Important Notes: Fish, Parking, Mars...

A few important things that you need to know.

First, we had to go out to Alamo Ranch to purchase some provisions from both Lowe's and JC Penny & Co. Following that, my wife had an idea to slip into Jim's to try their Friday fish special.It looks pretty decent on the menu and the price is certainly right. But I will tell you that once served, the fish looked like maybe it was fried a bit too long and the pieces seemed much smaller than what the menu depicted. But having complained about that (to you, not the waiter), I have to tell you that it was all pretty tasty.Please don't misunderstand; if asked to recommend a place to get fish, I wouldn't send an out of towner to visit Jim's for the catch of the day. But I'm just saying that the fish was good, the Cole slaw was really good and I liked the toast. Oh, and my wife liked the peach cobbler.The next important thing you need to know. Parking in the middle of the road is simply not allowed, even if you are trying to make a phone call. Besides the fact that it doesn't seem safe, it makes getting home a lot harder during rush hour. So please, refrain from that. Thanks.

Finally, I have to inform you that I have found a show that can actually make me stay on the treadmill for the full 50 minutes without getting bored. Life on Mars.

We started to watch the first episode of the show when it came out and gave up after the first five or ten minutes. Then, I kept seeing commercials for the show and suddenly realized that one of the characters was played by Michael Imperioli, who we loved in Sopranos and several other things. So I did a search on Hulu (by the way, I loved the Alec Baldwin commercial for Hulu during the Superbowl, even though I don't care for the guy), and found Life on Mars episodes on ABC. This might actually make sense because Life on Mars is actually on ABC. Funny how that works.

Anyway, the bad news is, they don't have the first four episodes online, so I did something that I normally won't do; I started with episode 5. I am totally hooked. Now I just need to find some Internet page that has episodes 1-4, just in case I missed anything.

In case you don't know, the gist of it is, this police officer is somehow injured (I don't even know if he was shot, hit by a bus, or slipped on a banana peel) and when he wakes up, he is still a police officer, still the same age, but the year is 1973. Think Starsky and Hutch. I swear, I thought I saw Huggy Bear walk by in one scene. Anyway, the people in his precinct know that he is some sort of mental case, but apparently not enough to send him off to the nut farm. Or, maybe they did and it was all resolved by episode number 5 when I started watching.

Anyway, as you can imagine, the guy has memories of how things are in 2008 (so last year, really), to include police techniques, sayings and even dance moves. He impresses his co-workers by performing Michale Jackson's Moonwalk across a desk during a party. Good times. I know all of this could seem just too easy to turn into a bunch of warn out cliches and stuff, but it really works well. The music is perfectly matched and even though we would recognize Harvey Keitel's and Michael Imperioli's characters from 70's cop shows, they make it all come together without the need to roll eyes.

I'm thinking I could have never gotten into this show if I hadn't accepted some suspended reality caused by being a fan of Lost. But now that I have found it, I'm pretty happy. If you know where I can find the first four episodes of Life on Mars, send me the link!