ironSoap

A couple of weeks ago I was getting frustrated with my TiVo constantly being out of available space. I have a fairly low capacity 40-hour Series 2 which, when combined with the horribly poor reception I receive from the non-boxed cable signal that requires me to record pretty much everything on one of the highest quality settings (thus taking up more space), often leads to issues where things don’t get recorded not due to scheduling conflicts but lack of available disk space.

After a particularly frustrating couple of days earlier this month during which I had this happen to me several times, I went through and fiddled with my Season Passes to try and help the problem. One of my solutions was that I trimmed the “Keep at Most” option of several high-profile SPs (shows I watch pretty much right after they air or at least no more than a day later) down to “1.” My thought process was, “I’ll always watch and clear these shows out, so why keep them around?”

Well, here’s why: Nik and I both watch Lost. But Lost comes on at 9:00 PT and I never start watching a one-hour show any earlier than twenty minutes after it has begun airing. The reason is that after twenty minutes you can usually skip through all the commercials because you’ve built a sufficient buffer and by the end of the show you’ve only just caught up to the live broadcast. But 9:20 is pretty close to when Nik heads off to bed. Being a more night-owl type (or just being more content to zombie-walk through my day) I don’t mind staying up until after ten or even after eleven. But Lost night is kind of tricky because I work in an office full of Lost fans. If I don’t watch the show the night it airs the inconsiderate TiVo-less hacks that work there will spoil the whole episode with their water cooler chatter before I even have a chance to watch it.

So this season we’ve been splitting the views up; I watch the show Wednesday night and then sometime during the next week Nik sits down to catch up and I re-watch it with her (because Lost usually is good for at least two viewings).

Well, last week the episode (“Further Instructions”) was pretty weak. When I griped about it, Nik faltered on wanting to watch it and in the end never got around to firing it up (actually, getting her to watch any sort of TV, including rented DVDs, has been something of a chore lately since she’s clearly addicted to playing Ticket to Ride online). But I forgot that I had changed all my Season Passes so I didn’t think to delete the previous episode before this week’s began. When I snapped on the set around 9:30 to start watching, I was confused that Lost wasn’t being picked up. It took me a few minutes to piece together what had happened and by the time I did I ended up with only the last twenty minutes of the show recorded.

I was pretty annoyed but I figured that it wasn’t a huge deal because abc.com makes a big to-do out of offering episodes of their shows online. Yeah, that may be theoretically true but the actual execution of those online episodes leaves something to be desired. I tried four different times with three different browsers on two computers to try and watch the whole show on ABC’s website. I only ever got the first fifteen minutes in before it would restart from the beginning or just stop playing and refuse to ever start again. After copious frustration I ended up settling for those first fifteen minutes and then the last twenty I had caught on TiVo and tried my best to piece together what happened in between.

Nik and I decided we would download the episode from iTunes Music Store later this week to watch the whole thing together but I don’t know that I can properly describe the level of frustration I was feeling yesterday.

And that was before I watched the Sharks game.

I Hope He Got a Big Bribe

I’ll give the Nashville Predators one thing: Their forecheck was phenomenal last night and the Sharks didn’t seem to puzzle out what was being done to them all night, even when they were pressing in the Nashville zone. It was clear from the sidelines that the Preds struggled in their own zone and knew it so they were going to do everything they could to keep it out of their zone as much as possible. Checking the boxscore, you might think that plan simply worked.

But you would be overlooking the one other part to the Predators’ plan which was obviously to grease the officials’ pockets with fat wads of cash to ensure that the Sharks lost, no matter how unfair it was.

I’m sure I’ll be accused of seeing the game through teal-colored glasses but I challenge anyone to watch the full game and not feel like the Sharks were the victims of bad call after bad call as well as having blatant, dangerous plays made against them in full view of some ref and there was no whistle to be heard. I think even Nashville fans should worry about the officiating in that game because if the Preds think they can play that way and get away with it every night, eventually they are going to jack someone up badly and have one of their players end up suspended or fined or put on a five minute major penalty.

