I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m a moron. Need proof? Yeah, I got that in spades. But here’s the latest example.

So I went to Lister‘s pad last weekend for his birthday-inspired weekend of gaming madness. We played Amoeba Wars, play-tested a homebrew Kung Fu card/miniatures game (actually, I didn’t participate because I had preparations to attend to, but it looked pretty sweet), then I ran an intro to my Shadowrun campaign (which went quite well I think) followed by a later game of Sucking Vacuum. Good times were had by all, but we were there for a long time.

At one point I needed to wash up a bit so I retreated to the restroom and peeled off my sweat-reeking T-shirt, carefully removed my wedding ring and set it on a table there that usually has several interesting volumes rested atop it, such as Isaac Asimov’s Chronology of the World. As I did this I thought to myself, I need to get these hands washed quickly and put my ring back on or else I’m likely to forget it.

Later I was using my laptop at the gaming table and I noted that my power adapter was lying on the ground next to me. My iBook’s battery is woefully taxed to the point where when I recently ran coconutBattery on it I was informed that the battery’s maximum capacity was about 40% of its original maximum. Since I use the computer at work, it’s pretty important that I have my power cord around. I thought, again, I ought to put that in my bag now so I don’t leave that behind.

Of course I didn’t pick the ring back up after I washed my hands and face and I didn’t put the power cord away when I thought of it and I ended up leaving them both at Lister’s. And—again of course—I didn’t realize I had forgotten them until I was all the way back home, which is roughly an hour to an hour and a half away.

Thus I have been lacking access to some pretty important stuff I have on my laptop (like my login info for WordPress as well as a few work-related files) most of the week.

Being without any real way to use the laptop is bad enough, and I reflected this week on how strange it is that I associate a piece of machinery almost like some kind of extension of my brain. I was noting to someone on IM the other day how what with Google, Wikipedia, OS X’s built-in spellchecker, thesaurus and dictionary and my bevy of bookmarks, calendars and digital sticky notes I really don’t have to actually think very much anymore, it’s more an act of collating the pertinent info and taking appropriate cues.

What is worse is the lack of a ring, which is of course annoying to my wife but also has a mental impact for those whom have grown accustomed to a particular sensation that can’t be replicated any other way. I’m not like some people, I actually remove my ring for various activities like my trips to the gym (certain weight bars don’t treat the ring very kindly nor do they particularly care for the combination of ring, bar and skin pinched between) and washing up. As long as the ring is in a safe place and I know where I can get it, I don’t trip to badly on not having it on. But if I don’t have it and can’t get to it, it makes me nuts not feeling it on my finger.

I was able to retrieve them both last night by making a special trip back to Lister’s which “coincidentally” meant I was around for the regular Tuesday night gaming session during which I challenged Strahd to a Blood Bowl match and actually won 2-0. Considering he was using a blazingly fast team (Skaven) and I was using my plodding, bruising Orcs, holding him to a shutout was quite the feat. I did get some help from a few bad rolls on Strahd’s part where he stumbled on a couple of key dodges that statistically should have been made (one in particular had a re-roll that came into effect after he rolled a one and the re-roll was also a snake eye), but I’ll take ’em however I can get ’em. I’m not a good enough player to be picky.

Anyway, I rectified my moronic display of forgetfulness but it makes me wonder how many other times I’ve done that with less identifiable stuff. I mean, I’m missing one of my favorite black T-shirts right now and I’m starting to think it may be at someone’s house with them going, “Huh. I don’t remember this shirt. Oh well, it’s pretty nice.”

You might ask how I would forget a shirt somewhere, but if you did, I would have to refer you to the previous paragraphs. Obviously you weren’t paying enough attention.

I have a new operating theory regarding relationships. It goes like this:

When you start spending a lot of time with someone, such as a friend or romantic interest, after a while you start to be so exposed to them so regularly that you begin to run the risk of falling into their sphere of influence. This can include a lot of things: Speech patterns, memories, stories, even material items like CDs and clothing can start to intermix. It’s part of what people do in order to feel close to each other.

But when you get right down to it, the most significant thing you share with people you spend a lot of time with is germs. In theory you could swap stories and emulate speech patterns from perfect strangers. You could even trade possessions with people you didn’t know very well (depending on how blindly trusting you were) and it wouldn’t really make a difference. The bigger thing is simply that these are by-products of just being in the same physical space as a person or group of people frequently.

There are even levels to this; degrees upon which you can identify, quantifiably, how close people actually are. Take kissing for example. If there is someone you kiss on the mouth, chances are that is someone you either do see quite often or someone that you would spend a lot of time with if possible. But when you consider how disgusting the act of kissing actually is when divorced from its sentimentalized, romantic cultural context you can discern that the real point of it is to say, in essence, “I’m willing to catch something from you.”

Lovers will often kiss each other in spite of colds, flus, cold sores, lip fungi, pimples, bad breath, sore throats… because ultimately they are expressing that those things are worth the risk for the sake of the other person and in fact by exchanging saliva, they actively taunt the very high probability that any germs, viruses or spreadable ailments will be passed on because they are non-verbally expressing the sentiment that “If I’m going to get sick, I want it to come from you.”

The closer you get to someone, the more risks you expose yourself and the higher the chance of contamination. This can be expanded to sex (and I’m not really talking about STDs here, more the fact that when you’re that close to someone, naked, sweaty, etc. if one person has a cold or something, the other would have to be remarkably fortunate to avoid catching it) but also scaled back for less intimate relationships. Consider how with a friend you might take a bite of their meal using their fork or try a sip of their drink from a straw they were using. If that person were another non-relative, you’d never consider such a thing. Who knows what kind of skanky scum they have happening in their mouth. But with a friend you’re able to go for it because you’re subconsciously telling them, “It’s okay if you give me cooties, buddy. I won’t hold it against you.”

You deserve an update, I think we can all agree on that point. However, time is limited and my capacity to collate, organize and glean meaning from the past few days is limited—primarily by stupidity but exhaustion plays a small yet pivotal role. Given this, I feel it may be in everyone’s best interest to try and get through this via a series of unconnected thoughts.

Oh yes, I mean to break out the bullet points.

• It was our sixth wedding anniversary on Sunday. We celebrated by taking a smallish vacation down to Santa Barbara and staying in a nice little bed and breakfast-style inn, having a nice dinner and wandering around the town. We took a handful of photos and did a very small amount of shopping, hung out and had a great time.
• The shopping was supposed to result in Nikki getting something nice. Somehow, instead, I ended up getting a new CD and a T-shirt. I’m still trying to sort out how that went so awry.
• The CD was Daft Punk’s Human After All. It’s rather excellent, if you dig the whole techno thing. Which I do.
• We drove a lot in the course of a few days. Which made me do a lot of pondering about the Honda. We never did get it together enough to calculate the actual miles per gallon we got, but my rough estimations put it at around 35/mpg. That’s not bad. Considering the Saturn gets about 22/mpg and holds four fewer gallons in the tank, that means that we saved about $35-40 in gas by taking the Honda. That’s pretty respectable, I’d say.
• Dinner was at a restaurant on the pier they have there, at a table overlooking the water. It was night so it was hard to truly appreciate the view, but it was nice anyway and a pleasant reminder of one of the dinners we had on our honeymoon in a place called Woody’s in Maui. We ate late there, too, and sat right out over the water. Of course in Hawaii it was balmy even at almost eleven o’clock so the windows were open and we could hear the surf. They had the windows closed in Santa Barbara to shield from the chilly October air.
• Nikki’s new master plan involves us finding jobs and an apartment down in Santa Barbara now. We’ve been talking around lately about how we continue to rent apartments instead of purchase houses and how our current jobs are Nothing Special. This leads to lines of thought such as, “Why are we bothering, then?” Et cetera. I have this whole theory of real estate motivation that goes something like this: There are three factors to choosing a place to live: Location, Accommodations and Opportunity. They’re intertwined, but there is usually a need for one factor to override the others in order to encourage a self-initiated change. For example, we may really love Santa Barbara (Location), but it’s crazy expensive there and as such we’d be forced to continue renting and probably have to get a smaller place (sacrificing Accommodations). If there were some really good jobs down there (and there may be, I haven’t researched thoroughly enough yet) it might tip the scales in favor of a move (the tandem of Opportunity and Location). On the other hand we might be able to afford a pretty nice place if we more or less stayed put (Accommodations) but neither of us are thrilled with the town (Location) and the jobs around here are okay but certainly not catapulting us to the top of the heap (Opportunity). Anyway, it helps me to think about this kind of proposition in these types of terms, the only problem being that Nikki and I put different weight on different factors and also weigh the possibilities on different relative scales. Look, all I said was that we had been married for six years, I didn’t even try to suggest that made us communication masters.
• We started watching the Veronica Mars season one DVDs whilst on vacation. It’s a good show, especially once you come to terms with the fact that, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it exists in its own realm of hyper-realized, supremely stylized reality. It’s easier to grasp that in a show where the heroine is kicking the crap out of monsters every week, but it really needs to be understood by watchers of Mars because otherwise the smart, funny and intriguing show seems less so and more like derivative crud such that I would refuse to watch (I am so not going to try and cover up saying something like The O.C. with a fake cough… seriously. I’m just not going to do it). My one complaint about six episodes in: The character of Duncan Kane is highly underdeveloped. We’re supposed to understand why Veronica is all conflicted about him and what it means for her future relationships, but mostly we just see Duncan act like a meatheaded tool, which doesn’t really fit with the image being portrayed of Veronica since he seems like the opposite of what we would expect her to be attracted to. Hopefully they clear it up (the last episode we watched seemed to be heading in the right direction). Otherwise, excellent show.
• After a rough start to the year, the Sharks are looking better: They never win in Detroit so pulling a point out from the tie-at-the-end-of-regulation should be counted a victory. The 7-6 win over St. Louis was brilliant (and a great game to watch) not to mention the perfect home stand. HB pointed out that with Rathje gone it’s hard to find a goat to pin any struggles on. My early candidate is Ryane Clowe, a rookie who irritates me because he always seems to be in the penalty box… and that’s pretty much it. I mean, the guy has two shots on goal so far this year. You know who has less SOG than that? One rookie defenseman and the two goalies. That’s it. Everyone else, including the rest of the defensive squad, has more attempts to score than the forward. That’s just wrong.
• Our cat, Dixie, and I were boxing yesterday morning. Put it this way, she won with a TKO and as a result I spent the rest of the day holding a bit of tissue to my face to sop up the blood. The lesson here, obviously, is that you can’t go inside on an opponent bearing claws. You have to stay out of range from that mess.

