscriminately between mouthfuls of Pot Noodle and Red Bull or whatever the fuck it is they eat to get that pimply, sandblasted complexion that offsets the white of their shellsuits in such charming fashion. As you may have guessed from subtle clues in my use of language, I am not in favor of teenagers as a collective body, though there's plenty of dramatic mileage in fiction that centers around any group trapped between two distinct stages of their lives, and by and large that means either middle-aged people or teenagers, with the 20-30-somethings presumably being an uninteresting bunch. Anyway, there's a lot of teen programming about, and Secret Life is now three years old and just as staggeringly sanctimonious as it was on day one, when absolutely no-one needed to be told that the producers were vaguely aware of the equally dull Juno and set out to make something just as boring and trite on a weekly basis.
Secret Life is awful, and that's why I watch it. Some right-wingers decided to make tv that told it like it is, and then went about telling it like they saw it, showing sexual activity as deviant behavior rather than an indulgence of those with opportunity and the inclination - sex is either explained by the actions of abuse victims, "your ethnic types", low income families, or catholics (though the latter three are usually three birds with one stone on American television), but it's all so thick-headed and impossible to take seriously that I enjoy it the same way I do sci-fi, because it's practically another planet these - and I use this term lightly - people inhabit, and it can be no coincidence that just as I would never have watched the likes of it years ago, I wouldn't have watched the Ferengi episodes of Deep Space 9 either, but now I breathe this crap in like oxygen.

Which is not to say you should watch it. You shouldn't.
It's terrible - so don't.

Watching: CSI Miami, Melrose Place, Trauma, TNA, 90210 - nothing but pure shite today, apparantly.