Advance warning to anyone who arrived here via search engine: this post is only peripherally about the Nintendo Wii gaming system that you didn’t get to buy this weekend. I’m using “wii” as a homophone for “whee.” Yes, it is very clever of me.

Well, this has definitely been an interesting weekend thus far.

Ray, my video game addicted partner, went home to visit his parents in a small town in Oklahoma on Thursday because he had had them pre-order a Playstation 3 console for him as a safety net while he pre-ordered one here. The order here fell through (something about Sony shipping about a quarter of the number of systems it had originally promised), and he went home to happily purchase a system there. I’m not opposed to such craziness in principal, since I’ve seen what these things go for on eBay, and I’m perfectly happy to make a nice profit off of impatient gamers.

This left me alone on Friday night, and I chose to spend my evening doing what I imagine that every like-minded reasonably young gay man left without his partner on a Friday night in a big, gay-friendly city would do: I sat on my butt and watched television. Specifically, I let myself down on my promise to only watch a couple of episodes of Epitafios, the HBO series you haven’t heard of because it was an original series made for HBO Latin America that eventually worked its way onto HBO Latino in the US, and then onto one of the English language channels with subtitles.

I wound up watching nearly the whole damned series in two fell swoops. It’s pretty gruesome, but also rather gripping entertainment, and it also stars Cecilia Roth (who played the bereaved mother in Almodovar’s All About My Mother). It’s about a psychotic serial killer who is stalking (and murdering in wonderfully inventive ways) people directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of four high school students in a bungled hostage situation five years earlier. The guy who plays the killer – Antonio Birabent – is maliciously creepy. The only part of the cast that troubles me a little is the lead detective on the case – Renzo Marquez, played by Julio Chavez – because he spends the entire series in one of two shirts that appear not to have been washed in several years (and he don’t look so fresh as a daisy, himself).

It was shot in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and doesn’t exactly make one want to rush down there on the next flight — but most films shot in New York don’t, either, and the New York tourist industry doesn’t seem to be hurting. It’s also an interesting refresher in Spanish for me, since the peculiarities of Spanish as it is spoken in Buenos Aires are quite different from those I’m used to hearing here in Texas.

Anyway. If you’re wondering what to put on your Netflix queue, definitely consider Epitafios. At the very least, you can brush up on your Italian Spanish.

Moving right along … after the jump.

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