I finally got the pictures of HB‘s bike off the camera and uploaded on to Flickr.

You should know that this bike was built, with some help from RR, by hand from the ground up. Everything is custom and the end result, as if you couldn’t tell from the picture, is spectacular.

I mention this for two reasons: One is that Harley Brother had been a sort of misnomer for a couple of years there when he was between bikes. That has now been rectified and while this is a custom, it resembles a Harley enough to at least make the name sensical. Two is that I don’t say nearly enough how awesome and talented my friends and family are. This is actually just one small example of the many, many marvelous things the people in my life have accomplished.

I mean, my primary accomplishment is that I usually hit the bowl when I pee, so having all these unquestionably talented people around me makes me look better by association. And I thought I needed to point that out.

Several years ago when I was really big into Linux, I decided quickly that my favorite thing about the command line was the flexibility. As an extension, that applied to the system as a whole which is why even to this day I prefer unix-y operating systems, but the specifics of flexible applications really enthralled me.

In the years since I’ve quite obviously become a Mac guy. I’m fine with that, I’m sorry if you’re not. But while OS X has enough of the unix-y stuff to keep me happy 95% of the time, there is still a very large part of the system that is rooted in GUI applications with no direct command line equivalent. For the most part, this is cool with me. In fact a certain part of the reason why I started sliding away from Linux was that for all the flexibility being offered me by the command line-oriented approach to computing, it isn’t very useful in terms of time management. What you exchange for being able to do whatever you want with your programs is that you have to do stuff with them all the time.

A quick example is grep versus Spotlight. Spotlight is, in essence, a grep/find hybrid. Now you can do almost anything with a combination of grep, find and maybe a couple other shell-based tools. Spotlight has some functional holes in it, comparatively. But the difference is there are probably very few people who could do with grep and find what Spotlight does in the same amount of time. Doing it with Spotlight is typing search strings into a text box available on the system menu bar. Doing it with grep means remembering and correctly typing a series of command-line switches, options, flags, formatting requirements or, more likely, looking them up and trial-and-error-ing it until you get what you want. Flexible? Definitely. Easy and fast? Negative.

So here’s what happens: Most of the time, I’m a happy little Mac guy. I use all these i-apps on my iBook (which, coincidentally is officially my most favorite computer I’ve ever had) and everyone wins. But then every so often I’ll run up against something that just seems so obvious and easy and yet it doesn’t work, doesn’t exist or hasn’t been thought of by anyone else and I remember the upside of flexibility as I realize there’s nothing I can do.

Here’s my example from today: Safari has a fairly nice bookmarking system. There is a bookmark bar below the address bar which can contain folders of bookmarks (which appear as drop-down menus), regular bookmarks (for one-click access) or what they call “Auto-Click” folders which open a series of contained bookmarks in separate tabs in the current window. There’s also a Bookmarks menu that contains a list of all the bookmarks (which takes over the whole browser window) but that’s not really relevant to the discussion here.

I use Auto-Click for my webcomics reading. I have a master bookmarks folder called “Comics Trawl” which I open about once a day that contains all the webcomics I read and fills up a browser window with about 15 tabs. The problem is that many of the comics I read aren’t updated every day. Some are once a week, others are every other day, Mondays and Fridays, Tuesdays and Saturdays, whatever. The point is I end up opening a site and waiting for it to load just so I can close it because that comic hasn’t updated that day. This seems dumb.

I also make extensive use of the bookmarks bar at the top of the Safari window. I have seven menu-folders up there, plus two little bookmark-functions (one for TinyURL and the other for Del.icio.us). Those plus the Bookmarks Menu button take up about 80% of the horizontal space at my current resolution (the iBook’s max, by the way) so having just enough space for one or two more items up there means my Comics need to take up just one spot.

My solution is obvious: I need a master Comics menu-folder with five Auto-Click folders inside, one for each day of the week. Those folders will only contain the comics that are updated on those days. Simple, yet brilliant. Thanks, I know. Here’s the glitch: Safari won’t let you have Auto-Click subfolders. Only top-level folders can be Auto-Click. Whaaa? Why? I don’t know, but there it is.

Now, if Safari was an open source command-line app, it wouldn’t be a problem. Somehow there would be a way to hack in and make what I wanted to happen work. But this is part of my trade off, I want to do something that will really save me some time and effort with minimal trouble, except no one has thought of it or just done it so I have no recourse. I must live with substandard comics browsing.

So anyway, I’m submitting a feature request to Apple, but I don’t have much hope. I requested that they add timestamp data to the iPod shuffle’s Recently Played info, I suggested that they make the top-level “Shuffle” feature on the 4G iPods work as advertised and shuffle the currently selected Playlist and I suggested that they provide a function to export iCal data into other applications (such as To-Do List into an email). I’ve heard nothing on any of these, and my optimism isn’t a trait I exactly refine and polish—it is therefore unsuited to the task of providing me with hope.

They Return

After sampling a lot of the new shows this season and sharing my thoughts I figured it was only fitting that I take a few moments to remark about some of the returning shows and their grand season premieres. Note that all the shows I’m talking about here are ones I actually watched most or all of last season. Other than Veronica Mars (which I’m TiVoing but not watching until the Season 1 DVD comes out so I can catch up) the only returning show that I watched this year but didn’t watch last year is Smallville, but only because HB and Gin love that show and had us TiVo it for some reason so they wouldn’t miss it. I ended up watching it with them but I won’t comment on it since I was more or less lost and playing catch-up the whole episode. I’ll stick with what I know.

Also, for completeness’ sake, I’m coining a new phrase here. Some of the shows I watch are admittedly soap operas. There’s no way around it: The plots revolve around the more or less mundane existences of the characters rather than some fantastical events occurring to heroic or reluctantly heroic protagonists. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a show like that; character-driven dramas can be just as intriguing as action-driven ones when done right. However, there comes a point when the seeds of the true soap operas, the daytime variety, and all their ugly hack-written dreck bubbles to the surface in a painfully overwrought sequence of “I’m your long-lost twin brother and I’m here to tell you the wife you thought was dead is really still allive” sort of eye-rolling schmaltz. When a show gets all über-cheese like that, I call it dropping the soap. It’s when people react to circumstances that are not inherently worthy of high drama as if they were matters of National Security, or when something happens so far out of the realm of plausibility that one must completely destroy their sense of disbelief, and then the writers ask you for one more leap of faith.

So, moving on.

