So it turns out we're getting some money back from our friends at the federal and state government this tax season. Add to that President Bush's "economic stimulus" payment, and all the pieces are in place for me to really waste some serious money on unnecessary home entertainment goodies.

But unfortunately, I'm much more responsible now than I was back in say, college. So whereas a tax refund back then would have gone towards liquid refreshment, a few trips to the Ponderosa Steak House buffet, and several CDs that would likely go almost totally unlistened to (Too Much Joy, John Wesley Harding, and Afghan Whigs, I hardly knew ye), today I tediously weigh the options of how to best spend any economic windfall.

The first item I'd love to buy with the refund money is an HDTV set. The lack of an HDTV set in my house is making me feel seriously behind the times, especially since several of my co-workers and my in-laws have already taken the HD plunge with no regrets. And certainly much of the HDTV programming I've seen has impressed me in terms of its quality; the most recent example being the Super Bowl, which I was able to watch in HD thanks to the good people at Disney World having the foresight to install digital sets in guest rooms at the Polynesian Resort. (You'd think that Disney could almost get away with having no sets in their guest rooms since you'd assume that people would be too busy checking out the Country Bear Jamboree to watch TV, but there you have it.)

I should also have an HD set because I am a lover of television. And one of television's biggest weapons in the fight against audience erosion from Internet competition (whether it be from users watching TV episodes on-line or users gambling and looking for fake celebrity nudes) is the advent of HD, which completely destroys the image quality available by downloading or streaming video on-line.

The reason I'm personally reluctant to get an HD set is probably the same reason many others are as well: Good old SD is just fine by me. Now I know that people probably said the same thing about their black-and-white sets when color television was introduced or about their washboards and clotheslines when automatic washers and dryers were introduced. But the fact of the matter is that I honestly don't believe I will enjoy my favorite shows like 30 Rock and The Office any more if I can see Tina Fey and Creed Branton in HD. So the HD set purchase will likely become one of necessity -- hey, why does the TV in the living room take four hours to warm up? -- than of impulse.

The other toy I considered spending my tax refund on is a Blu-Ray Disc player. Here I have two main issues. Being an early adapter to DVD (I bought my first no-frills player as an open-box item at Best Buy in 1998 for what now seems like a ridiculous $300), I have literally hundreds of DVDs that I'm not too thrilled about having to upgrade. Not only does the cost of having to upgrade not thrill me, but here again, I'm satisfied with my DVDs and don't see the necessity to go to Blu-Ray. The choice to jump from VHS to LaserDisc for me was easy: On LaserDisc I could watch This Is Spinal Tap and Monty Python and the Holy Grail with commentaries, deleted scenes, and other goodies. On VHS I couldn't. The decision to jump from LaserDisc to DVD was equally easy. Not only was DVD more compact, but the discs were cheap, meaning that I could build a home library of movies and TV shows. The costs of individual LaserDiscs meant I could only rent the shiny silver platters. But with Blu-Ray, again we're talking only about an improved picture and sound, and there we're talking a noticeable improvement on only some discs. Do I really believe that Seinfeld will look or sound any better on Blu-Ray? Am I willing to spend hundreds of dollars (Blu-Ray discs are pricier than DVDs) to find out? No and no. So the purchase of a Blu-Ray player seems far off as well.

What about satellite radio? Got it. Love it. Here we're talking about being able to access actual content that's unavailable elsewhere, which Blu-Ray and HD don't really provide. (Oh, I know there are minor exceptions, but no one buys an HD to watch HDNet.)

What about an iPod? Come on, I'm not that far behind the times. Have one of those too. And while I could probably live without it, the option of being able to download Pardon the Interruption and listen to it while walking the dog or mowing the lawn is an incredible convenience.

TiVo? Could not survive without it. Any television fan without TiVo or a DVR has no idea how badly and unnecessarily they're suffering.

So I'm stuck. I guess I'll drive home while listening to my satellite radio, watch my standard DVDs of Saturday Night Live: The Complete Second Season and my TiVoed episodes of Big Brother 9 (not shot in HD anyway) on my standard-def television, take the dog for a walk while listening to my iPod, and wonder if it's really possible to be maxed out on home entertainment. And if so, what do I spend my tax refund on? Are there still any Ponderosa Steak Houses in business?

So the Justice Department has just approved the merger of XM and Sirius, the two major (only?) providers of satellite radio in the U.S. The next and final step is approval from the Federal Communications Commission, which I’m going to say will come easily since the FCC appears to be too busy doing the bidding of the PTC and other conservative activist groups.

So will this merger be a good thing or a bad thing for fans of satellite radio? Well, the main fear is that with no competition from each other, the merged company will have less incentive to keep rates low. So that would be bad.

The plus of course would be that subscribers of one service would then begin to reap the programming benefits of the other. A good thing if you’re a sports fan subscribing to Sirius who wants the exclusive baseball coverage of XM, or if you’re a XM subscriber and you want the The Howard Stern Show now only on Sirius.

