I wanted to share more photos from my fabulous trip to Cornwall. I have so many photos, but I don’t like to post ones that feature my family, so that kind of limits what I can share on my blog. Here is a lovely house we drove by on the way to St. Ives. We drove by many houses that looked just like this. So pretty! Me holding up Lanyon Quoit. This photo is of some farmland behind a restaurant where we stopped for a break at Zennor. I stepped in stinging nettles just before tak

Someone asked me why I’m not blogging much about TV lately and the reasons are 1) I don’t watch as much TV anymore now that I have a baby and 2) there really isn’t that much good TV to watch! The only new shows I’ve been watching regularly this season are Once Upon a Time and Up All Night. I also tried Prime Suspect, but it was a little too gritty for me. I’m still watching anything Masterpiece, The Good Wife, Modern Family, Castle and yes, Gossip Girl but am waaaay behind on

I blog a lot about books and a lot about TV. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good TV show as much (or maybe more) than the next girl, but here are 10 reasons why I love books much better. 1) If you tell people you read a lot of books, you sound smart. Tell them you watch a lot of TV and you…don’t. 2) When reading a book, you get to choose who to cast. Don’t like Robert Pattinson as Edward? Choose someone else! (Or you can cast him in all the parts if you like…) 3) No commercials

I have an alter ego online. That’s right, I’ve finally decided to link to my TV blog. My writing group members told me to do this ages ago, but I had some convoluted reasons not to (something about not promoting TV shows as a children’s writer–seems a little silly now). Now that I’ve moved my blog to my husband’s server, I’m thinking about somehow importing the TV blog too and doing something with categories, but am too lazy to figure that out since I already have a category

According to reviews online, the miniseries isn’t very faithful to the novels, but it has made me wonder why I’ve never heard of them before. Has anyone read the books? What did you think? #nobelprize #tv #tvshowreview #johngalsworthy #forsytesaga

Title Page from 1st ed. of Emma (Img from wikipedia) Hooray! My first blog post for the new year (and January is halfway done…oops). Some of you may have noticed that I’ve switched over to wordpress. Please note that this will be my last post to amithaknight.livejournal.com and amithaknight.blogspot.com so please update your links/rss feeds or whatever. Anyway for Jane Austen fans — PBS will be airing a new four-hour version of Emma at the end of the month. You can watch a pr

(Inspired by Peta Andersen’s blog post “5 Things I Learned From ‘The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh‘”. We had a bit of an online conversation on the commentary section of her blog about learning from TV shows, and I didn’t realize how much I had to say about this topic!) So my husband and I loved Battlestar Galactica, and listed to many of the writer/developer/producer Ronald D. Moore’s commentary on the early season DVDs (originally distributed as podcasts which you can s

Wondering about the rest of that lovely Shelley poem from last weekend’s episode of Inspector Lewis? Here it is (from Bartelby.com): Love’s Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley The fountains mingle with the river And the rivers with the ocean, The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine In one another’s being mingle- Why not I with thine? See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No

My Own Worst Enemy So when I read the description of My Own Worst Enemy on NBC and saw the ads I thought it would be boring and/or annoying. In fact I almost didn’t watch it at all, but thought I’d try it out anyway. The premise of the show is that Christian Slater plays a secret agent who has kind of purposeful multiple personality disorder. Basically they implanted something in his head so that he has an alternate identity who knows nothing about his secret agent life. I w

So I was starting a blog about the TV shows that I watch and realized in horror that my list is very long. Too long to post on my blog without being embarrassed. I showed the list to James to see if he too thought it was too embarrassing to post and his response was, “Um. Yeah. Maybe if you delete the really embarrassing shows?”. There were only one or two that I deemed humiliating enough to delete, so that didn’t help. When did I start watching so much TV? It’s not like I do

Life on Mars Based on a hit BBC series, Life on Mars is about a police detective sent back in time to the 1970’s after he is hit by a car. It reminds me of Journeyman or Quantum Leap, only with murder mysteries to solve and I think the main character will not be switching back and forth in time. He’s just stuck. The acting is very good (the show stars Harvey Keitel), and I enjoyed the first episode, but the whole premise felt a little bit contrived. I will keep watching, des

Two more TV shows (I know you’re wondering where I find the time, and frankly so am I): Knight Rider on NBC – I don’t think I need to tell you what this show is about since it is based on a old TV series (that I never saw) starring the one and only David Hasselhoff. (If you don’t know, it’s basically about this guy and his super-special talking car that can do everything.) I don’t know what the old one was like, but this new version is fast-paced and a little silly at times.

Psych + Monk +added intensity = The Mentalist. This season, it seems that CBS decided to copy two of USAs hit shows to try to create a hit of their own. It worked. The story goes like this: Patrick Jane is a consultant for the police department whose detective skills are so good that he is often able to convince people that he is psychic (=Psych). However, he is still haunted by his inability to capture serial killer Red John who murdered Jane’s wife and child (=Monk minus OC

The next new show I tried this week was Do Not Disturb on Fox. I chose to record this program because it was written by Abraham Higginbotham, who was formerly a writer for “Arrested Development”. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for some reason my DVR only taped 15 minutes of the show. But I felt I did not miss much because from what I saw, the dialogue was stupid, the actors lacked chemistry together, and (the worst part) I didn’t laugh the whole time. I know that I said in my

I watch a lot of TV. I am only slightly embarrassed to admit this. This season I thought I would blog some of my thoughts about the new TV shows I’m trying out. The first debut show I tried watching this season was Fringe on Fox. I read a lot of good things about it and also, one of the writers is JJ Abrams from Lost (which doesn’t start up again until 2009 apparently). To my great disappointment, this show was NOT GOOD. The story is about an FBI investigator named Olivia who