I’ll go ahead and ignore the first boarding call that was blatantly overlooked late in the first period. Whatever. The guy wasn’t hurt and as much as I griped about it at the time, I would find out soon enough that it could get much, much worse. Third period comes and Toskala is whacked by several late coming after-the-whistle Predators. A minor melee ensues in which offsetting minors give the teams some 4-on-4 time. Questionable maybe but one could shrug it off. Then a few minutes later Toskala moves behind the net to play a puck and is promptly boarded by a forechecking Nashville player.

Was he really boarded? You better believe it. His face was to the wall, he was playing the puck and the Predators player hit him square in the numbers and tossed him in the boards. It wasn’t incidental contact, it wasn’t the result of some defender pushing him awkwardly: He flat-out checked the goalie and did so in a very dangerous way with the referee standing no more than five feet away.

No. Call.

Actually, there was a call on the Sharks defender following up on the play who put his stick down on the Predators player and got called for cross-checking. Cross checking. I’ve seen superstar goalies get goaltender interference calls for accidentally tripping them up behind the net by spraying ice on their pads, but Toskala gets full on checked in the back toward the boards where he could have easily been injured in full view of the ref and there’s a call on the Sharks? Absolutely unbelievable. And what makes it really suspect is that this happened right at the end of the game with the Sharks down by one and pretty much in full press on Nashville and threatening to score.

Maybe I’ve been watching too many online conspiracy theory videos lately, but I’m just saying that seemed like the worst possible call at the worst possible time.

But my suspicions would amount to nothing if the Sharks had been ahead or tied at the time. And the fact is, they were, only the scoreboard didn’t reflect it because the referee straight up stole a goal from the Sharks. It went down like this: The Sharks rush Tomas Vokoun who stacks the pad and goes down. A Sharks forward crashes into him and the puck rebounds clear and is stuffed home by the trailing Sharks player. The goal light goes on, the Sharks start to celebrate… and then the ref skates up with speed flinging his arms wildly in the “no goal” motion. No goal? What play was that guy watching? Even if he lost sight of the puck, he was in a bad location to see it and certainly shouldn’t have whistled it down that quickly.

So they checked the tape. Clearly a goal. Then they decided the call must have been that the whistle blew before the second Sharks player actually buried it in the net. So they play it real-time with on-ice audio. And the puck sails into the net a full three seconds before any whistle is heard, even from the bribed mistaken referee.

At this point the Sharks fall prey to my biggest pet peeve in all of sports: The non-reviewable call.

Okay so let’s assume for a moment that you aren’t one of those technophobes who think that instant replay doesn’t belong in sports. What is the rationale for including instant replay review in a sporting contest? To get the call right. I mean, why else? The assumption there is that the officials are fallible humans who don’t always have the benefit of watching plays from various angles and in anything slower than real-time (which in a game like hockey is pretty fast). So you offer them an “out” by allowing calls to be corrected based on video evidence.

Now I understand that certain plays or calls don’t work from a review standpoint. For example, if a player fumbles a ball in football but the play is called dead by an official which stops the progression of both teams, it’s hard to fix that because the teams should have had the opportunity to try and recover the ball and make a play with it. Overturning a call on a play whose result can’t be re-created simply won’t work.

But in this case we’re talking about a goal. A goal. This is a binary play: Either it was a legitimate goal, or it was not. A referee can’t say “I meant to blow the whistle earlier” any more than a player can say, “I didn’t mean to sock that guy in the head during his breakaway.” Intention doesn’t matter. In this case the on-ice call was no goal but so what? We reviewed the play and the no-goal call was flat incorrect. But it’s not like something happened that couldn’t be re-created. It’s easy, you called it no goal but you were wrong because the video replay shows that it was a goal so you overturn the on-ice call to “goal” and give the Sharks the point they deserve and swallow your pride.

Although I’m sure it’s easier to stand your ground with all the money in your pockets weighing you down.

