What is it?
More precisely, what is “it”, lower-case, in block letters?
Well, normally “it” is whatever you’re buying on eBay. But if “it” is italicized, then it’s what might be in you, when the folks at Gatorade inquire. For some reason, two simultaneous ad campaigns focus on similar physical representations of this two-letter word.
Perhaps they should settle this via a big game of tag.
TV confuses me.
Love Monkey is the new happy series starring Tom Cavanaugh.
You remember Tom. He starred in that series Ed. He was the guy who, in the first episode, ended his romantic relationship and lost his job, and set to rebuilding his life.
In the first episode of Love Monkey, Tom ends his romantic relationship, loses his job, and sets to rebuilding his life. This time, though, he doesn’t need to rescue his soul. It doesn’t really seem to have been at risk. Tom is an A&R guy, finding new talent for the recording industry. Importantly, he’s spun as a good guy A&R guy (which is not, I am told, the default), quite knowledgable and caring about the music and the acts he’s discovering. He’s also a man who is getting to the point where he wants to find The Woman, rather than Tonight’s Woman. And he has friends who support him and egg him on in various directions.
This, of course, is all jus structure, and nothing about it is particularly unique. Doesn’t matter. It’s done well, and that’s what counts. The folks we see are folks you want to spend time with. There’s some default patterns fallen into (the married member of the group who lives vicariously through the single folks, the gal who says she doesn’t want marriage but because she’s a certain age it’s a lie) but there are other things that aren’t default which work. There’s the congenial supportive relationship between Tom and his sister, not built around trading insults. There’s Tom having a gal pal who isn’t, at least of this episode, just the obvious setup as The One He’s Really Supposed To Be With Only They Never Both Realize At The Same Time.
This may end up being too devoid of conflict to be interesting, but for now, I like being with these folks. I shall see more. Check it out yourself.
(Oh, this should all be more insightful. But I am a tired boy.)
I’m only five minutes into watching the first episode of Love Monkey, and I can already tell that it’s not the all-simian remake of the classic Tony Randall sitcom Love, Sidney that I was hoping for.
More later.
Fox has announced that this is the last season for ’70s Show and Malcolm. The former had some good silliness but ran out of steam relatively quickly, and has now lost both of its key audience draws, leaving it more of a Mayberry RFD of its former self.
Malcolm, on the other hand, was quite the sparkler at its peak. Its first couple seasons were audacious, brash, funny, and very human. A horrible quality drop in the third season (placing the series in the hands of folks who didn’t realize that a prank costing someone their only remaining hand might not be, y’know, funny) was followed by a strong return in the fourth season, proving that such recovery is possible. The series has been slowly drifting off in the remaining three seasons, not incapable of high points but generally repetitive, frequently tripping over the aging of its young characters (mainly Malcolm, whose awkwardnesses have moved beyond the struggles of adolesence and thus move him from struggling everyman to more of a loser.) So in seven seasons, this show has said what it had to say, and its not a great cultural loss for it to move on.
But if you haven’t watched that first season, it’s worth renting the first DVD to give it a taste.
(Speaking of first DVDs – after having Ballykissangle Season 1 Disc 1 on hand for a full week, I finally get to pop it in the player… only to discover that Netflix had accidentally sent Season 2 Disc 1 in a Season 1 sleeve. Grrrr. I’ve probably seen most of the episodes of this genial BBC answer to Northern Exposure already, but I want to go through them in order, and now I’m waiting another few days to get the right disk. Grrr.)
The Daily Show, wonderful as it is, has had a visible talent drain over the last year or so. Steve Correll went to The Office and 40 Year Old Virgin. Colbert has The Colbert Report. Samantha Bee is off spawning. Rob Courdrey is still around and good at some things, but, sigh, we so miss Colbert on “This Week in God”. But on the whole, the new guys getting various bits to do seem like they’re trying to be weak clones of the folks previously mentioned.
