The problem with Swingtown

Note: This was originally posted August 5th, but was mistakenly filed not as a blog post, but as a separate page.

“Suppose there’s a brown calf and a big brown dog, and an artist is
making a picture of them. What is the main thing that that artist has got
to do? He has got to paint them so you can tell them apart the minute you
look at them, hain’t he? Of course. Well, then, do you want him to go and
paint both of them brown? Certainly you don’t. He paints one of them
blue, and then you can’t make no mistake.” — Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

The problem with Swingtown (isn’t the fact that I’m watching it at all, hush you) is that two of the male leads just look too much alike. Any moment that they’re not in immediate context, I lose track of who’s who.

Time to paint one of ‘em blue.

Nat's 24 Hour Comics Day 2008 comic

Yes, as the founder of 24 Hour Comics Day, I never got to celebrate it properly myself – I was always running the event. But as of this year, I’ve passed control over to others… so I made my 24 hour comic today. And it’s not great. But it sure is colorful! (I was steered by topicality by the choice of two random words from a magazine: Percentage and Due. But I winged the story, generally making each page without knowing what was going to happen even to pages beyond.) Click through if you really want to read it.

The way things are around here in the mornings

• Me: Hey, that company that bought out that company that I used to prepare material for? They’ve cut all their employees back to being paid minimum wage plus stock.
• Mrs. Nat’s TV: (momentarily puzzled) Stock?
• Me: Yeah, they’re cutting back to minimum wage, plus giving them some stock.
• Mrs. Nat’s TV: (pause) Oh, company stock.
• Me: (trying to figure out what image got stuck in her brain) No, they’re getting paid in beef stock.
• Mrs Nat’s TV: (silent glower)
• Me: Hey, I know a guy who used to get paid in beef stock. Now he’s a bullionaire!

Things I am of

In the preceding post, I express my fondness for the construct “I am of the opinion…”

I suppose that’s because, in the first person, we are almost solely “of” things that are indistinct. We may have things, be things, do things, but when it comes to being “of”, the phrase “I am of” is almost certain to be followed by “the opinion”, “the belief”, or “the understanding”.

The same limitations do not hold true to other people. He may be of vast muscles and little else, she may be of the Boston Beauregards, but I? I build myself by being of those things that I believe and I understand.

And I’m of a belief that that says something about our self-image and our understanding of ourselves.

(Added later: Thinking about it, the only second person usage that comes to mind is “ye of little faith”.)

My Own Worst Enemy

The concept of My Own Worst Enemy – an average suburban joe doesn’t know he has a government-controlled second identity as a hitman – feels like it should either be a film comedy or a cheap cable action show meant in part for the international markets. I was convinced that they thought they were making something more serious by the fact that they cast the ever-respectable Alfre Woodard (and gave her a line that started with “I am of the opinion…”, a structure I have a weakness for.

In creating this, there were some tricky decisions to make. It would’ve been easy to start with just Henry, the non-hitman identity, slowly discovering the truth about who he is. The problem with that is that the revelation would’ve been seen as ludicrous; the whole concept that the government spends millions maintaining this split identity to no visible advantage is a hard concept to sell. By launching with that first thing, there’s no question of selling it; it’s a matter of “here’s what is, and if you’re going to ride this ride, you’ll have to accept it.”

On the other hand, by not starting in that way, we don’t build an association with Henry. Since Edward, the killer personality, is the first one we see, the viewer sees Henry as just Edward in a mask, even if Henry doesn’t know it. And since it turns out that Edward is the true identity and Henry is the manufactured one, trying to root for the everyman in this case is trying to be concerned about the life of a shadow. While they try to make moments around the sort of introspection that would make this matter, that would somehow help the reader associate the personality he was given with the personalities we each adopt, it didn’t work, didn’t sell me.

In the end, this came across as a lot of money and some serious effort thrown at something that money and effort can’t make work. Oh, and at a car ad. Yes, it’s one of those where a certain brand of car is treated as a key figure. Other apparent product placement occurs as well. So they ain’ t making this show for you, and certainly not for me, they’re making it for the advertisers. Used to be, they made shows for you and me so that we would watch the advertisements, but they seem to have skipped that middle step.

Actually, a "meatball log" entry, but for now I don't want that as a category

So, what do I do with about 80 cents worth of leftover on-sale ground turkey to keep it from going to waste? Use up several bucks worth of other ingredients in an attempt to make something of use from it.

So, here’s what’s in the works: about eight ounces of ground turkey. Two or three ounces of leftover Pick-Up Stix brown rice that’s been in the fridge for a while. A good little pile of Mrs. Dash. Kneaded them altogether, rolled into little balls about an inch-and-a-quarter around. Half cover with tomato and basil spaghetti sauce, then when I decide that it would take too much spaghetti sauce to cover it all and that it would end up too thick, I cover the rest with a Trader Joe’s low-sodium tomato and red pepper soup (by the way, the Trader Joe’s low-sodium soup line? Very good. Very flavorful. Doesn’t taste like soups that are pretending to be sodiumy; just taste like something being what they intended to be, and tasting rich.)

That’s all now sitting in a crockpot, set to “high” for now. Dinner is four or five hours away; I may switch the crockpot down to “low” once I’m convinced that the turkey will end up cooked and I will not end up killing the entire little family of mine.

