As many readers know, when I established my Tuesday-Saturday blog posting schedule many years ago, I did so to accommodate the broadcast of Ancient Aliens late Friday night. Over the years, Ancient Aliens has moved earlier on Fridays, but my schedule stayed the same. Now, Ancient Aliens is taking up residence in the television graveyard of Saturday following a year in which a third of its audience evaporated. However, I am not available to work Saturday nights, particularly now that the show is on late Saturday, past when I am too sleepy to write. I am not sure how my weekend schedule will work out. I plan to post a review sometime either later Sunday or Monday, but I am not entirely sure when I will have the time to write one. I will need to see how it goes.

In its quest to be all things to all people, Netflix releases a lot of content that wouldn’t make the cut at most networks. This filler tends to get dumped on off days, or in the shadow of higher-profile series. October Faction, nominally a supernatural monster-hunting drama, premiered just one day before the release of the next batch of episodes of the similarly themed Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Netflix made it quite clear that October Faction was a dud. The show, filmed more than a year ago, dropped on a weekday with virtually no promotion, and for good reason. It’s bad, at least based on the first half of the season, which was as far as I got before I couldn’t take the inanity any longer.

Publishers don’t share all of their new books with me, so I don’t always get to read all of the books that might be relevant to this blog before they are published. Ever since Andrew Collins complained that I gave one of his books a negative review prior to publication, Inner Traditions, one of the biggest purveyors of pseudohistory and New Age claptrap in the publishing industry, has stopped making available for review their books on themes relate to archaeology and ancient history prior to publication, presumably to stop me from reviewing them. Therefore, I had to wait to read a new book published last month by Bear & Company, a division of Inner Traditions. The book is called Mysteries of the Tayos Caves by Alex Chionetti, and it deserves notice for two reasons: First, because of who Chionetti is and second, because of who endorsed his book. The actual content of the book is nothing you haven’t seen before on Ancient Aliens and Expedition Unknown, and for good reason, as we shall see.

My boiler stopped working yesterday morning, shutting down my heating system, and as a result I spent all day yesterday arranging for repairs before the house chilled to the point of becoming uninhabitable. The circulator failed, resulting in an electrical malfunction that only managed to avoid catching fire because the valve above it leaked, extinguishing the sparks. This resulted in a busted circulator and a blown fuse. The circulator was easy to repair, according to the HVAC specialist, but the stupid special little fuse took two hours to replace because no one in the area carries that particular type and it had to be procured from twenty miles away. This happened simultaneously with the much-delayed closing on the house I have been trying to sell since last summer and with FedEx delivering my repaired computer. It was a busy morning that slid into a busier afternoon when the ongoing legal issues I have faced entered a new phase when the complainer (whose name I no longer use) demanded the removal of his name from every URL ever published on this blog. Despite the hardships, by the end of the day, I had a working furnace, a working computer, and only one house. My lawyer also drafted a response to the complainer. But I had no time to write, so I have nothing else to share this weekend except that my publisher has asked for revisions to my Legends of the Pyramids book and I now must work on that since I have a working computer again.

Last week, I discussed Expedition Unknown host Josh Gates in his role as a trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America, a nonprofit which “promotes archaeological inquiry and public understanding of the material record of the human past to foster an appreciation of diverse cultures and our shared humanity.” I criticized the AIA for giving a prominent role, both administratively and in terms of public events, to Gates because his program had included some dubious content and awful guests. Gates has occasionally spoken in glowing terms about the ancient astronaut theory, and his show airs on a network owned by Discovery Communications, a conglomerate responsible for some of the most damaging pseudoscientific series of the past few years, such as Legends of the Lost.

The History Channel announced the return of Ancient Aliens for a new season, but there is a twist: According to the network, new episodes will air on Saturdays beginning January 25. Previously, Ancient Aliens had aired on Fridays. Saturday is typically television's lowest-rated night and is often described as the "graveyard" of programming. However, America Unearthed spent several seasons on Saturdays on the H2 network to decent ratings, so this is not an automatic death sentence for the long-running series, but the move to a new and less-watched night might reflect the declining ratings for the series, which fell from more than a million viewers per week in January 2019 to fewer than 800,000 by the end of 2019.

The upshot, however, is that I will no longer be able to review the show on the night it airs. The new night also includes a new 10 PM time slot, and that is too late for me to be working. I will be asleep before the episode ends. Having a toddler tends to do that to a person. I am not sure when I will be able to slot in a review of the show since my weekends are usually booked.