End of the year summary briefs

As we prepare to leave 2023 behind us, a look at the blog shows that I wrote rather fewer posts this year than I did in 2021 and earlier. I have a feeling that's in part because I've been getting ahead of myself in terms of watching movies and scheduling posts. I intimated a couple of times that Dad fell and broke his hip (well, the top part of the femur that goes into the hip socket) in May 2022, which necessitated the two of us moving to someplace more centrally located and, crucially, someplace where I've got reliable and unlimated high-speed internet, enabling me to do a lot more streaming video.

I don't intend any major changes in what I'm doing with the blog, which means that at the rate I'm posting, the blog should get to 7,000 posts sometime in August or September. I've got a lot of movies on my cloud DVR to get through, and there's a lot of interesting stuff on the various streaming services. I'm still one of those weirdos who likes physical media, however, and if I can get a second Blu-ray player for the upstairs TV I might start getting through more of my multitude of DVDs. I might finally spring for a bigger TV too -- if you call 40 inches big. The configuration of my upstairs space is such that anything bigger won't fit, and in the living room downstairs we've got a very old entertainment center that won't fit anything larger than 32 inches, the center dating from the days before 16:9 TVs. The TV itself was bought during the 2008 Olympics; since it's still running reasonably well, why replace it?

As for New Year's programming, TCM's lineup is a bit different today from past years. It looks like the daytime programming has several movies with New Year's scenes. Certainly Ocean's 11 (8:00 AM), Radio Days (2:15 PM), and An Affair to Remember (6:00 PM) have them. During the evening, it's spoof comedies. The January 1 daytime lineup is Japanese monsters, and finally in prime time on Monday we get a Marx Brothers mini-marathon.

In the case of FXM, it looks as though the FXM Retro programming block is going to continue, at least for a while longer. There doesn't look to be anything notably new over the next two weeks as far as the TV listings pages go out. That means both nothing new in terms of being brought out of the vault, and nothing new in terms of changes to the FXM Retro format. As always, I'm astonished that the FXM Retro block is still going after over a decade.

Here's to a happy and healthy 2024 to everybody!