I subscribe to Sirius satellite radio but get many XM channels at home through DirecTV (Sirius has a similar deal with Dish Network), and can say that Sirius clearly has the best music programming. Sirius has led the way with artist-oriented channels, such as Rolling Stones Radio, E Street Radio, and Elvis Radio. And XM doesn’t have anything to compete with Sirius’s "Super Shuffle" (where you can hear Kenny Rogers followed by AC/DC) or "The Vault" (where you can hear underplayed bands such as King Crimson and rarely played album tracks by the usual "classic rock" stable of artists). Plus the geniuses at XM have given most of their music channels cute names such as "Fred," "Lucy," and "Squizz" which are maddeningly non-descriptive. So I’m certainly hoping that the final Sirius/XM channel lineup is more Sirius than XM.

Or at least the portion of it that I choose to subscribe to. A likely outcome is that -- with the plethora of channels resulting from such a merger and with the lack of competition keeping rates down -- Sirius/XM (who knows what the merged company’s name will be) will offer programming tiers similar to what cable and satellite TV offer. Which will be a bummer. Because even if I don’t want to listen to Canadian Adult Alternative Music (Sirius Channel 95) and certainly wouldn’t pay extra for it, I just like knowing I could listen to it anytime I wanted. Irrational, yes, but there you have it.

I don’t know what would separate programming tiers on satellite radio, but it clearly wouldn’t be as clear-cut as " music," "talk," and "sports," any more than cable or satellite would offer a "news" or "kids" tier. My guess is that subscribers would get most or all of the music, news, and talk/sports talk stations for a basic rate, and then have to pay extra for "star"-driven channels such as Howard Stern, Oprah & Friends, and Martha Stewart Living Radio, and more still for play-by-play channels from the major sports entities such as MLB and the NFL. None of this is due to happen anytime soon, but the bottom line is that satellite radio subscribers are likely to be given expanded options but then be forced to pay extra for those options.

Speaking of options, what’s with the release of Elvis Costello’s upcoming release? Costello fans have long been screwed/blessed with multiple reissues of his albums -- I have bought no fewer than four versions of My Aim Is True and This Year’s Model, and that’s ever sitting out one of the reissue campaigns. Now he announces that his latest recording will be released on vinyl only, with a code included in the package that will allow you to download the album (which I have to assume is a free download). What’s the deal with that? Fans that want to download the music who most likely don’t own a turntable won’t want to be saddled with a record album while others like me who are still stuck in the "if I’m going to pay $12.99 for some songs I better damn well have something concrete in my hand to show for it" CD era are shut out entirely. Sure the songs will eventually wind up on a CD release, but aggravating still. Makes me wish Costello had just decided to re-release Goodbye Cruel World again instead.

A sad note in the world of music: The chief executive for the Beatles’ Apple Corps and their former road manager and personal assistant Neil Aspinall died at the age of 66. To me, Aspinall had the ultimate gig -- living and working alongside The Beatles without having to deal with all of the crap they had to deal with. And as a childhood friend of McCartney and Harrison, you know he was well taken care of by the Fab Four, undoubtedly sharing in many of the riches (money, women, power, etc.) without many of the headaches.

Of course, Aspinall’s death is further evidence that Paul McCartney is suffering through one of those Green Mile-type punishments from God that is forcing him to outlive all of his friends and loved ones. First their manager Brian Epstein, then John Lennon, then his wife Linda, then George Harrison, now Neil Aspinall (not to mention other deceased colleagues such as press agent Derek Taylor). I’d be worried if I was Ringo.

Tonight's the night. No, I'm don't mean that. I took care of that last night. And the night before. I'm talking about the slow return to network television of original scripted programming.

Monday night (March 17), CBS will unveil the first new episodes of The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, and Two and a Half Men, airing along with a new episode of the midseason show The New Adventures of Old Christine.

It will be interesting to see how these new episodes do compared to the reruns that have been airing; i.e., if fans of the series that have been avoiding the repeats come back. Unfortunately, the season premiere of Dancing with the Stars over on ABC will likely steal some potential viewers away, thereby giving network executives more ammunition to their arguments that they don't really need writers to have successful programming.

An even bigger concern than how these first "all gnu" (as CBS has lamely marketed their return) episodes do is the long-term fate of both How I Met Your Mother and The New Adventures of Old Christine, which are by far the best shows in CBS' lineup but also the two in the most ratings trouble. CBS seems to feel that Mother has peaked in popularity and hasn't given the show a third-season renewal, while Christine's ratings have fallen off, which isn't too much of a surprise considering it's been surrounded by reruns since its midseason return. Even though the writers of Mother are sometimes frustratingly redundant (enough with Ted and Robin already), the cast remains one of TV's best. Christine takes a cast that is almost as good as Mother's and gives it much better scripts, resulting in the best "old school" (three-cameras, shot in front of a live audience) comedy on television. It would be a crime (get it, CBS being the "crime procedural" network) were CBS to bounce either show.

