TV ... Boring?

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No access to the BBC here, unless you get a satellite dish and get a subscription to Sky TV or similar. Some BBC programs are shown here but bizarrely most are dubbed into French rather than shown in VO / VML i.e. in French and with the original soundtrack so you can flick a switch and listen in the language of your choice. So you have to put up with most BBC programs dubbed into French. Thankfully Dr Who is one they show in multi-language.

I watch a lot of Arte. That tends to be largely in German with narrators over-speaking it in French. They do have good documentaries though. The Arte channel also shows some old English films in the original English too.

The Arte we had was about 50/50 French/German. The French was harder for me than the German.
Our foreign-language channels generally don't get subtitles, you're out of luck if you don't speak English or German. Apparantly the BBC are too lazy to provide us with Dutch subs at the expense of British taxpayers.
There is also a weird tradition of Flemish people getting subtitled when they appear on Dutch tv, and vice versa. We also get two Flemish channels (government broadcasting) for free.

Do you believe Flemish is a separate language? Or do you believe it's a dialect of Dutch?

Actually, I don't. I grew up where hockey was an obsession. I was seen as defective and imperfect because I didn't play.


Tim Horton: defenceman for the Maple Leafs. He also played for a few other NHL teams, presumably in the same position. I'm old enough to remember seeing him on the telly.

I thought you enjoyed hockey because you bemoaned the loss of "Hockey Night In Canada" from the CBC.

I was a very poor hockey player growing up--we only played street (with roller skates) hockey in my neighborhood in Queens, NYC.

I don't believe most people would care whether you played hockey or not as an adult. They'll know that you have many other strengths.

That's an interesting question. Officially Dutch is an official language of both the Netherlands and Flanders and it is considered a single language. But the standard Dutch is more or less a constructed language from all the regional languages/dialects, mostly based on what they speak in the western part. So when I listen to the Flemish news I can understand them just fine, though I needed to get used to the accent and to the few different words they use. I think this is similar to American or British English.
Then there are some Flemish people who speak in their regional dialect(or regional language, it's pretty arbitrary) and I can't understand any of it at all. But there are also people like that in the Netherlands. If people here speak in their regional language I can't really understand them, sometimes even if they try to speak standard Dutch I can't understand everything because of the accent.

Here is a really interesting picture in this article about Flemish on wiki (didn't want to post the picture because it's so huge): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish

The second picture has in yellow Nederfrankish (Low Franconian, which is Dutch) and green Nedersaksisch (Low Saxon) and Fries (Frisian) and Mittelfrankisch (Middle Franconian, which sounds close to German to me). Langues d'Oil is French.
The area was settled by different but closely related tribes such as the Franks, the Frisians and the Saxons (yeah, the ones who didn't go to England). Generally people in the non-yellow language areas such as Frisians also speak standard Dutch. I live on the edge between the yellow and green areas and there are people within a few kilometers of where I live that I can't understand it if they speak their regional language. So I think that the standard Dutch is one language that contains both what I speak and what they speak in Flanders, but the regional languages are seperate to me (including the regional languages in the Netherlands). I remember quite a few times talking to someone from a different part of the Netherlands in Dutch, and then they get a call from their parents and they switch to their regional language, and I only understand half of it. This language continuum continues into Germany. The north of Germany also has Low Saxon languages.

I agree. Colbert Report is the only thing I watch regularly and that is going off the air this year. So it'll be nothing shortly.

Well, it was hard to escape that fact when it was all over the news.

I like M*A*S*H, it's a great satire/medical show.
The Prisoner was a good show. The 60's version, not the new one.
Other shows I like:
Hogan's Heroes
Gilligan's Island
Fringe
The X-Files
Get Smart
Futurama
Mission Impossible can be good, but often repetitive.

I also watch anime sometimes. I don't watch TV much anymore. I used to be obsessed with them.

Mythbusters. Sometimes the Colbert Report, or the Daily Show.
I miss Battlebots.

Thats about it as far as shows Im enthused about.

Jazeera has a kinda news-meets-reality experiment going on with a show thats kinda interesting called "Borderlands".

I do watch "the Middle" on ABC. Got hooked on the sitcom family because one of its members seems to be an aspie.

My gf loves "Homeland". She talked me out of doing some real life thing in order to watch it once. It wasnt worth missing real life for. But its an okay show.