Alias

Ah Alias, how I used to love you. Remember when you were a fun, quirky show about a sexy secret agent trying to lead a double life of normal grad student and international super spy? Remember when you would feature an ensemble of interesting characters and fantastical mythology story arcs held together by a likable, chameleon-like lead? It seems like only yesterday when you had crisp writing and sharp dialogue. When you took chances with plot lines and weren’t afraid to shake things up. I remember those first couple of years when it was like you could do no wrong. Every bold twist, every unexpected turn, every moment of romantic tension, every fight scene seemed to happen with a certain boldness. Anyone might die! Anything could happen! It was… thrilling.

I miss those days. Sure, when you introduced a two-year gap in time, I was a little skeptical. The love-triangle central story line in our third year was at times trying but you held on to some of your early promise. I still felt like you wanted to do right. Lauren being introduced as Vaughn’s wife was worthy of an eyebrow twitch. Lauren turning out to be a bad guy was a bit hard to swallow. Lauren being a double-agent and getting killed by Vaughn was at least a relief: It was over. We could get back to Sydney and Vaughn or, more specifically, we could get back to dream-sequence-less Alias without all the drama.

Then came last year. I had so much hope going in! It seems naïve now, I know. Another system reset. Bring the team back together, oh and here comes Sloane again. I guess he’s a good guy now, huh? Sure. We got less mythology. We got more one-shot, standalone episodes. I felt like it was getting hollow, a shell of what we once had. Where was my reward for four years of loyalty? What was the hook if there wasn’t a complex set of crosses and double-crosses and triple-crosses? Just some chick in funny costumes doing (yawn) another roundhouse kick to the head? Wake me when something happens.

I guess you tried to bring the mythology back toward the end. But it wasn’t good. It was getting sloppy, maybe even stupid. What happened to those writers? The ones I used to admire for their boldness? A remote town in Russia? Sydney off the hook because she has a sister she didn’t know about? My interest wasn’t just slipping, it was racing downward on a greased track. Oh look, a giant red ball of bad CGI. How terrifying.

I was just about to leave. Just about to walk out the door when the final scene of season four made me pause. The abrupt car-crash ending, while ripped straight from the movie The Forgotten, was effective. Oh, I had my skepticism. Vaughn is a double agent? Uh, no. As a matter of fact he is not. I can suspend disbelief, but it does not soar or hover on its own power like a helicopter or a particle of dust. It needs some kind of support, and I wasn’t getting any of that. Still, still I can’t deny I was intrigued. Alias writers have pulled off some even more unlikely twists before. I owed it to you and you deserved one more chance. For old time’s sake.

What a fool I was. Maybe your father, J.J. Abrams is too busy with his real show, his one true love, Lost to bother anymore. Maybe he’s handed you off in a Gene Roddenberry-to-Rick Berman kind of lapse in judgement to people who simply don’t get it. Maybe the writers have gotten to the point where there isn’t anything to do but get silly. I don’t think so, though. Silly is okay. Stupid, intelligence-insulting crap is not okay.

Here’s what I think happened. You want to hear this? Here it is: You got scared. You forgot that which Hollywood is so adept at forgetting which is the simple truth that writing is everything. Maybe in the movies directing is big. Directors can impose their vision on a script when they have months to film and gargantuan budgets. In TV, there’s no time for that. Directorial flourishes, okay, but you can’t change a badly written TV episode with great direction. The most a TV director can do is make it click, make it work. What? The actors? I’m sorry, did I forget them? Actually, no I didn’t. The thing is: They. Don’t. Matter.

Sorry, Us Weekly and National Enquirer subscribers. I hate to break it to you, but those people on screen? They’re not making up those lines on the spot. Not a single one of them. Somewhere, some under-appreciated writer has carefully decided what they should say and do and the actors merely carry out instructions. Story-driven media demands to be driven by (shockingly) the story.

So here’s what went down: You have a hot young actress. A rising star. She’s the marquee name on the show. In a way, you kind of gave her the break she needed. But she’s rising too fast. She’s getting into high-profile relationships with co-stars. She’s ending those high-profile relationships with co-stars and finding bigger, richer co-stars to hook up with. Now she’s making all these requests from the writers. “Don’t put me in so many scenes with my ex-boyfriend. It’s uncomfortable for me to kiss him. My new boyfriend gets jealous.” Blah, blah, blah. But the thing is, your writers are scared. They’re terrified at the prospect of losing their star. No star, no show, right? You forgot that the story is everything. That actor? That contractor? That vessel? Meaningless. You should have stood up right from the start and said, “We’re here to tell stories. If you’re worried about where that story may lead, the door is to your left. If you want to be a part of a great story and make a bit of money in the process, take a seat.”

But you didn’t. Now your fearmonger star is asking for co-stars to be excised from the show. She’s getting married, see, so she needs to have her exes out of the way. Oh, and did you write in my pregnancy? Because—congratulations to me and a big pat on my back—I’m expecting so my character is going to need to get knocked up as well. That won’t be a problem for an action-based show about undercover super spies, will it? Of course not. There’s a good little Word Processor Monkey. Now shoo, and go make me more famous.

Well you may be able to live with yourself, Alias, but I can’t. I hope it goes well for you, I truly do. We had some good times, you and me. But enough’s enough. You know I would normally be standing in ovation with a whoop and a whistle at the shocking death of a major character in a show. What a way to start the season! Except, no, it wasn’t. It was a cheap cop-out. A lame and bitter send-off to a guy who dared to be less of a star than our title character and who got caught in the wake of the Hollywood star machine. Poor sod. But forget about him, he’s just an actor. How about those writers? Sorry guys, you’ve lost it. Too many paychecks? Well phone it in to someone else. I’m out.

You had me, and you lost me. (Apologies to Eric Burns.)

Lost

Watching Lost is sort of like watching a cat stalk a bug. It’s very entertaining as it goes round and round, with brief snatches of brilliance in form and style here and there, but eventually you start to feel like saying, “Come on already!” Plus there is this feeling that when it does finally happen, it will be so sudden and abrupt as to just about ruin the rest of the experience.

Of course the big problem is that at least 85% of the enjoyment of Lost is speculating on what the maddening clues mean and training your eagle-eye to spot the less obvious ones. This is definitely an “Internet Chat Board” show. Where that starts to stumble is that at some point the clues have to become more than just tantalizing suggestions and form some sort of story. When that happens, the story better bring it or the show will fall flat on its face. Without the mystery, I can’t imagine what this show would have to offer.

Which is frustrating to me because as I’ve said before, I don’t have a problem with things being mysterious, where I get leery is when people try and shoehorn something like this into an open-ended format. People in the entertainment industry really, really need to learn the value of conclusions. I’m afraid they’re going to have to keep pouring on the mystery until we’ve all just run out of patience and given up before we’re finally told something dumb like “They were kidnapped by the government. And monsters!” At which point we won’t care, but we’ll still be pretty hacked that we wasted our collective time.

I want the show to push forward and start to reveal some of these mysteries. I want less of the flashbacks that don’t reveal anything new about the characters (in the Season Premiere we learn that Jack… uh… met a guy. Once. A long time ago. For like five minutes.) and more story advancement and/or dealings with new characters. And no, I don’t think adding a bunch of tail section survivors was the right way to go. There’s no reason why we couldn’t be introduced to some of the 30 people also part of the group who get zero screen time.

I still love the show and it hasn’t slipped since last year (other than retaining its inherent difficulties) but it remains a show I watch with great trepidation.

Cold Case

People talk about Law & Order being a very consistent show. In terms of structure—knowing what you’ll get in any given episode—that’s quite true. But I don’t think most people who use that particular adjective with that particular show are meaning anything else, and I don’t think they’re ever really referring to quality.

I actually like Law & Order, although I never watch the first runs, but to say the show’s storyline can be hit or miss is like saying batting against Roger Clemens can be hit or miss. Sometimes L&O is very good. Usually it’s decent. More often than it should be, it’s really dull.

When I say Cold Case is consistent, I mean that in both senses. For the most part you can turn on an episode and know what you’re going to get: An intro flashback setting up the crime/murder, a present-day setup where the team gets the case, title credits, several rounds of interviews where the flashback gets fleshed out or redefined, a hint of main character development, some intense scenes of police detectives doing their work, a breakthrough and the flashback is complete, ending the episode with a musical montage of fading flashback figures, police wrapping the case and people silently emoting.

But what’s interesting here is that for the most part these stories are well-written and interesting. Law & Order stumbles most often by trying to shoehorn an interesting courtroom idea (some legal hot-button issue) into a crime story and solve it in less than an hour. Cold Case just goes with the crime story and focuses on how the crimes impact people in less immediate terms. Law & Order or CSI show how crimes affect the perpetrators or the victims which is immediate, time-of-the-crime focus. Cold Case is more concerned with the people who have to move on after these events and how they change and shape them, what closure could bring to them and how they respond to old secrets.