Today’s agenda will be dealing with Heroes, T-Shirts, San Jose Sharks, San Francisco and TiVo. Also if you visit GameSpot or subscribe to the RSS feed, my video game-specific blog has a post regarding the New Super Mario Bros. game for DS. You may have noticed that I put an RSS feed thing over in the right column for the GameSpot blog (titled “A Gamer Darkly” for no real particular reason) which may not be all that useful but does at least provide an updated link to the latest posts made over there.

The Hero Lies In You

Someone on the TiVo web forum mentioned in the discussion of last night’s episode of Heroes that so far the Heroes aren’t really acting very… heroic. This is a fair criticism for a show called “Heroes” but I think one of the themes the show is very effectively dealing with is that just because someone is born extraordinary doesn’t mean they’re born with an understanding of how to cope with that. Many of the characters on the show are either in denial about their abilities or not convinced that they aren’t just plain crazy rather than remarkable.

Another complaint I’ve heard a lot was regarding Hiro’s ability to communicate with Nathan in the diner in this week’s “Hiros” episode. I’m not quite sure I understand that gripe since in a previous episode (in which Hiro travelled to the future) he was able to more or less communicate with everyone until the conversation got so specific and law-enforcement related (which is almost a subset of English in itself) that Hiro realized he may not be fully comprehending what was being said and wanted his English-fluent friend to talk to the officials to make sure he didn’t get himself into more hot water than he was already in.

It’s not unreasonable for a Japanese guy to understand basic English (probably at about a third or fourth grade level speaking-wise) and he seems to have a decent grasp for reading it (based on his familiarity with American comic books and television) so his ability to have a fairly simple conversation about a topic he is familiar with in English terms makes total sense to me. As a few people pointed out also, there’s no better way to crash-course language than through immersion and he’s certainly been immersed in English-speaking environments for several days now. I didn’t find it at all unusual for him to speak to Nathan.

Some people have wondered what is so special about Claire that she warrants the “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” mantra. My personal theory is that Peter is the key to stopping the bomb, but he needs the powers of the others in order to do so and specifically, he needs Claire’s ability to regenerate to keep him alive long enough to pull off his world-saving gambit. But that’s just speculation.

One interesting question that I haven’t been able to determine from the information presented so far is whether Isaac’s future-reading powers are triggered or in any way related to his heroin use or if that is simply a mechanism he’s instituted for himself to cope with the ability. I would guess based on the fact that Peter can use the power when in his presence without any drugs (and Isaac wasn’t high at the time either) that the heroin-power connection is all in Isaac’s mind.

Here’s something else that’s interesting: Most supernatural comic book characters (i.e., those that aren’t just heroic humans like Batman) have a hefty amount of combat-readiness to their powers. Consider that Spider-Man has exceptional strength and agility (certainly an asset in a fight); Storm can control the weather such that she can send bolts of lightning at foes; Cyclops is practically all combat with his laser-eyes and so on. But most of the characters in Heroes actually don’t have a lot of combat ability: Isaac’s future-seeing (at least in its current incarnation) wouldn’t help much in a fight; Matt’s mind-reading is certainly useful but not really combat-ready; Peter’s power absorption isn’t intrinsically combat-ready unless he was fighting someone who’s powers were combat-oriented; even Nathan’s flight ability is helpful but aside from the apparent speed he has, he hasn’t shown any hint of being capable of handling more pain or taking more punishment than anyone else which means that while he could speed-fly fist-first into a foe, he would probably hurt himself as much as whomever he was fighting. In fact, only Niki (whose powers are still vague at best but who may be super-strong based on the fact that she probably weighs about 110 lbs. and she cut a guy in half), Hiro and Claire are likely to be of any real use in a fight and even then, Claire would survive the fight for a long time, but her ability to win such a combat (except by attrition) is questionable.

Shirts Shaped Like Tees

So I ordered some shirts off of Threadless.com yesterday because they were having a sweet sale where most of the shirts were only $10. The site is pretty cool in that it allows people to upload T-shirt designs which get voted on by the site users and the most popular designs actually get made and put up for sale.

