Holy smokes, I Live in New Zealand.

As a co-op student many years ago on my work terms, I would watch America’s Funniest Home Videos Sunday nights at 7pm on The New VR (formerly CKVR, now A-Channel).  I would be finishing off my laundry at this point and contemplating making either tacos or opening up a can of Chef Boyardee something-or-other.  My chicken or beef would be browning in between groin kicks and seagulls deep throating hot dogs.  By the end of the show I would have wonderfully awesome tacos and be ready for the Simpsons and whatever animation was on afterwards.

That’s how I rung out my weekend for eight months.  As a professional in Barrie, my Sundays typically run longer nowadays.  Actually, they are usually shorter.

In New Zealand, I do have an equivalent program to ring out my weekends that I think is way more self-indulgent than even AFV.  Sol’s (a beer) Sunday Night Movie on C4.

It’s pretty genius actually.  They throw on a third- or fourth-run film that has already been flogged to death and has instant caché with nostalgic culture vultures like me.  It runs two to two-and-a-half hours with loads of commercial breaks for me to do laundry, send e-mails or write a blog post.  My first few months in Auckland, I wouldn’t miss the movie for the world.  Then the movies got dull and I started making friends and wasn’t around as often to watch movies (at least at home…the theatre movies are awesome this month).

To the best of my memory, so far I have watched:

• Sixteen Candles
• The Breakfast Club
• Wayne’s World 2
• The Neverending Story (why I survived it, I’ll never know)
• And tonight, I’ll be watching Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

That’s how weak my memory is and how indulgent these films are.  From C4’s website, upcoming films include:

• Revenge of the Nerds
• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
• Edward Scissorhands
• Installments of the Mad Max trilogy
• And the second-highest grossing English language Canadian movie ever, Porky’s

(To be clear, I wrote this before the movie so I could relax this Sunday night.  I did run 19k this morning and feel I deserve the break.)