It was my daughter who first clued me in, although it was Rush Limbaugh who really pushed me over the edge. The reasons were many and varied.

Daughter had been waxing on about Fox's hit TV series 24 for over two years before Rush got on the bandwagon. Planned visits were always accompanied by a warning that we'd all have to watch 24 or I would simply have to leave early. Fortunately planned visits were arranged around nights that 24 was featured because, from what I had seen of this hit drama, there was entirely too much fire, bullets and mayhem in this show for my middle-aged sensibilities.

Not that I've ever been an anti-violence zealot. It's more that I was a Dancing With the Stars sort than such as high drama. Besides, too often my brain cells get crossed when I try to follow a complicated plot but that could be middle-aged crossed-synapses as well.

But I tuned in anyway.

I was hooked, lined, and sinkered the very first show.

For the first time since memory allows, I saw a show packed with entertainment and drama. The characters were imperfect but very real. There were several sub-plots going on all over the place and just to keep track of them all was an intriguing challenge. The women in the series didn't wear low-cut clothes everywhere, even when frying dangerous popping bacon. There were bullets, sure, and sudden firebombs. But the show is about a counter-terrorism unit going up against terrorists for God's sakes. The violence wasn't gratuitous is what I'm saying here and frankly other than the exciting sight effects, viewers weren't treated to constant gore and dismembered limbs.

There was one problem.

While I understood the individual show's plot lines, I had no idea just who was who, how Jack Bauer came back from the dead, what the hell all those government agencies were, why the terrorists were never Arab or what on earth a first lady was doing getting all involved in affairs she should be kept from.

In a desperate bid to put it all together I began to research, first from the show's own web site. Which was a help in that I might learn, for example, who Audrey is in terms of her government position and the actress who plays her. None of this helped me understand the interplay of all the characters, their history and still there's that bit about Jack Bauer dying and coming back to life.

I turned to Blogcritics.org as surely, my mind reeled, other Blogcritics have watched the show and written about it. This was how I ended up in the Twilight Zone of 24 and the Blogosphere. A really weird place by the way.