Last night, however, they had a nice exception. A guy named John Hodgman was introduced as simply their “resident expert”, and did a nice job of an unassuming nebbish trying to explain the Iran nuke situation. I hope we see more of him.
Linda Hunt has for a long time been the answer to one of my favorite trivia questions: name the only person to win an Academy Award for acting in a role outside their gender. (She played a male in The Year of Living Dangerously; did it quite well, in fact.)
Given the results of the Golden Globes voting, it looks quite possible that Felicity Huffman will soon eliminate the uniqueness of that achievement.
(Me, I’m just oddly happy that the dramatic acting awards went to Huffman and Hoffman, which sounds like an accounting firm in a comedy skit.)
So I’m watching West Wing, and in order to swing some international deal, they are offering to allow some EU countries to sell some arms to China. This is bugging me, because last episode they spent the entire time trying to get the Chinese to help them without giving the Chinese what they really wanted, the right to go buy some arms.
Then I realize: no, that wasn’t West Wing. That was Commander in Chief.
TV confuses me.
(A tip of the Nat’s TV hat to the first commenter who can name three prime time broadcast network sitcoms set primarily in the White House.)
You aren’t going to get a lot of music reviews from me.
I buy a couple CDs a year, perhaps, and most of them are at least a few years old. I’ve got a lot of music, and I no longer have a lot of just-listen-to-music time. In the car, I listen to the local “giant iPod shuffle of the last 30 years” channel.
I haven’t been to a concert in a fair while. When I went, it was largely the same few bands again and again. Moxy Fruvous, Barenaked Ladies (once with Frente opening, yay!), and an impressive electro-acapella rock band called SpiralMouth (get their album, skip track one, and prepare yourself for some impressive listening.) I’ve only been to a few huge rock concerts. About fifteen years back, I went to two nights of David Bowie’s Sound+Vision tour; I was dating a couple of Bowie fans when the tickets came available, and didn’t want the conflict of getting tickets for one but not the other. Both relationships broke up before the concert actually happened, but on friendly terms, so we still went. I hit the Lillith Faire in Pasadena a few years back. And since my wife is both a Billy Joel and an Elton John fan, I bought us tickets for one of their joint appearances a few years back. It was at that concert, amidst a noisy crowd, realizing that we had paid hundreds of dollars to watch these guys on the big screen TV over the stage, that we basically swore of large concerts… and standing awkwardly in a club listening to Marc Cohn extend every song by repeating the end bit again and again discouraged us even from smaller concerts. (Didn’t kill us entirely on it; we’ve taken in They Might Be Giants since then.)
We’re pretty well set-up for MP3 playing. Mrs. Nat’s TV and I both have portable hard disk players, both off-brand, mine with a pretty poor interface for navigating large numbers of files, but still we can both carry most of our CD collection around with us. The car has an MP3 CD player. And we have a flash memory-based player around, but it’s one of the very early ones and there’s not a proper working driver for it for the current versions of Windows. As such, the songs that are in there are gonna stay there! (I bought that one because I was co-writing a book on MP3, and there were only two makers of such players at the time. The other manufacturer loaned me a review unit, but I had to buy the crappier one just to review it.)
Oh, this is more detail than anyone wants. All I’m saying is that I listen to and buy fairly little new music, particularly from folks you haven’t heard of. I’ve never been musically hip, and now I’m not even trying. So don’t expect music reiews.
For those who complained, I have now adjusted this blog’s RSS feed so that it feeds out the entire article rather than just the first 100 words.
Also for those who complained, I forgot to bring the Muppets tape with Alice Cooper along on Friday. Remind me before the next time we get together. It also has the Vincent Price episode.
Watching the Sunday morning politics shows this morning, the question is raised that, if the president was wrong in authorizing wiretaps of suspected Al Qaeda calls without a court order, what should be done to make up for this violation.
That’s easy: let Al Qaeda listen in on George Bush’s phone calls for the next few years.
It’s only fair.
