Guest post written by Erin Barker

For my reality TV show blog, I like to make sure that I do a big retrospective for each season of a show. Well, right now I’m working on doing that for this season of The Bachelorette. I do make it pretty in depth, so I like to spend a pretty good amount of time putting them together. I’m not sure if my readers read all of them, but I like writing them so I think that it’s worth that extra bit of effort.

While I was looking online, trying to find some good screen captures of the stuff that I was writing about, I ran across the site http://www.domainNAMES.COM/. After I looked through it a little bit, I decided to buy a website domain and change over my blog to it.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and I think that I would do a whole lot better with posts like this on an actual website. I can’t wait to write all the dirt on Bentley. I think that everyone can agree that he’s a jerk.

Since we cancelled DirecTV, our TV viewing habits have changed. We watch a few shows on broadcast television, but most nights we watch a DVD thanks to Netflix or Redbox.

Most of the DVDs in our queue are TV shows. We are waiting for our current shows to finish their season so they will be available on DVD. Until then, we have been watching new-to-us TV shows. One of my favorites is The Tudors. Last night we finished season two. I was kind of sad to see the season end. The first two seasons have been really good and am looking forward to season three. It’s just I’ll miss Anne Boleyn and Catherine of Aragon.

Watching TV shows on DVD will spoil you. The most we have to wait for the next episode is three days – the turnaround time for Netflix. I can’t imagine waiting a week or longer for the next episode. But that used to be how you watched your favorite TV shows. How I love progress.

For the past three days, “Jeopardy!” has had a special tournament with two past winners – Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter – who took on Watson. Watson is an IBM super computer. He only rings in if he is certain of the answer but that still isn’t a guarantee it is the right response.

They played two games with the top winner taking home $1 million. Second place was $300,000 with third being $200,000. All of Watson’s $1 million winnings will go to charity. Half of Jennings and Rutter’s winnings will go to charity.

It was fun to watch the two games. I thought the humans did well. Watson was really impressive. He won with over $77,000. He seems to like sevens. A lot of his daily double bets had sevens in them. Wonder if that was a programming ‘Easter egg’ or a mathematical equation.

Still it was a nice break from the regular “Jeopardy!” games and being somewhat tech savvy, I found it highly enjoyable. Maybe Watson can come back or take on ASIMO – the Honda robot. Now that would be an awesome exhibition.

This guest post from Rafael Hodge

Remember the days of black and white TV, well the younger ones couldn’t even conceive of the idea of black and white, let alone only having three channels, four if you had PBS in your area. Back then we had great family shows and Saturday morning cartoons that weren’t all filled with the violence of today.

And we can’t forget that around 10 P.M. every night we would hear the words “oh say can you see” coming from TV and then the old test pattern. In some cases all you would see was snow on the screen until 7 A.M. rolled around and once again our TV set would boom into life again.

Show like Howdy Doody, The Mickey Mouse Club, The Jetsons, or The Bullwinkle Show are classics that I wanted my children to experience. Then Satellite TV came along with great networks like Nickelodeon that we added back in the late 70′s. Our children and our grandchildren now have the opportunity to watch a lot of the great shows like we did when we were children.

The great thing about Nickelodeon is that it shares space with Nick at Nite that has reruns of some of greatest sitcoms from years ago. And even this past May they purchased the rights to the Power Rangers franchise and will actually resume production for the eighteenth season of this popular show that kids have loved for years. If you don’t have nickelodeon on your direct tv specials get it and remember the good old days.

It has been almost a month since I cancelled our DirecTV service. We had been a customer for two years and really enjoyed all the DirecTV channels. We were introduced to so many great shows not to mention countless hours of entertainment for our daughter.

We are taking a break from satellite TV for a while. I do miss it though. Next year we hope to add it back once I have a full-time job. I have to admit that Direct TV is my favorite satellite TV provider. They are the only satellite TV provider we have ever used, but family members have tried others. We realized we had better programming at home with DirecTV.

We just like the variety in the DirecTV packages and really hope that our local channels will be available next year. Apparently they are working on it, so maybe it will finally happen. It is kind of exciting to think about having satellite TV again. So many of our favorite shows are now in new seasons. We are missing them – which makes us sad. We will trim our budget for now and will come back to DirecTV at some point in the future.

Brought to you by your friends at My TV Options.com

My new guilty pleasure is the History Channel’s Pawn Stars. It comes on Monday, and they usually have a mini-marathon of shows that day. Luckily the we have a DVR that records them all. Then during the week I watch a few every day.

Pawn Stars is about a family owned pawn shop in Las Vegas. The Harrison family consists of Richard (The Old Man, his son – Rick, and Rick’s Son Corey Harrison(Big Hoss). The show is a cross between Antiques Roadshow and American Chopper. The show focuses on the Harrisons’ relationship. I love the Old Man as he reminds me of my dad in so many ways. He doesn’t hold back on what he thinks. I love when he is negotiating a price for an item. His second offer is usually lower than his first one. People bring in some really unique items to sell or pawn. I love how if they don’t exactly know what an item is, they just give their best ‘educated’ answer. My favorite so far is Corey talking about a salesman Coca-Cola cooler sample as a cooler they placed at the checkout to entice people to buy one on the way out.

If I ever make it to Las Vegas, I will be making a trip to the pawn shop. I might can even round up something old or unique to try to get a few dollars.