Who needs a writers' strike to watch reruns

I admit it, we watch far too much TV in our house. However, we don't watch a lot of major network television. Though we are beginning to go into withdraw over "Heroes". And, I'm already missing "Moonlight" and (yes, I like it:) "The Bionic Woman".

Some of the shows we watch are spring-summer start-ups: "Rescue Me" and "The 4400".

"ER" might have a couple of episodes left in the can for February sweeps. And, it looks like we'll be getting some "Lost" shortly as well, and maybe some "Battlestar Galactica". I wonder if "The Riches" will be back soon.

That said, we've decided to start watching "Monk" by renting the DVDs from season one. If we make it through the entire season, we may start watching "House" next.

Plus, we are fans of BBCA. You know, the British writers are not on strike. "Torchwood" episodes are showing up on my TiVo queue again. Maybe we'll get some "Robin Hood" and "Doctor Who" before summer as well.

Since we have digital cable from Comcast, we have a boatload of channels to surf and queue from for TiVo. (Food/Travel/History/Martial Arts) Plus we get at least a hundred of "on demand" movies to pick from, for free, each month. Then, we rent a movie from Blockbuster once a week or so.

TiVo also affords us the ability to record reruns of show episodes that we have seen before so we can watch them again. Recently I recorded and re-watched a couple episodes of "Friends".

Now, the truly dirty little secret... We own over 600, yes SIX HUNDRED, movies on DVD and VHS. And yes, we watch movies that we have seen numerous times, over, and over, again. ("Timeline", "The Stand", "Dante's Peak", "Snatch", "Better Off Dead", "Shawn of the Dead", "The Day After Tomorrow", and so on)

I TRULY sympathize with the writers. However, my entertainment patterns have really not changed much because of the strike. Sorry folks, but I guess I'm not really your demographic any way.

But, hey, guess what? When we went to the movie theater on Saturday night it was a lot more crowded than the quality of the movies should have warranted. So, I'm guessing that the movie distributors are probably benefiting a bit from the lack of new programming on the tube.