So John August had "four bars in villages without electricity, roads, or running water". As if I needed proof that Scottsgrad is less civilized than Malawi.
December 8th is Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day! Some suggestions:
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A fun clip, from the SF performance of Sweeney Todd in Concert
I caused some grief over at Steve Gimbel's virtual place the other day. I'd made a comment that had an unintended second reading:
Fundie religionists are the retarded kids who eat paste and whose parents bitch and moan at youth coaches demanding that their precious little ones get to play. Basically, George Will.I thought it was pretty clear that I was calling out George Will as a former paste eater, but someone read it as a comment about George Will as a parent. I was unaware the be-bowtied one has a child with Down Syndrome, but given that knowledge the incorrect reading is understandable. And that reading could certainly be construed as extra mean.
Jane Espenson is mad at the media for their coverage of Britney Spears' appearance at the VMAs. And who can blame her? They've totally trashed Sarah Silverman's great post-lipsync joke.
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Last weekend, you'll recall, was Doog-arific. Fun, but awfully dated. This weekend we went a bit more modern with NOT-Studio 60.
Tina Fey's greatest strength as a writer is finding room for her actors to breathe. The first season is a great showcase of that talent. Each new episode gets a little more chaotic and a little more improvisational in feel as the great performers surrounding Fey get to stretch out. Alec Baldwin is the obvious standout, but Jack McBrayer's Kenneth is a revelation. And let's not forget Tracy Morgan's ¿fictionalized? version of himself - Tracy Jordan.
It's a tough call whether I'm more anxious for 30 Rock or HIMYM to return, but based on how steeply this show went from so-so funny to can't-miss hilarious, it might be the gang in Rockefeller Center.
I've not yet tried out any of the commentary, but the extra features are decent. Kenneth's late-night interviews, McBrayer and Lonny Ross walking around the Silvercup Studios with a camcorder, and Judah Friedlander being...himself. Fun stuff. Definitely worth owning, as I'll watch these again and again.
You know, those smoking bans in bars and restaurants also help explain why freedom-loving Americans have bolted to the Cuban side. They smoke a lot of cigars, you know.
As insane as Fred Thompson's comments in Iowa were, they weren't as strange as this quote from the Daily News:
Thompson received mixed reviews from several listeners who had reservations about his late entry into the race.Really? It's a late entry? We consider four months before the first primary early now? Considering that Senator Fred's been campaigning off the books for months now - safely too, he hasn't allowed himself to be humiliated in a debate yet - I'm not sure I'd call this "late".
I've had the beta of ID installed on the blog for all of two days now. Thanks guys for commenting, by the way. I've had my account with them for a little less than a week, I think. This evening I took a look at the blog and noticed a weird problem with the way the javascript was rendering the comment links. I emailed my bug report at 11:53pm and at 12:44am - a scant 51 minutes later - I had a response email from Jon Fox at ID reporting that the bug was resolved. On a Friday night.
Now I've turned around bugs faster for in-house business units, or for fellow developers, or for other dev teams; however, I can't recall having ever received a bug report from the field to which I turned around a hot fix that fast. These guys are good.
Not because I get much in the way of comments (unless I pick on day laborers or Tim Burton) but because I'm a pretty compulsive beta tester, I installed a new comment system from Intense Debate. I haven't been able to import old comments over, so right now only posts with no extant comments on them will be using the new system.
Please help out a startup and try it out when you've got a chance. I'm not 100% sure I'll stick with it, but if it doesn't blow shrapnel all over the place and seems to work well I'll probably keep it around at least for a little while. If you do decide to leave any comments on this post or any others and use the new system, please indicate whether you like or dislike it. If you dislike it or have problems/feature requests, be specific. The Intense Debate guys will want that feedback.
Check out this line:
| 1st Serve % | Aces | Winners | Unforced Errors | Elapsed Time |
| 71% | 14 | 42 | 24 | 2:02 |
I'm quite late coming to the Earl bandwagon. I blame it on bad luck. The first episode I watched was "Joy's Wedding" and that was unpleasant on multiple levels. While I think Jaime Pressly is a cutie-pie (and shots of her in that stars and stripes bikini above are almost enough to get me to see the long-shelved DOA) I find Joy to be the most abrasive personality on tv. I'm including Faux News blowhards, Bush press secretaries, and Bob the Enzyte ad guy. Bad first exposure to an awesome show.