The Cold Case season premiere was a typical Cold Case episode, neither startlingly brilliant nor anywhere close to disappointing, but somewhere in that nice zone where a show accomplishes exactly what it is trying to and counts that as success enough. The passing nod to the Hunter story from the end of last season was a nice epilogue to that short plot thread (most plot threads that pass between episodes are short) as she tosses the paper in the trash and gets right back to work. The new girl, Josie (Sarah Brown) is an interesting addition to the cast which already contains maybe one too many peripheral characters who don’t get sufficient screen time. Plus this throws off the two-two split for detectives when they go off interviewing suspects or witnesses. I’m not saying I have a particular problem with the new character or the actress, I’m just saying I agree with Vera: She’s trouble.

CSI

The season finale for CSI was close to the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen on this or any other show. And I’m including the episode of the Brady Bunch where Greg fools people into thinking aliens are coming with a whistle, a flashlight and a big piece of cotton stuck to his lip.

We have a member of the cast, a teammate, buried alive and running out of air. Earlier in the show’s run, we had a similar situation with someone who was just a regular victim. In that earlier episode, they got in a helicopter with a snazzy heat-detecting gizmo and they found that girl in like five minutes. Over the open desert. At night.

But when Nick is trapped in the oh-so-clever booby trapped coffin, no one mentions the helicopter thermal gadget. No one really does much besides sit and stare at the video feed from the webcam in the coffin. Of course they save him after a gratuitous two-hour drag during which the CSIs act like nothing more than drooling baboons the whole time and the end result is… the team gets back together?

I hoped that Quentin Tarantino’s misguided hand on last season’s ender would serve to just get the show back on track and let the rest be part of our collective pop culture nightmare of things that should not have been. But no, this season in the premiere we have dozens of references to Nick’s “ordeal” and a long scene of him acting… something about a bug on his arm. (Granted, the bug was the size of northern Wisconsin, but that’s not the point.)

The case here was a car flying through a house which was obvious once they showed the shot of the holes in both the front and the rear of the mobile home. And the big tire-sized and shaped divots in the ground on the backside.

Where CSI has started to make me wonder is that it doesn’t really work on the level of a mystery show. I mean, these aren’t exactly whodunnits, you know? We’re introduced to like two, maybe three possible suspects in the course of a show. In many cases, we don’t really even know who the true perpetrator is until he’s introduced late in the episode. Sorta hard for us to guess who the killer is when we don’t see him, right? I mean, the B case in the premiere wasn’t even solved. They knew who did it in an abstract sense, but they didn’t catch him or even really talk about it much once we heard about the cocaine in the cinnamon rolls.

The show used to work as an exercise in displaying how forensics helps to solve cases, but at this point we get it. We’ve seen these characters snap hundreds of photos, dust millions of prints, process images, examine blood spatter, align bullet entry/exit points, conduct autopsies, collect DNA evidence and shine their blue lights around so much that there is very little else to be shown until some new technique gets invented. So we don’t get much of a mystery, we’ve seen all the police-tech stuff, we’re not dealing with a character-driven show by any means so I have to wonder how many “Freaks that live in or visit Las Vegas” episodes there can possibly be before we just don’t care anymore?

Truth is, I don’t need a cheek swab to tell me that I’m getting bored already.

Grey’s Anatomy

The season premiere of this show dropped the soap so often I felt like what I needed to buy the writers for Christmas was soap on a rope. Meredith (oddly enough the show’s protagonist and least interesting or likable character) finds out her frowned-upon relationship with a co-worker is further complicated by him being married (but separated), she flips out and drowns in soul-crushed misery despite the fact that she’s been dating the guy for, what? A month?

Either way, a show about surgical interns that finds itself using relationship crises for conflict is already fishing around on the shower stall floor for that soap.

Grey’s Anatomy is a good example of how shows like CSI benefitted from thinning the inter-character conflict down. Of course, at some point shows like CSI start to need the characters to be more than a two-paragraph summary on a pilot outline and they would be well served to start showing a little more about what makes them tick. Contrarily, Grey’s has shown flashes of being a brilliant show about doctors on occasion: Instead of “Crazy and Highly Unlikely Medical Feakshow of the Week” most of their stuff has been interns trying to get a chance to get in on routine but interesting procedures. The patients are given enough time to show some character and in some cases even comment on the situation in a way that parallels the main character’s lives. In the season premier Joe the bartender brings something out of George that makes him show some previously unseen cleverness: That’s good melding of character and story.

Shepperd and Meredith’s blah love triangle? That’s not character development, that’s self-indulgent whinging. They tried to meld it to a story by having a patient who was a scorned wife hate Meredith after overhearing about the unintentional affair. The problem there, as is so often with dropping the soap, is that the whole situation could be resolved if people talked the way they would in real life. The obvious reply from Meredith to the patient was, “I didn’t know he was married, the jerk lied to me about it and now I’m just as mad as you are.” Case closed. Instead she sits there and takes it for the sake of letting Dr. Sheppard (the wife) show a compassionate side by coming to Meredith’s defense. Dumb. These slips into soap opera crud make it hard to remember the parts where they get it right as a medical drama.

The rumor is that last season’s finale (episode 10) was not originally supposed to be the finale, the third episode of this season was (episode 13). Having seen that episode, I can say that this seems very likely and the though soap has remained dropped, but the show has just enough going for it to keep watching for a bit and if they could manage to be even half as effective with some plots and characters as they are with others, the show would be one of the best on TV.

Maybe once they get their Christmas presents they’ll pull it together.

Desperate Housewives

Yes, yes, I watch this stupid show. I know. I know.

Here’s the deal with Desperate Housewives: It’s darkly comic blend of corny soap opera, mystery, social commentary and satire made it deserving of about half the praise it got last year. It certainly wasn’t the kind of show that would go down in the annals of history as among mankind’s greatest achievements (despite what the tabloids might suggest) but it was quality entertainment and one of the few true examples of the much-bandyed, rarely-achieved “guilty pleasure” genre. I mean, yeah it had a lot of over-the-top (sometimes way over the top) plots and characters but it always managed to wink at the camera and say, “I know you’re not buying any of this, but it’s pretty fun anyway.”

You had to agree.

But season two is where the rubber meets the road. The big mystery that tied the first season together into a semi-cohesive whole is over, and tragically season two has swept it aside as if it hardly mattered. Now the new mystery is one that many fans are finding less than engaging, the writers are dropping the soap so hard I swear they’re throwing it down, like a gauntlet, daring the viewers to challenge their wit. Susan and Mike on again/off again? Slip. Edie and Susan fighting again? Slide. Susan getting nosy with the uninteresting new neighbor? Whoops, there it goes, watch your toes. Gabrielle fights for the—what—400th time with both Carlos and John? Whoa man, those are some bold moves you’re making there… be careful not to tread too far into new territory.

The Lynette character continues to get uninteresting stories out of an otherwise potentially interesting situation. Bree’s mother-in-law is an ill-disguised stand-in for Rex as a constant challenger to her poise and sense of sophistication. While later episodes have made Bree’s run-ins with the insurance company and George’s dark obsession the most compelling plotline of the season (by far, and considering that it was almost something lost in the shuffle last year, that should speak volumes) early on there is almost no redeeming reason, from a story standpoint, to engage the show.

People have suggested that the writers need time to get the ball rolling again. Last year they had a pre-existing set of bonds to play off of (the friendship between the leads and Mary Alice) while this year most of those bonds have been pushed aside due to circumstances (Bree’s mourning, Lynette’s new job, Gabrielle’s social embarrassment, etc). But to me that sounds like they simply wrote themselves into a corner with the finale last year and it shouldn’t take five episodes to shake things up again. As someone pointed out, among the lead characters, none of them could really even be considered housewives any longer making the show basically a long form version of The Burbs.

I liked The Burbs. If I want to watch it, I have the DVD. It came with the frame. Desperate Housewives, if it doesn’t shape up soon, is going to out with the trash.

Survivor

I watch Survivor despite its reality show status for two reasons: One is that I don’t classify it as a reality show. To me, it’s a game show filmed and edited in a reality style. Despite what you may think, I don’t dismiss reality shows out of hand, I just don’t think most of them are very interesting and precious few of them do anything original. Two is that I love the social/game interaction in Survivor. As someone who finds both human nature and game strategy fascinating, Survivor offers a sometimes unique (if not tainted) glimpse at how people respond to unusual situations in a high-stakes game, how those situations arise and what impact they have on the players.

