I know, I know. Late in the game but...

How many of my peeps out there have been watching The National Parks: America's Best Idea over on PBS?

Let me tell you something: It's things like this that make me sooooooo happy that my parents/brother went half-sies with me on a new T.V. for my birthday because I can't imagine seeing such gorgeous images on my old set (which to be fair was 16 years-old).

See, I totally forgot it was on this week, which is amazing when you think about it since the Boston Globe has been running a National Parks photo contest with filmmaker Ken Burns himself picking the winners.

In any case, I accidentally stumbled across it Wednesday while I was flipping through the channels and landed on WGBH Channel 2 just when that installment of the National Parks documentary started. I was totally and completely sucked in by the pretty, not to mention the history. (Have I mentioned that Ken Burns documentaries are like totally crack? Because they are. He's worse than Frontline, Nova, and American Experience combined.)

Last night I had a mouth full of ache after my final (and worst) dentist visit in my campaign to fix my damn mouth. I decided I needed comfort television, which meant I turned on the tube for Project Runway and...well...see, I had left my teevee on Channel 2 from my previous night's viewing of the Burns documentary and I had turned it on just as the latest episode of "National Parks" started and...and...

DAMN YOU KEN BURNS! DAMN YOU!

The series is totally awesome, educational, and did I mention...PRETTY PICTURES!

By the way, did you know that We the People own 391 national parks? I did not know that. I thought the number was smaller. Here's where you can read more about the different kinds of National Parks.

And there's always the National Parks Web site itself if you really want more information about the national parks in your back yard. (I just checked Massachusetts and...hey, there's a few in my state that I didn't even know about.)

PBS hasn't started streaming the series through Netflix yet, but you can watch the entire series online via the PBS Web site.

As an illustration of just some of the pretty, I leave you with a photo from Acadia National Park in Maine, because as it turns out I own this. But know what? If you're an American citizen, you own it, too.

It's kind of nice to be reminded, isn't it?