Borrowing it from our children... The best $10 I ever spent.

One of my favorite quotes I've heard lately is "We don't inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." It's Native American, though I'm not sure which tribe or if it can even be traced back to it's very origin. Regardless, it's something that really struck a chord in me.

Last night an event much awaited in our home occurred. It was the premier of The Discovery Channel's mini-series called Planet Earth and we bought the high-def channels from our local cable company for one month specifically to watch it. After the first 5 minutes of the first show in the series, I was confident I had never spent $10 on a better luxury. The show was inCREDIBLE.


The first three out of eleven episodes played last night but we only watched the first as we had other things that needed our attention. We TIVO'd the other two. But as we were curling up to watch a few minutes of something before drifting off to sleep, we flipped it on The Discovery Channel and happened across a later showing of one of the other two we hadn't seen yet and while I was dog tired I was also GLUED to the TV for over an hour. I finally had to pull myself away from it with promises that I wouldn't miss anything because of our TIVO'd episodes. And I can NOT imagine that show in non high-def. What a disservice you would be doing to yourself. It was a truly amazing experience.

One of the coolest things about the show is that they take about the last 10 minutes of it to explain to you the innovative cameras and techniques they used to get particular shots in the program. Many of the things you watch have never been filmed before or even seen by many of the scientists in the field simply because the technology wasn't available until now. For the first episode they show you how they get a ground eye close-up of wild African dogs from a helicopter that's over a kilometer away!

I'm sure I've gone on about it enough by now to give you the picture. Lou was very hospitable when he humored me the four times in the first 15 minutes of the show that I would come knock on his door and say "You've got to come see this!" Until before he knew it he was sucked into the show too. He had purposely set off to his bedroom because he didn't "feel like watching TV" right then but before he realized it, he was just as sucked in an amazed as both Monkey and I were.

My only real regret is that we can't keep the TIVO'd versions forever. Programs in high def take up a LOT of disc space and as I said, there are 11 in the series total. We can't burn them onto our own DVD's either, even though we own a DVDR. You can order the set on DVD's on Discovery Channel's web site but only Blu-ray DVD's can store enough data for high def so that won't be high def, but I'm still probably going to get it. Please, if you do have high def available to you do NOT miss this series. You WILL be astounded.