This year in Guatemala, the big twist was that last year’s loser brigade Stephanie and Bobby John got to come back and take a second shot. After the weaseling and Jeff Probst-ing that got Stephanie farther than she probably deserved last year, giving her a whole new chance to play seems like they may want to try to avoid going to that well too many times or else her whole “poor me the girl with all the bad luck” image is going to be shattered into “Hey, how ’bout you just give her a million dollars and get it over with?”

Don’t get me wrong, Stephanie is an admirable player and has a definite charisma on camera, bringing her back was an interesting move. I just don’t know I feel sorry for her anymore now that she’s gotten at least three leases on life in the game and her tribe still keeps losing.

Unfortunately with Survivor, the twists and highlights usually don’t show up or matter until later in the season. The producers rarely just overhaul the game, preferring instead of tweak and refine each year. The real interest comes later once alliances and strategy and voting conundrums present themselves.

In a recent episode the tribes were re-assigned. The tribe losing the immunity challenge had four from each original tribe and each had a fairly weak member. If no one flipped, a tie would occur and tie breakers have been known in Survivor to not favor the undecided tribes. So the interesting game situation here is, how do you extend the hand of trust, get what you want, but not put yourself in a position to have to make a shady move later that could hurt you in the long run? My solution was that I would find a second member from my original tribe I trusted and offer a proposition to an influential member of the other side: Take one of your most trusted tribemates, and the four of us will form a new alliance. As a gesture of good faith, we’ll take turns voting off one member from our previous tribes in turn, randomly decided. Once the second vote happens and our original tribes are back to even at three, the alliance is set. We pick off the unaligned people and go four strong and firm into the merge.

Of course that’s not what happened. The guy just took someone’s word on it with no guarantees and angered his own former tribe, but that’s why the show is fascinating because it introduces interesting logic problems that factor in very volatile variables like human emotion.

I’m still in.

My dad weighs in with some thoughts about caravan driving. These thoughts have merit. Observe:

Leaders
You mentioned that they should make moves early. I would add they should avoid unnecessary moves altogether; keep the driving “vanilla.” That is, even if you’re normally one of those (ugh!) drivers who cannot bear to have any vehicle in front of you (i.e., your mission in life is to always overtake and pass the next vehicle), when leading someone step out of character and just find a nice consistent speed and stay there to the extent possible. If it means going only 68 where you would normally be burning the wind at 75 and changing lanes every 50 feet, tough it out for the good of the person you’re leading. I’ve tried to follow people who zipped in and out of traffic exactly the way they would if they were trying to lose a pursuer. Go ahead and change lanes when it’s truly necessary and if you get behind a genuinely slow or oversize vehicle, its okay to pass but make sure you only change lanes or pass if it’s worthwhile to do so. And “Amen” to the admonition not to yellow-light your follower.

Followers
Keep up. I’ve tried leading people who acted like they didn’t particularly care where I was going. After ten minutes of driving the speed limit I can barely see them in my rearview mirror. If a follower pulls that stunt while going through town it is next to impossible to avoid yellow-lighting them. There is a difference between staying with the car ahead and tailgating. Except in extremely tight traffic, one can usually follow at a safe distance while still being close enough to respond to the leader’s moves and making it relatively undesirable for most drivers to want to get between you.

Also, Bosslady was horrified to hear that I was suggesting people back up on the freeway. Obviously you do not want to be cruising along for half a mile on the shoulder, but I don’t think 30 yards is going to hurt anyone. Still, the point is valid.

The problem this presents (and this is why I wanted commentary) is that as the leader who has taken an exit the follower did not, what should your response be? If we’re going to assume that backing up and actually taking the right exit is not an option for the follower, their only recourse would be to take the next exit after that. If that exit is close enough, they may be able to navigate surface streets back to the general location of the missed exit, but that can be confusing for the separated cars to try and get back on course. Also, the whole point of the caravan exercise is to prevent people from trying to guess where they should be going. Ideally the follower who has missed an exit will get off at the next exit, get back on going the other way, exit again after they’ve passed the intended exit and get back on going the right way before that so they can take the exit they missed. In that case, should the leader be sitting there on the shoulder for what could be a very long time while the follower does this or should there be some kind of universal meetup location so followers can do whatever they feel most comfortable doing in order to get back there?

I Am Every Web User

If you’re very observant you might have noticed a couple of new badges down in the Meta section. I have been using Flickr and Last.fm lately and find them to be nighttime attire suitable for felines. The badges direct you to my personal Flickr page and Last.fm overview, but if you take digital photos or use iTunes, I heartily recommend you set up your own accounts on these sites because, frankly, I feel like a loser for having only one friend on each site.

Granted, I am a loser, but I see no sense in feeling like one all the time. Especially when these sites are cool things that all you non-losers out there would enjoy.

Oh I Almost Forgot

San Jose Sharks hockey time, baby!

Dr. Mac, living up to his moniker, corrected me in my mistaken assumption that it was not possible to play Apple’s AAC-encoded music files through TiVo. I guess there is a software solution using LAME that encodes-on-the-fly AACs into TiVo-friendly mp3s. It hardly matters since I’m rocking the AirPort Express either way, but I wouldn’t want to be accused of spreading lies.

Also on the Apple front, some dude thinks he knows what the ROKR iTunes disappointment phone is all about. He may be on to something.

Follow Me

A minor squabble yesterday has prompted some thinking on my part. The topic is driving in caravan. It happens all the time, “I’ll follow you there” or “You follow me, I know how to get there.” It’s typically a lot easier to, when the circumstances are right and more than one car is involved, have the person who knows where they’re going lead the way than to try and give what may be complicated directions. There is something about this relating to the fact that giving someone directions back home is a lot easier than getting someone somewhere unfamiliar; it has something to do with finding the closest point of recognition, but it leads me to a digression so nevermind for now.

The problem with following or leading is that there is sometimes a disconnect in driving styles which leads to the follower being in possibly a worse situation than they would have had they tried to find something on their own or which makes the leader frustrated. I think a set of simple guidelines for leading and following need to be established which could eliminate the pitfalls in this common situation. So I present the first working draft of my Caravan Driving Guidelines, to which I am accepting feedback and comments.

Leaders

1. Drive a comfortable, typical speed. Don’t race, don’t try to match the speed of the guy following you. Five miles per hour over the posted speed limit is a good compromise: You aren’t likely to get pulled over (or get your follower pulled over) but you won’t make speed freaks want to pull their hair out if they’re behind you.
2. Signal. Always turn on your blinker several yards earlier than is strictly necessary and leave it on a few seconds longer than you normally would. Never do anything without signaling.
3. Make moves early. You don’t need to make sure there is enough room for lane changes and such for both you and your follower, but change lanes as early as possible to give the follower a chance to catch up. Likewise, any merges or exits should be indicated as soon as they possibly can so you don’t force the follower into a dangerous last-minuute situation.
4. If you completely lose the follower, pull over before you make any course deviations. If a follower gets stuck behind a red light, it’s okay to drive on if the road ahead is relatively slow moving and there are no upcoming turns or exits. Once you need to do something, make sure your follower is there. If not, pull over and let them catch up. To avoid losing followers, never run yellow lights.
5. Carry a cell phone. Call it “Plan B.”

Followers

1. Don’t tailgate. Drive a safe distance behind the leader and don’t freak out if someone gets between you. If the leader is following the guidelines, he’ll pull over before making any moves if he can’t see you so you won’t get lost.
2. Take the cues. It’s possible that your leader will be making unnecessary moves like passing cars, changing lanes, etc. Do them anyway unless it’s obviously unsafe. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between a random lane change and a change of direction.
3. If you miss an exit, pull over immediately. You may be able to back up along the shoulder and take the exit anyway, if it seems safe. If that’s not a possibility, call on your cell phone and arrange a place to meet.

Email comments or suggestions to paul@ironsoap.org.

One Little Thing Real Quick, It’s No Big Deal Just That…

Hockey starts tomorrow! Boo-yah!

Whoa man. So much to cover. So not sufficient time.
I have Part 3 of the “Box in the Living Room” series coming, including thoughts on returning shows, but that will have to wait. Instead, I have bullets. A veritable shower of bullets.

