A Year of Mockumentaries? Err, I Mean Documentaries?

For years I’ve been padding my non-fiction reading lists with books from Zandria’s year end “This is what I read” list. (She reads non-fiction almost exclusively.) Non-fiction can be so hit or miss that it’s always nice to have someone you know and trust read one first and tell you what she thought. (She’s also been very nice and elaborated on some of your opinions on books via email so that I was sure I was getting what I thought I’d be getting.)

This year, she also posted a “This is what I watched” post full of documentaries. Ohhhh boy! One of my personal favorite things about having the ROKU has been watching the occasional documentary, just because I felt like it. Unfortunately, the girls tend to monopolize the ROKU on the weekends and I haven’t watched as many as I’d like. I also was never sure what I should watch — there are so darn many, after all.

I sat down on Sunday and added a ton of documentaries from her list to my Netflix queue and in the process added some more that she hadn’t watched but caught my eye.

I figured this would be a good way to force myself to work on JMP’s Christmas stocking — watch some documentaries and work on this thing at the same time. Win/win! So on Sunday, I picked a short one that I wasn’t sure TW would be interested in, since she was working in the bedroom but before a few minutes had passed, she wandered out to join me in watching. Prince J watched along for awhile too.

We watched “Between the Folds” — super interesting! The art, the history, the science of paper folding. (Oh, I actually watched this on Amazon Instant because Netflix was grouchy. Too many kids in the house watching other things on MY Netflix account, probably, lol.)

Then, because we enjoyed that so much, we moved over to Netflix and watched Vegucated. A vegan in NY recruited (via Craigslist) three people to go vegan. Pretty much what you’d expect. They watched videos about animal farming/meat production, wandered into a farm and saw things they didn’t want to see, struggled with friends/family who don’t understand the vegan thing, missed cheese (mmm cheese) and they all lost weight, improved cholesterol and blood pressure — as expected.

While we were watching these, alienbody was watching documentaries from Zan’s list too, heh. (Zandria is becoming a legend!) Alienbody coined the phrase “mockumentary” and oh how I look forward to mocking some documentaries this year. It’s gonna be funnnnnnnn. And interesting.