Well, some day soon, anyhow. The holiday season is nearly upon us. I can tell this by the number of catalogues arriving in the mailbox every day.

Most of them don't tempt me but the video catalogues and the book catalogues usually put a serious strain on my self-control.

Not only do I want to order the dozens of things I've seen but don't own, but I want to order DVDs to replace all of my video tapes, and I want to order things I've never seen but think might be interesting.

And some things I just want to order so I can have them, regardless of whether or not I think I might watch them.

The Jewel In the Crown is a prime example. Saw it, loved it, not sure I'd ever have the time to watch the entire thing again, still want to buy the DVDs.

Ditto, Reilly, Ace of Spies. I've seen it twice and loved it both times but I'm not sure I'd watch it if I bought the DVDs. Still, it's a temptation. Sam Neill. Yummm

I've never watched the Horatio Hornblower miniseries because I read the books first and the early ones were so badly written they were almost unreadable and also because the hero continued to be a whiny, self-pitying wimp for most of the series. He reminds me of a contemporary, male version of one of Dickens' most pitifully overwrought female characters. There are better, and better-written Napoleonic naval war series books out there. I've always assumed TPTB chose to transfer the HH ones to screen instead of one of the others because the HH series is notable for having very few naval battles. That would make it a lot cheaper to turn it into a mini-series.

Eventually I did grow to like the HH books. Just not as much as some of the others. I mention it because the DVDs are always in the catalogues and I stop and brood over them when I see the pictures, but I haven't been seriously tempted to buy them. Maybe I can check around and see if they're available for rental first.

The Jeeves and Wooster DVDs are another temptation. They did a great job of transferring the books to screen and yet I don't have a strong urge to buy all of these. The casting is as perfect as casting can be and yet...somehow the television adaptation misses by justthat much of being able to delight me in the way that the books do. I enjoy the television series, but the one season of DVDs I own aren't the first thing I reach for when I'm trying to decide what to watch.

Maybe once I've known and loved (and largely memorized) a book, it's impossible to translate it to the screen in a way that will completely satisfy me, I don't know.

I suppose it's possible that I'm just a little picky.

Just a little.

What else tempts me? British comedy. Britcoms. There are several programs that I love but we already own most of these, have watched, and rewatched them fifty times, and have them nearly memorized. Still, they rarely fail to amuse me.

There aren't many American television shows I'd buy. I'd buy West Wing if they brought it out on DVD. I still haven't seen the first season.

When due South comes out, I'll buy that, but of course it's Canadian. Still, Canadian is American, right? There were one or two seasons of Highlander (Canadian again) that I would have bought on DVD but so few people bought Season One that they aren't planning to bring the others out on DVD. I can live with that. It's not something I'd have watched very often.

I wouldn't take the X-Files DVDs if they were given to me as a gift with a free cruise thrown into the bargain, but I refuse to go off on another pointless tangent about how Chris Carter is a clueless dweeb who should have been given a golden handshake and a faulty parachute after Season 4.

What else?

I've actually seen half a dozen episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer over the last year and have to admit that I enjoyed it a lot. Given the opportunity, I'd sit down and watch the entire thing but I'm not sure I'd buy it.

There's a difference between a show that's watchable and a show that's re-watchable. *

Outside of fannish love, I mean. When we're obsessed with some fandom, I think most of us watch and re-watch the episodes, but how many of us can continue watching old episodes once the fannish passion burns out?

I had a brief fannish flirtation with The Invisible Man but once the idea that I might write for it passed, I really didn't re-watch the episodes I'd taped.

Ditto for Once a Thief. When I realized I wasn't going to be able to write decently for it, I never really watched it again. (Although the urge to give it one more try does come over me occasionally. I've been dabbling with some ideas for a story for the past couple of months but I have to wait until the kind person I loaned my tapes to returns them before I can think about actually doing any writing.)

Neither of those are good shows in spite of being amazingly slashy and having some brilliant moments here and there. They're both shows that had a lot of potential, potential wasted by bad writing.

Pause while I resist the urge to go off on a tangential rant about people who ruin good ideas with lousy writing.

(I see that the debut of OaT on television here in the states garnered a whopping 0.7 in the ratings. That might be connected with assigning the show a lousy timeslot and then not actually airing the premiere until 24 hours later in some markets. Even people who wanted to watch it had trouble finding it.)

I think I'm losing the point of this entry, not that it was all that interesting to begin with.

* I think I'm more interested in this idea, anyhow. It applies to fiction and fanfiction as well. There are books/stories that are quite readable, but that one would never have the urge to pick up a second time. And then there are books/stories that one can read and reread a dozen times and never grow tired of them.

Part of the reason I'm so picky about what I want to read is that I prefer re-readable stories.

A once-off is okay, but it's like eating one piece of candy. It satisfies a person while they're chewing, but they're left with nothing once it's gone.

On the other hand, if they sat down and ate a nice steak and maybe a baked potato, they'd be satisfied for hours afterwards.

Reading a once-off story is like...it's kind of like just killing time for a few minutes. Once it's over, you've killed five or fifteen minutes of your day, but you didn't gain anything. You don’t have anything that lasts, anything to take away with you.

Maybe it's because I'm getting old but I want more from my entertainment than that. I want stories I keep thinking about after I've finished them, stories that offer fresh ideas or intriguing situations that continue to inspire my imagination even after I've finished reading the story.

I always hated that "box of chocolates" movie, whatever it was called, but too much fanfiction is like eating a box of chocolates. You pick them up and bite them and you throw the icky ones back. Once you've eaten all of the good ones, or at least as many as you can hold at one sitting, you feel bloated and your conscience points out that you'd have been better off if you'd have just eaten a nice sandwich.

I always say there's nothing like a nice sandwich.

I don't know why I'm rambling about all of this except that I am getting the urge to read fanfiction again these days and I'm hoping to find more sandwiches than chocolate-covered cherries when I dive in.

I know. I'm delusional.