• Much of what I’m passing on here relates to an event that occurred Friday. My contracting job paid its dividends with a bounty of goodness including: An AirPort Express, a copy of OS X Tiger, a RAM upgrade for the laptop, a powered USB hub for the mini and a new printer/copier/scanner. This will give you the appropriate reference later.
• So I finally installed Tiger over the weekend. Here’s the thing about installing stuff… really about upgrades in general. My rule of upgrades is that you have to give some in order to get some. As an example, the RAM upgrade I got turned out to be faulty. That is, the stick of RAM is bad and causes my computer to display badness instead of, you know, computery stuff. Since the RAM did not display its corrupt, vile intentions until after the upgrade process had begun, the result was that instead of doing a nice “OS Upgrade” which would leave my system largely intact, I wiped the whole thing clean and started over. In theory, not so bad since I did lots of backups before I started upgrading away. However, here’s some things you forget about when you’re backing stuff up:
  • Caches, cookies and site-specific logins.
  • Application-specific settings that aren’t stored in the usual places like ~/User/Library
  • Registered software that uses weird hashes to verify registration status.
  • How incredibly large of a pain it is to set up a system the way you like.

  I discovered that I have 21 months invested into this laptop. That’s very close to two years of custom tweaks, installations and upgrades that have to be meticulously re-created if I want to get things back the way they were. Of course the point of upgrading in some cases is to not go back to the way things were, but to say that I’m running a bit behind due to this is an understatement.

• My Tiger impressions: Wonderful. Spotlight: Good. Dashboard: Very Good. Safari RSS: Nifty. RSS Screensaver: Super Nifty. Command-Control-D: Hotness. New Mail.app: Actually, I dig it. Overall the new features are cool but perhaps only worth the $129 if you, like me, are constantly losing files or you, like me, have a specific need for the Dashboard. In my case I use a Dictionary every single day. Dictionary.com is a good site but it is dog slow, even on a fast connection. That kills me. System-level dictionary: Lifesaver. Also, I managed to delete my Calculator.app out of Panther like, the first day I got it. Even later OS Upgrades didn’t bring it back. I use calculators a lot (because I suck at math) so I downloaded an app called Calculator+ which was okay, but not nearly as handy as the Dashboard calculator widget, which I’ve used five times just today. Maybe that’s only because I could, but then again, that’s the point. Right?
• Setting up the AirPort Express was, in typical Apple fashion, cake. Carrot cake. I got some of them Monster cables to connect it to the stereo system in the living room and seconds later: iTunes-in-Living-Room bliss. I talked a while back about the logic of this kind of system. On one hand, TiVo lets you do something like this already, and control the whole works with the remote for the TV. Which is cool, but TiVo likes to claim to support Macs and then promptly not so lots and lots of my files are in AAC which TiVo ignores like a child having a meltdown in the middle of a department store. I could re-encode my files into TiVo-friendly mp3, but that’s annoying to have to do each time I buy something from iTunes. There are other ancillary benefits as well. The wireless connection we have at home is courtesy of SBC at the moment. Their modem includes an access point. But since the demise of the old HP Wireless Switch some time ago, if we ever did something besides SBC, we’d be back to the wired stone ages. Now, this is no concern. Also, the APE is portable so I’m already kind of thinking that for Gin and Nikki’s birthday BBQ this weekend I may DJ it up right with my laptop and the APE over at HB and Gin’s place. Convenience, not provided by TiVo. Check and check.
• Speaking of TiVo, you know how I was all on your case a few weeks ago like, “Hey buy a TiVo and if you don’t like it I’ll give you money?” Well, nevermind. It’s not that TiVo isn’t good. It is. But TiVo is also struggling. Struggling companies do dumb stuff. In this case TiVo has now managed to deliver an underwhelming feature improvement (TiVo2Go, which still doesn’t work with Macs), promise to slap ads all over the screen while you’re fast forwarding through commercials (wrap your head around that one, I dare ya!) and now their new thing is they have content flags which could allow copyright holders to prevent shows from being marked as “Keep Until I Delete.” So far they aren’t doing it that I can tell (a few mistaken instances notwithstanding), but the fact that they’re bending to pressure from the entertainment industry to cripple key features in their product shows that they don’t have the spine or intestinal fortitude to do what’s right for their customers because they think their best bet for staying alive right now is to do whatever they have to such that they might avoid ticking off the TV moguls. Also, they’re so worried about losing money that their new service agreement doesn’t let you do less than one year’s worth of service. Dumb, dumb and more dumb. So put it this way, TiVos are $50 now. That’s a good price. At $12.95/month for one year, you get the whole package for a little more than $200. I think it’s worth it, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend something that is this consumer-unfriendly, at least not at personal cost to myself.
• What I can recommend without reservation is Serenity. I con(vinc)ed Nik to see the Firefly movie with me on Friday morning, and was not disappointed in the least. Having watched and very much enjoyed the TV series, I was afraid that it might be hard to follow the plot for people like Nik who hadn’t seen even one Firefly episode. Not so, she said she had no problem picking everything up (even if her assumptions about certain characters such as Shepherd were off because of his movie portrayal). They did a rather masterful job of getting the sometimes complex relationships between the characters to shine through in only two hours (Nik even picked up on some of the nuance between Mal and Inara that took me many episodes to grasp) and while they had to push some of the events into hyperdrive (the revelations to fans of the show about River, the Federation and the Reavers come fast and furious) for the sake of the plot, but it worked extremely well. Someone else sagely said that this movie makes the Star Wars prequels look like Amateur Hour and that is a very fine way of looking at it. While I would have preferred the show remain on the air (Joss Whedon does episodic television better than 99.99% of all other humans), having some kind of continuation/closure sure was nice as an alternative to the premature death and gradual memory fade at the hands of the idiots at Fox. If you have any inclination towards SF flicks, trust me this once and go check it out. Maybe we can help show studio execs that people really like well done SF adventures and we will pay to see well executed, well written stuff.
• You know what’s not cool? Cleaning a cat litter box. Like, dumping the litter, getting in there with paper towels and hot soapy water and disinfectant cleaning. Yeah, that’s pants.
• As a side effect of my losing lots and lots of stuff from my laptop, I’ve once again killed my Amazon account. I don’t know what it is about that site and my accounts, but we don’t get along. Anyway, the only reason I still use the stupid site is because of the Wish List which, as others such as Bosslady have pointed out, is a real help to people like me who love to wait until the last possible nanosecond to do any kind of shopping. But I’m sick of re-doing it at Amazon so I switched mine to a different site (which, conveniently, also allows me to include stuff that Amazon doesn’t carry). So for those doing some early shopping (94 days until my birthday, FYI) my new list is now and forever more at Confusticate’s Wishlist.

From a miniatures gaming mailing list I’m on:

...it's everything you want in a con... The only downside is the lack of buxom RPG playing girls running around in... revealing costumes!

If you have been using gaming conventions as your prime babe marketing venue, you might want to rethink your base line strategy...

Having had some time over the weekend to catch up on a bit of TiVo, I have more initial impressions of the new shows from this season. I can feel you holding your breath in rapt anticipation. I assure you, it is perfectly safe to exhale.

More of the New

Invasion

A hurricane hits a Florida town, which may have been a cover for an alien invasion. Or it might have been a cover for William Fichtner. Possibly a little girl’s cat is involved. Ooh, look! Glowy lights!

Where Surface‘s pilot suffered from trying to do too much in the pilot, Invasion goes the polar opposite route and has an hour where practically nothing happens. The very convoluted relationships among the main characters needed more time to get straight than anything else. Ready? Main studmuffin Russell (Eddie Cibrian) is a park ranger dating/living with local news reporter Larkin (Lisa Sheridan) and her laid-off conspiracy-nut brother, Dave (Tyler Labine). They watch after Russell’s kids (Evan Peters and Ariel Gade) on weekends and return them to their mother, Dr. Mariel (Kari Matchett), the rest of the time to stay with her creepy Sheriff husband (Finchter) and his daughter from somewhere else, Kira (Alexis Dziena).

Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.

The big tense moment is when the young daughter wanders off as the hurricane is hitting and sees some lights (which aren’t effectively shown on screen) which gets Dave’s conspiracy-sense tingling as she recounts the experience. There is a car crash, a missing persons search resulting the the discovery of Dr. Mariel’s unclothed body (she pulls through, with some creepy help from the creepy Sheriff who stares creepily off camera for several seconds any time he gets on-screen), two boat rides, unidentified bodies dragged from a bayou and stuffed into a car trunk and a glowing manta ray under the water’s surface which maybe tries to eat Dave’s legs.

