Okay, here’s a moment of weakness. A few months ago, I started watching The O.C. on Fox. IIRC it was on at a time when nothing else was on, and in the beginning it was fast and witty (like West Wing,) and not the 90210 story it turned into. But then, the smart people at Fox decided to put it in the same timeslot as West Wing, and my TiVo stayed with NBC. I still have the OC season pass lower in my list, so on the occasion where NBC decides to run something else (Law and Order — what’s with that??) I get OC.

That happened tonight, and I think I saw the season cliffhanger of OC. The show is still a guilty pleasure, although I feel like I need daily soap opera digest handy when it’s on just for the Cliff Notes. Like 90210, if California living ever turned that weird, people should really move.

Anyhow, the ending montage had a Hallelujah song going in the background. I knew I liked it, and I’d heard it before, and I wanted a copy, but I didn’t know much about it. So I looked on iTunes Music Store, but there were 900 different songs and bands named Hallelujah. So I rewound some of the show on the TiVo, typed the lyrics into Google, and found out it was Jeff Buckley. I typed that into the iTMS and found the song I was looking for, and downloaded it for $0.99. I also found out via iTunes new iMix feature that it was a song in ALIAS Season 1, and that’s where I knew it from. (PS, ABC, if you made a CD collection of songs from ALIAS, I would buy it — even though most of the songs are by artists I would never buy, like Jewel and Sarah McLaughlan.)

All of this in less than 2 minutes, with the song legally in my possession playing out of my laptop. We are truly, truly in an information on-demand society. (That and Lewis Black talked about TiVo on the Daily Show — woot!)

Buckley’s Hallelujah is sad, and haunting. Powerful and somehow uplifting. I dig it. It’s playing in the background as I write this. Props to anyone who can find out which episode this was playing in ALIAS, and what was going on at the time. (Season 1 was a little early to be about Syd and Vaughn — I think it has something to do with her fiance or Will (WISCONSIN.)) The song has also taught me how to spell Hallelujah.

Also, since quizes are popular in blogs, here’s one picked up from the OC:

http://www.teenpregnancy.org

You’re in the game, but you get sidelined sometimes. The good news is that you realize what the safest choice is in most situations. The bad news is you may not always use it.

All for now. (Josh)

Some of you noticed I finally got comments, at least in a simple form, active on the blog yesterday. We’ll see how that goes.

I’m planning on buying a house, and have been halfheartedly searching over the last week. Today, I drove by 6 homes on my way to work, and wasn’t really impressed with any of them. The ones I did somewhat like were already off the market or pending sale. That’s scary — I usually take a long time to deliberate on large purchases. It seems if I try to do that here, I’ll lose the house I might like. But I’m not inclined to even look at a house that doesn’t “do it for me” from the outside, although I probably should at least for the experience of house hunting. I think my mom and brother are going to come up this weekend and help me shop around. Weeee.