I've recently started watching so I could provide script coverage to some friends and realized how good this show really is. My bad. At least I figured it out eventually.
Anyway, here's a great video Earl's friends put together to help the world know his plight. Free Earl!
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Rough weekend. First there was the lack of productivity, then the shitty construction (see below, for my racist comments about that), then the dreaded Three Red Lights on the XBox's Ring O' Light.
Since it's our DVD player as well as my sometime gaming console, it needed to be replaced quickly. I was just not confident enough in the weekend's tennis offerings to go without a backup plan. So we ran out to Best Buy and picked up an Elite. While there, wifey-poo found the perfect (and way cheap on sale) DVDs for the weekend - the above season 1 of Doogie Howser, M.D.
I remember it being better. NPH rocks, even as a kid, but the show doesn't hold up that well. First off, it doesn't bring the funny. It was one of the first single-camera, half-hour dramedies and it shows a bit of the awkwardness of a new art form whose legs aren't quite strong enough to support its new frame. Worse than the shortage of humor is the heavy-handed moralizing in Doogie's "youseetimmy" journal entries that close each episode.
We're most of the way through this first season (whether we buy the remaining three is open to discussion) and Doogie's already learned so much. Those valuable life lesson - so neatly summarized in two or three pithy sentences that reek of co-creator David E. Kelley's touch - are so easily spoofed because they are so facile. Take those away and the episodes are actually stronger. With them, the previous 22 minutes come off as little more than a live-action Davey and Goliath.
To its credit, there's no laughtrack. There's also Vinnie - the redoubtable Max Casella. Vinnie brings the funny. And thank goodness for that. The show would drown in its own treacle if not for the lifesaver that is Vinnie. He especially makes up for wet-blanket Wanda. Ugh.
Should you watch Doogie Howser? I can't possibly answer that. Before this weekend I'd have recommended it heartily based on my fond recollections. After making it through episode 23 of 26...um, well...it's still NPH. It's hard to go wrong there. Besides, the first season's pretty damn cheap. If you're the right age and have fond memories of Doogie, give it a shot. At worst, you just appreciate NPH more on HIMYM or in Harold and Kumar.
We've got a date for the new floor - October 15. That Monday, we'll have every room of the house but master bed and bath emptied out and ready to go for the tile to be ripped up and the new cement floor to be laid by Vision Concrete. They do some really beautiful work and we're very excited about finally having a floor that can be cleaned. And that isn't ungodly ugly.
Of course this means we have a lot to do around the house between now and then: prime and paint the entry; finish painting the kitchen/family room; choose colors and paint the office; remove all the baseboards and door casings. Yeah. That last one. The butt-ugly, contractor's pack moldings throughout most of the house have to be ripped out so we can replace them after the floor's done. Which in a correctly built house would mean some spot repair and touch-up of walls after ripping the molding down. In our house, it means a lot more.
See, when they built our house, it seems they didn't just use illegal day laborers for cleanup tasks, they let them do everything. Framing, plumbing, electrical, taping, painting. Hell, I'm not sure they didn't let Pedro and Paco draw up the original blueprints and do the engineering calculations for the vaulted ceilings. What I'm saying is: this house was built by functional idiots.
Today's example: the baseboards were installed before the tile floor.
Now, perhaps you don't know anything about construction. Perhaps you think that sounds reasonable. If so, perhaps you should hang out at the Home Depot weekday mornings hoping to get asked into the bed of a random pickup.
Normally, prying up baseboards is a moderately challenging and back-bending task. In this case, it's back-breaking. And when you've had holes drilled in your lamina and bits of disk material cut away, one of the things the surgeon suggests post-operatively is that you maybe not come back to see him if you can avoid it. So right now, the wife is very slowly prying up a few baseboards. She's been at it for about an hour and a half and has gotten a good section up. About twice as long as what I pulled up this morning in 30 minutes. Advantage: she won't have to put my socks and shoes on me every morning for the six weeks following surgery (again). Disadvantage: oh will she be crippled tomorrow.
This was supposed to be a productive weekend. I was supposed to complete all the painting other than the office and start the molding removal. Instead, we're hoping to have about a quarter of the baseboards (and none of the door casings) removed. Excellent.