If this sounds exciting, rest assured it is not. Despite the “action” going on, everyone kind of walks around the whole show looking vaguely surprised to be on a set, much less on camera. The dialogue is cheesy and the suspense is played more like unintentional comedy, utterly failing to deliver anything remotely resembling a thrill. The special effects are not even effects, including the big “discovery” moment where the little girl sees… something, we presume since we’re not really allowed to share the awe. She does recount the story later in some detail but by then we don’t really care. The episode’s closing shocker (complete with thunderously ominous synthesizer music) is another half-shown look at some kind of unspecific something-or-other which may have something to do with Dr. Mariel but we can’t really tell since it looks more like someone may have dropped some Tide with Bleach into the swamp. However, the bubbling detergent sure makes William Finchter look creepy, so we must be shocked and appalled. Right? Right?

As per my rule I’ll give this one an episode beyond the pilot to straighten things out, but I can hardly wait to dump this Season Pass.

My Name is Earl

A petty thieving redneck with a two-timing wife and a blubbery brother/sidekick wins the lottery but loses the ticket. He learns about the concept of Karma in the hospital (from Carson Daily-hah!) and decides he needs to make amends for his life in order to get back the lottery winnings, so he makes a list and sets out to atone for his transgressions.

The show has promise. That’s the best compliment I can offer it. The semi-original setup deserves some mild acknowledgment and the show looks and plays like a movie comedy (which, after the raucous but wildly inappropriate canned laughter from How I Met Your Mother is so welcome as to get me all misty-eyed). Beyond that, the pilot felt pretty flat. Most of the jokes were Office-style “discomfort” humor—his wife gave birth to a black baby! How hilarious! But I didn’t laugh, because I didn’t laugh at the Office that much, either. The plot finally kicks in late in the episode with the guy who used to pretend to be the CEO of Del Taco playing a picked-on kid from Earl’s formative years as a lonely gay man in a small rural community.

ATTENTION: This is a public service announcement for all TV executives and movie producers. PLEASE NOTE: Gay jokes are done. Finito. Not funny any more. Seriously, we’ve heard them all. After Ellen, Will and Grace, Queer Eye, roughly 52,000 movies and Mythbusters you must surely know by now that it stopped being funny a long, long time ago. How many more “Oh my gosh! A straight guy dances with a gay dude!” jokes can you do? Find a different well because this one is dry. SERIOUSLY. KTHX.

Anyway, aside from the lame side plot, the pilot mostly just suffers from not being funny. Jason Lee seems a bit bored with the role, his accent comes and goes in a manner reminiscent of Kevin Costner. The only amusing part is when the squirrelly gay guy sprays mace in his own eyes then runs face first into a wall. And they showed that on the promos.

I want to say this show has potential. The premise is interesting enough that with some much tighter writing it could end up being a quirky little gem. Or, since this is network TV after all, it will probably end up a tedious little dingleberry. I’ll give it two more episodes to win me over, but another short leash is in order.

The Ghost Whisperer

A young woman is gifted with the ability to see and talk to earthbound spirits that haven’t passed into “the light” who come asking for her help. Also, people cry. A lot.

I’m not exactly sure what I expected with this show. I know I didn’t expect quite as much Touched by an Angel. I think I was hoping for more The Sixth Sense.

Silly me.

Jennifer Love Hewitt gives it a decent go as the wearily afflicted/gifted young woman (Melinda) who kind of wishes she didn’t have to deal with all these ghosts and their problems. In an interesting twist we get a young lead character who is actually happily married (or at least newly married as of the pilot) which gives the series a different direction than the old and haggard “will they or won’t they” cliche, a move I kind of appreciated. Aisha Tyler isn’t even thrown a bone to nibble on as the best friend and co-shop owner? Co-worker? Like I said, calling her character sketchy would be generous. Melinda’s husband Jim (David Conrad) is a paramedic/EMT who throws himself into his job to try and lighten Melinda’s load which sparks a lot more tearful conversations about life and death.

The pilot’s plot involves a Vietnam soldier who died in a helicopter crash and the search for his son, now soon to be a father as well. Let me be clear here, there isn’t anything particularly wrong with the show, the performances or the execution of all of the above. The problem is with the relentless schmaltz and puddle-eyed sentiment gushing from every scene. The actors are certainly given plenty of chances to emote, and they do so admirably, but the bottom line is I just don’t care.

I was more hoping for some kind of explanation about how the mechanics of Melinda’s gift worked; some sort of internal consistency or set of rules about how it worked would have been nice. How did the compass get there? How much can the ghosts influence the real world? How does she know if what she’s seeing is a ghost or not? What is the point of the dreams if she can see them when she’s awake? Do their physical bodies have something to do with their spiritual experience? And most importantly, why the heck isn’t this show scary?

One more to meet my minimum requirements, and that’s all. Seriously.

Killer Instinct

A “deviant crime” detective comes back from a leave of absence after his partner (and maybe more?) is killed in the line of duty. He’s assigned a new (young, female, attractive, natch) partner and they start searching for a serial killer who uses venomous spiders to paralyze and kill his victims so he can rape them.

As a standard cop show in the CSI (x3), Law & Order (x3), Cold Case, Without a Trace era, Killer Instinct has very little to offer. Deviant crime? Huh? But somewhere in the middle of the pilot (which TV Guide claimed was “disturbing” or “ghastly” or something like that but apparently I’m the only one who’s been watching CSI for the last five years if they think spiders are grotesque… sheesh) I found myself intrigued. The new partner to Detective Hale (Johnny Messner) seems to be a little too interested in him as she (played with off-kilter charm by Marguerite Moreau) drags info out of his files and stalks him all over the place.

The spider storyline was kind of shrug-worthy, but the closing sequence with the anti-toxin was intriguing from a character establishment standpoint and impressed me enough to redeem even some of the slower moments in the show. I also confess a soft spot for the show being set in San Francisco (and shot with impressive visual style that mercifully does not bite off CSI for once) but it’s hard to tell if that’s because I know and like the biggest city closest to me or because I’m just sick of seeing New York City as the setting for every other show.

I was a bit confused by the “Coming Next Week” promos which show a completely different character than Moreau’s. I’ve since confirmed that she was replaced by Kristin Lehman, which I can’t judge as a good or bad move but I thought Moreau was fine in the role. Either way, color me intrigued. I do however think this show has close to zero chance of survival and will likely be cancelled at the earliest opportunity; the limited fan buzz I have seen has been deafeningly apathetic which doesn’t bode well. I’ll watch it as long as it’s given a chance, I think.

Stay tuned for a round-up of the returning shows’ season premieres in part three…

Brevity: A new direction?

• If you use iTunes, sign up for Last.fm. Don’t ask questions, just do it and you can thank me later. With gifts.
• Nintendo announced their new controller earlier this week and it seems it’s a kind of remote-control-style one handed device. Wired has the best overview and pictures. The theory I subscribed to was not entirely incorrect, most reports suggest there is a gyroscopic element in there, but it does not provide centrifugal feedback. In any case the first inclinations may be similar to the DS, namely “Whaaa…?” While I’m still not sold on the DS, I can at least acknowledge that it’s offered some intriguing possibilities to developers. Thus, I’m withholding judgment on this thing until I see what software they bring with it (and they’d better bring it, if you know what I’m sayin’) but it does bear linking that there is an extremely well reasoned piece of exposition which goes a long way to explaining the apparent madness of king Nintendo.

The New

It seems the new TV season is upon us. I don’t exactly understand why the enigmatic “Television Executives” deem that we should have these artificial seasons for our entertainment; between the wash of reruns and the glut of expensively loud movies between May and August, I’m not certain what these individuals believe we are doing while the ambient temperatures rise. The gluttonously wealthy puppet masters who control the entertainment viaducts (a group of people I always imagine look like Kingpin from Daredevil comic books, or possibly this 80’s album cover) must have some strange vision of America streaming in hordes to the beach for three months at a time, leaving their television sets to collect a thick blanket of dust until the winds pick up and the trees begin to shake free of their leaves at which point everyone packs up the beach towels, surfboards, water wings and fishing poles and settles back into their couches for a long winter of frequently interrupted by words from our sponsors programming.

Regardless, the illogical wait is over and a crop of new shows have arrived. I certainly haven’t seen them all, nor do I plan to, and not all of them have even aired yet. However, thanks to the success of Lost, there is a heavy dose of suspenseful SF-tinged flava this year which at least bears investigation from your humble geek-in-waiting.

Since there are enough new shows I’m interested in this year, I won’t even bother covering returning shows here, just the hopeful fresh faces. Of course, like the march of the baby turtles to the sea, only a few will survive and those by sheer luck, force of will and overwhelming odds. To say nothing of which may actually deserve it.

Threshold

So a freaky alien thing shows up and people start flipping out. A kind of worst case scenario management specialist wrote a set of protocols to handle such a situation and assembles her team to combat the threat.