Added at 8 PM: Well, that was a success. Not an A+, but a solid B. It was a light flavor; I worried that the red pepper aspect of the soup might make it spicy, but no. We ended up with a creamy, mild sauce. These weren’t rugged sandwich meatballs, but good little pasta-topping meatballs.

I may do some more meatball experimentation. Maybe make some bigger, spicier, but non-evil meatballs for sandwich usage or flinging at cars.

Eleventh Hour

As best as I can tell, the point of the Eleventh Hour is that there is a guy going after science, evil science, in the same way that Buffy went after vampires and other supernatural creatures. And finds science surrounded with dimly-lit and atmospheric sets and creepy people doing evil. And it just seems silly.

Life on Mars: Sprinkling cereal on your candy bar

Life on Mars is an Americanization of a two-season British series which I’ve not seen, so I’m not judging it relative to that series or on the basis of how effectively it adapts that series. The basics are that a 21st century New York police detective gets mysteriously transported back to 1973, and is still a police detective in that era. This means that the show is simultaneously trying to be three different things:

1. A crime show: catch the killer or other bad guy of the moment
2. An exploration of contrast: How are the 1970s different from modern day?
3. A mythology show: How did he travel back in time, what’s really going on, and what are the forces behind it?

It’s common for a show to be two things at once, but three becomes a juggling act. Number 1 is the most generic part of the show, and whether it’s well done or not could vary from episode to episode. Number 2 is the most interesting, and in the first episode they do it well, painting it as a cop from a big CSI-like crime lab era finding himself dealing with a world where getting the answer is all asking the right question and punching the right person, and if there’s a few wrong ones along the way, such is life.

It’s number 3 that is the most problematic in this case. If the time travel is just an hallucination, then the contrast in attitudes (which is the tougher sell portion of the contrasts; we know they didn’t have the tech, but did cops generally have that violate-everyone’s-rights-to-get-answers attitude, and if they did were they actually worried about getting the right answers?) becomes meaningless, just a contrast against the assumptions of someone who wasn’t there. And if he did travel back in time, then the reality of the worlds he’s comparing become meaningless in a different way, as they are caught up in some Bigger Than It All situation. The regular invocation of that big picture makes it hard to settle into story of the moment. But, of course, all I’ve seen is the pilot, which inherently has to get that Big Picture rolling; it will remain for later episodes to show us whether that big picture intrudes to the same degree in each episode.

(Plus, of course, there’s the problem of any new big mythology show, that it’s unlikely to run long enough to show us the big picture. We’ve been promised that the big picture is different than it was in the English original, but I’ve seen no effective promise that all will be revealed and your viewership will be rewarded even if others chose not to view it.)

Texturewise, the 1970s are dark and grimy (we did have lights in the 1970s, guys!) Every scene makes an extra effort to dance you past something that shows the world as Very 1970s, in the way that shows that were actually made in that era never do. Harvey Keitel is a good choice for the top-dog-by-force cop, because, well, if you said “Harvey Keitel is playing this part”, then this character is basically what you’d expect to see. So he telegraphs the character, although I’m less comfortable that the character is really the right one to have. Michael Imperioli, in contrast, is having trouble convincingly inhabiting the handlebar moustache they’ve given him as a member of the squad. The lead, Jason O’Mara, is given the thankless task of being uncertain of the reality of what he’s dealing with, and yet having to treat this presumed-hallucinations as though they were real people, to whom he occasionally tries to explain the future (mostly to Gretchen Mol, who seems washed out and bland, and I’m uncertain if it’s because she’s trying to not rock the boat in the man’s world of 1970s policing, or if she’s just bland). He doesn’t triumph over that in any impressive way, and seems more reacting to the script situation of the moment (“now I’m in the heat of the crime battle and believe it all”/”now I’m sure it’s all a dream, as I lay in the hospital somewhere”) than having integrated that viewpoint.

Hmmmm… the more I think about it, the more I realize that there’s a problem between point 1 and point 2 above. There was a study done a couple decades back (and probably quoted to often since) that showed that the cop show that was the most realistic in the estimation of cops themselves was Barney Miller. Those detectives spent their time filling out forms and dealing with minor hassles. If this is going to be a crime-of-the-week show, then what are we contrasting? We’re not contrasting with cop life in the 1970s. Are we contrasting it with cop shows of the 1970s? That’s the source for a comedy, not a drama.

All in all, there’s the base for some interesting stuff here, but the pilot left me unconvinced that they’ll manage to slalom through all the dangers and make it work. I’ll be giving it another episode to convince me.

New economic stimulus plan

(Dateline: Washington, DC) In a move designed to provide an immediate economic injection into our ailing economy, the Department of the Treasury has announced that they will be moving Christmas up to November 3rd this year.

“We feel this is just what’s needed,” explained Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. “By moving the date up by over a month and a half, we accelerate consumer spending on gifts. The earlier receipt by workers of their Christmas bonuses will also do much to bouy consumer confidence and the economy as a whole. And, of course, the overnight imports from the North Pole will do much to improve our trade balance.”

Paulson went on to explain that a similar shift would not be applied to Hannukah “because none of us could agree when it was originally scheduled for.” Instead, that celebration will be enhanced to fifteen days from its traditional eight, increasing the sales not only of gifts, but of candles, not to mention menorahs designed to the new government standard.

Who will bribe me to move to their state?

In my life, I’ve lived in four states: New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California.

If same-sex marriage becomes the law in New Jersey, I’ll know it’s stalking me!