I was watching a lot of the Big Ten basketball tournament over on the Big Ten Network (yeah, I know this isn't a sports blog, but stay with me), and I was shocked that one of their main sponsors was a lawn and garden company called Hustler Turf Equipment. Hustler? If you owned a company that was in no way affiliated with the pornography industry, would you brand it the same as one of the most notoriously filthy men's magazines in the world? What's next, Barely Legal Power Tools? Sure, it's possible that Hustler Turf existed before the magazine, but come on, Turf guys, give it up -- you've lost the name recognition battle to Larry Flynt. Remember the diet candy AYDS? You don't? That's because the company knew when their name had been hijacked by something not conducive to moving product. So they changed the name to Irritable Bowel Syndrome candy. Actually, the product was dumped from the market not long after AIDS became such a widespread disease. Some associations you can't outrun.

Welcome back. It's been too long. Here we go.

Hard times for fans of the 1989 cult movie Road House. Earlier this week blind musician Jeff Healey, who played the leader of the Double Deuce house band in the movie, died of cancer. Then on the heels of that news came reports that Patrick Swayze, who starred as the bouncer at the Double Deuce, was battling pancreatic cancer. Depending on which reports you want to believe, Swazye is either responding well to treatment or is near death.

Now a little background is in order here. When I was in high school, I worked at a first-run movie theater that wasn't necessarily the finest in Burnsville, Minnesota. OK, it was a dump. How else to describe a place that had kids earning minimum wage acting as projectionists? (Hey, sorry that you paid $6 to see Another 48 Hrs. wildly out of frame, but Tony just broke up with his girlfriend and doesn't really care. And that's nothing compared to how unwatchable our print of Young Einstein is thanks to the combination of Cherry Coke and Arby's Sauce he spilled all over it.)

Anyway, we didn't get much in the way of hits. When Harry Met Sally was one and Road House was another. In the several weeks that Road House maintained its stranglehold on theater number seven, my co-workers and I memorized every laughable line in that godawful movie. To this day, if I see that film on TV, I watch it with a wide grin on my face.

So rest in peace, Mr. Healey, and get well, Mr. Swazye. You have contributed greatly to the person I am today. Oh, and there's no doubt what Swayze's second-most important contribution to the world is. No, not Dirty Dancing. I'm talking about the "Chippendale's Audition" sketch from Saturday Night Live opposite the deceased (sorry to be morbid again) Chris Farley. Although I am annoyed that the sketch completely ruined "Workin' for the Weekend" for me. Oh well, at least "Hot Girls In Love" is untarnished by the jokesters at SNL.

Speaking of SNL, some of you may be aware of my love for SNL distant cousin Second City Television. How much love? Well, I wrote the definite book on the subject. So you can guess how excited I was to hear that cast members Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, and Dave Thomas are reuniting to perform for the first time in 24 years. The occasion is a benefit concert on May 5 at the Second City Theater in Toronto. The downside (besides the absence of the late -- more morbidity -- John Candy)? The price. $500 a ticket. Now if I was going to pay $500 to see any single show, this would be the one. But is any single performance worth $1,000 (assuming I'd have to bring the significant other)? Maybe if the cast also did a reading of my book (see above). So it looks like I'll skip the show . . . but if any readers want to start a collection to send me . . .

Way down the TV foodchain is the granddaddy of all the current reality shows, Survivor. Now I don't make any apologies for loving Survivor, and this current edition is one of their best yet. But CBS and corporate partner Sprint are doing their darndest to screw it up. Here's what I mean: About 2/3 of the way through every episode, CBS runs a spot announcing that through your Sprint cell phone you can text your vote for the "player of the week." You are given three "player of the week" choices, and the choices given can provide major spoilers to the remainder of the episode. Case in point: On last week's show it looked like "favorite" Cirie might be voted off. Then the Sprint ad comes up telling us we can vote for Cirie as "player of the week." Well, then we KNOW that Cirie isn't this week's casuality as her nomination then wouldn't make any sense. Sure enough, the footage in the remainder of the episode detailed how Cirie campaigning to get "fan" Joel voted out. Come on, CBS, get it together. It's bad enough that you can't watch the episode on-line without first reading the spoiler summary ("MIKEY B. BLINDSIDED BY OUSTER. WATCH NOW.").

So everyone's sounding the death knell for the Oscar telecast since the ratings for this year's show were in the toilet. Hey, the ratings were almost as bad in 2003 when a boring Best Picture race was won by Chicago, a movie I still haven't seen and probably never will. Bottom line is, just as the ratings for a major sporting event increase if the matchup is compelling, so will the ratings for the Oscars reflect interest in the nominees. This year's nominees were about as exciting as a Penn State/Northwestern men's basketball game. But having said that, changes to the broadcast seem to be in order. Like how about removing that entire putrid middle hour with the deadly honorary Oscars and the montage of the people who died in the past year, which next year should feature Jeff Healey but hopefully not Patrick Swayze.

And so we come full circle. Talk to you soon.