First of all, the premise is as old as the hills but there are enough twists and turns to give it a pretty long leash. I’d guess I’m invested for at least a half dozen episodes already (the two-hour pilot episode helped avoid some of the pitfalls other shows in this genre have this fall which is trying to introduce too much in too little time). The show is kind of like watching the beginnings of the conspiracy from the X-Files unfold, from the perspective of characters like Deep Throat and the Cigarette Smoking Man. Only these guys are less shadowy puppet masters and more smarmy oddballs.

Brent “Data” Spiner basically reprises his role from Independence Day as the paranoid/reluctant lab geek microbiologist; Peter Dinklage is probably the best actor of the bunch (and kudos to the writers for not even tossing in a passing joke about his dwarfism) playing a cryptographic analyst, mathematician and linguist; Robert Patrick Benedict is the sketchy Marshall-from-Alias-like physicist and Carla “Son-in-Law” Gugino plays the “contingency analyst” lead passably but certainly not remarkably. I’ll forgive some of the performances since starting a series usually means actors don’t quite have a grip on their characters yet. (Don’t believe me? Go back and watch the pilot for CSI and witness Marg Helgenberger’s “King Kong on Steroids” scene and try not to cringe.)

Some of the science-y elements were vaguely intriguing (four-dimensional beings, the “downloading” instructions via DNA, etc.) although the triple-helix DNA thing sounded hokey to me. The show’s ubiquitous logo was also poorly incorporated (fractal patterns “burned” onto the electromagnetic equipment?) and seemed more like a “hook” than an actual plot device. Kind of like marketing wanted something cool to slap all over posters and stuff so the writers kind of stuffed it in.

It was curious that Lost‘s deceased antagonist from season 1, Ethan, makes a sort of return in the competition as the alien-controlled first mate from the initial contact ship but is played with identical intensity by William Mapother as he brought to Lost. In fact, it really broke the fourth wall for me to see him acting this way because for a minute I thought Threshold might be some kind of prequel to Lost before I realized they’re on different networks. But in any case the weakest link on the show is Brian Van Holt’s massive yawn-inducing performance as a shadowy “special agent” and laughably bad chemistry with series lead Gugino. Here’s hoping something knocks his character off in a sweeps stunt. November sweeps.

Threshold manages one thing quite right and that is they go ahead and show most of the mysterious stuff right up front and let the “hows” and “whys” and “what exactlys” build the suspense. Unlike Lost which managed enough of that to not be lame (see Surface, below… ha!) but still got into the trap with the jungle monster thing where at some point you’re going to have to show this thing, and when you do it had better be good. The closest we got was the season finale on Lost and it looked laaaaame. So props to Threshold for not leaving me hanging on much more than the plot instead of the special effects.

Supernatural

Two brothers lost their mom in a freakish unnatural fire (on the ceiling!) and now fight spooks and things that go bump in the night trying to figure out what really happened.

Despite the incredibly lame premise, this was actually one of my favorite premieres this season. Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles create interesting if unoriginal characters out of Sam and Dean Winchester (and manage to do it in the one-hour pilot as well), plus they do a nice spin on the classic “Ghost Hitchhiker” campfire story and deliver some genuinely creepy moments throughout.

I have a feeling the cast is bound to expand past the two leads (although I wouldn’t be particularly upset if it didn’t get all serialized and managed to just stay a “monster of the week” kind of show) and while of all the new suspense-style shows this was the one I cared the least about what happens next, it was the one I cared the most about what happened within the one episode.

Despite it being high quality cheese, it’s on a crummy network and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it fade quietly from the lineup in January, a victim of being lost in the shuffle of other, higher-profile but ultimately lesser shows. Don’t get too attached to this one, but you might as well enjoy it while you can.

Surface

Weird stuff starts happening in all sorts of bodies of water and people race around trying to figure out what they are. Maybe they’re… aliens!

Surface really, really needed to go the Threshold route and do a two-hour pilot. Or at least air the first two episodes back to back because there was just too much stuff going on to possibly follow. Although Lake Bell (get it?) gives a decent performance and some of the effects worked on a basic level (I admit the show was quite a bit more freaky to me than it was probably even intended due to it hitting my phobic buttons; sort of like someone with an irrational fear of spiders watching Arachnophobia) I don’t think this show has much of a future.

The problem here is that most of the suspense relies on the audience not knowing what the creatures are, or even really what they look like. But at some point they’re going to have to show the creatures, and once they do, where’s the suspense? What’s left then? Are they aliens, aren’t they aliens? That’s really a very secondary issue behind what are they, what do they look like/do and what do they want? It won’t take long to answer those questions… at least, it shouldn’t, but I guess if that was actually the case there wouldn’t be much of a show.

Come to think of it, there isn’t much of a show here. This will probably be the first of the new TiVo season passes that I dump.

Bones

A forensic anthropologist and a G-Man flirt their way through cases where the majority of the evidence lies in small bits of bodies.

I’ll give David Boreanaz this: He can separate himself from the character he played for so long on Buffy and then the eponymous Angel. He shows a pretty solid sense of comic timing and while his co-star, Emily Deschanel—ehm, how do I say this? Sucks, she manages to not suck so bad as to ruin the show. So I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to pilot episode syndrome.

The first episode actually kind of bored me once it settled into a fictionalized Chandra Levy plot, but there were a few moments (the opening scene in the airport was surprising and amusing) where the show displayed enough promise. One thing that gets me is how they’re going to make an entire show out of this: CSI barely works because they give the labrats a liberal dose of creative license by having them present in the interrogations, pulling guns, and serving warrants. Real crime scene techs process crime scenes, do evidence procedures in the crime lab and testify in court. That’s it. Now we’ve narrowed it down even further to the point where we have a forensic anthropologist going out and doing police work? Uh-huh.

I’ll give this one another try or two, but I’m keeping it on a short leash.

How I Met Your Mother

This is the only comedy I’ve tried so far this year, and I admit I was extremely skeptical when I hadn’t even cracked a smile by the first commercial break. But the show picked up pace and managed (once they let Neil Patrick Harris’ character to get in some lines) to be laugh-out-loud funny in parts. I’m surprised that this was the first time I’d heard a “This is so going in my blog!” joke. It even sounds like a catchphrase to me.

The twist at the end of the episode was a nice touch and the narration/flashback angle was interesting (although ultimately unnecessary). I just wish they’d try something else for once with TV comedies. The only other comedy I watch is Scrubs because it seems like a real comedy to me and not some corny canned-laughter-laden rehash. The best comedies are dramas with funny writing anyway: Buffy was a great example of a show with smart, funny writing that didn’t have to rely on gag-a-minute tedium. Alias, in its heyday, did this well also.

How I Met Your Mother is perhaps worth a half dozen episodes of cheesy chuckles, but I seriously don’t see how they can make an entire series out of this: At least not without it grinding into even worse sentimental muck than Friends did starting, oh around halfway through its run.

To be continued after I watch more shows…

ST. LOUIS, MO — Schick (owned by Energizer Holdings, Inc.) announced their newest product line today in direct response to yesterday’s announcement regarding Gillette’s new Fusion five-bladed razor. A spokesperson for EHI stated, “Those frenchie chowderheads think they can out-blade us? When they see our new Dectuple Brand Shaving System ™, they’re going to shoot wine right out their noses and all over their clean, white flags.”

When informed that Gillette Co. was an American company, the Schick spokesperson declined to give his name, an unusual request for a press release. “Whatever,” the anonymous spokesperson added, “those guys are going to feel French when they see this thing. They won’t believe it. Consumers won’t believe it, either! Ten blades! It shaves so close, it takes the freakin’ skin clean off! It’s a killer! I mean, look at this thing, you need two hands just to lift it!”

Schick and Gillette have been playing a game of one-upsmanship for the past few years starting with the triple-bladed Mach-3 razor introduced by Gillette and combatted by Schick with their introduction of the Quattro four-bladed razors last year. After Gillette announced the five-bladed Fusion, Schick wanted to strike back quickly. “We’ve been working on this ever since we perfected the Quattro. I mean at first we were like, ‘Let’s start on six blades,’ but then we were all, ‘Why keep adding one at a time? Those pansies at Gillette are just going to keep putting one more on there.’ So we jumped the gun. Our first attempts were fifty blades, but after a lot of trial and some pretty messy errors, we’ve discovered that ten blades is that maximum number of blades possible on a safety razor. I mean what are they going to say, ‘Ours goes to eleven?’ Who’d buy an eleven-bladed razor?”

The new Dectuple razors will be in stores in time for Christmas.

They’re not just pants. They’re space pants.

Wait, it gets better.

They’re not just space pants. They’re space monkey pants.