I’ve been really, really worn down lately. Well, as long as I can remember, really. Moving into my new house 2 weekends ago nearly killed me, and then I’ve been fighting off getting sick since sometime before that, unable to really take any time off work because of poor planning and lack of resources — if I took time off, then people who are already doing other people’s jobs would have to do mine too.

Knowing that this week was going to be spent moving work from our old building to our new building, I decided to get as much rest as possible this weekend, and I think I accomplished it rather well. I lucked out and discovered that TVLAND had decided to run a 48 hour marathon of Benson, of which I think I watched a solid 12-14 hours between bouts of unconsciousness.

Given the choice between old Benson and new Benson, pick the old; it really started going downhil in ’83 or so. I finally turned it off midway through the second half of a 2-part episode shot on location in Hong Kong — you know the kind, where all the dialog is looped and the video is of entirely different visual quality from every other episode — involving the mistaken-identitity-kidnapping of a fashion designer by one of the apparently many Hong Kong-based fashion designer organized crime syndicates. Ugh.

Anyway, during this 48 hour period, TVLAND aired a total of probably 12 unique commercials. (Oh, I forgot to mention that I watched this in the bedroom, where I haven’t yet built/installed a Mythtv PVR, so I was stuck actually watching the commercials.) Who woulda thought that the demographic for a 48 hour Benson marathon would be depressed, single, lactose-intolerant, acid reflux suffering, incontinent, lazy (have to have a device to automatically clean the shower daily), lazy (have to have a device to automatically clean the toilet daily), with kids who are dirty and thus are in need of having surfaces safely disinfected?