I have a strong dislike for clothing that turns me into a walking billboard which is why most of the clothes I wear are either plain or feature something I like such as a band. I guess band shirts make you into a walking ad for that particular group, but somehow that works for me since it’s something I actually endorse versus wearing a Nike shirt or something that very obviously came from Wal-Mart or whatever.

In this case many of the designs are clever but avoid being at all ad-like, which means I don’t feel quite as boring as wearing one of my (literally) six plain black shirts but I don’t have to worry about my soul.

Plus, $10 each. How can you go wrong?

Powerhouse?

I was reading an article on ESPN.com about the Red Wings’ fall to mediocrity and in the article columnist Damien Cox uses the adjective “powerhouse” to describe the Sharks.

That was kind of nice to read.

Of course the Sharks are obviously not invincible. While I’m certainly happy with the start to the season 7-2-0, and it is definitely a plus that three of those seven wins have been shutouts in the Sharks favor, those two losses were kind of ugly. One was the really bizarre game versus the Edmonton Oilers in which there were two natural hat tricks (one by Cheechoo to put the Sharks up 4-1 and then one by Ryan Smyth which ended up putting the Oilers ahead). That game could be written off just because of the strangeness of it all but the 4-1 loss to the Minnesota Wild was pretty sad considering the Sharks out shot the Wild 32 to 18 and the Wild beat Nabokov four times while Manny Fernandez only missed one of the barrage.

I certainly understand that the Sharks can’t be expected to win every game and I don’t mind giving up the occasional 6-4 insanity game or even a 3-2 nailbiter that goes down to the last five minutes of the third period. But I certainly don’t want to the see the Sharks out there in a futile effort through two periods and only score once just to keep themselves off the shutout. The tough thing about the Sharks being a “powerhouse” is that it’s hard not to watch them play and expect them to win pretty much every game.

The big test comes tonight when the Sharks play in Detroit, a road venue they have practically never emerged from victorious during the regular season. They handled the Red Wings soundly the other night in San Jose but if they can show the same poise and ability in Detroit, that will be quite a statement to Sharks fans.

One other thing I was thinking about which stemmed from my recent visit to the Tank for the Dallas game is that the HP Pavillion needs to do a bit of upgrading. For one thing they need those arena-spanning HD screens between decks. They installed them at AT&T park in San Francisco and I noticed that several of the road games the Sharks have played have been in stadiums with those wraparound screens. They look nice because for one the quality is phenomenal which means you can put player photos and stuff on there and they actually look like someone you might recognize (versus the aging JumboTron technology which still looks like staring at a newspaper print way too closely to my eyes) but also because they wrap around the whole stadium you can get some nice graphical effects going with bright, vibrant colors that really help with the atmosphere. Plus, I thought the Sharks were supposed to be this very technology-friendly team and they have these embarrassingly antique Lite Brite-looking signs. So lame.

Fog City

Nik and I spent some time in San Francisco this weekend, belatedly celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary. We would have celebrated closer to the actual date but I was afflicted with my hades-spawned flu which was not very romantic, to say the least.

Anyway we mostly just hung out and wandered around the touristy areas like Pier 39, which we’ve both done about a thousand times before but the point wasn’t what we were doing but who we were doing it with. Eventually we wandered down the waterfront so we could eat at Joe’s Crab Shack which is a sort of tacky little place that has some really tasty food and, of course, copious options for crab lovers.

I recently was able to turn Nikki on to the joy of crab and she’s been near-insatiable ever since. I think her 1 lb. fresh dungeness crab order may have cured her for the time being but she certainly seemed to enjoy her meal. We stayed there for quite a while, talking and eating and watching the Bushman across the street.

If you’ve never been to San Francisco you probably aren’t familiar with the extraordinary number of street performers that crowd the touristy locations around the city. Street performers are a kind of unique beast in that they are simultaneously fascinating and yet annoying. Some of them are actually remarkably talented: Musicians, performance artists, etc. But at the same time they are only a slight step above your average panhandler which there are far too many of in SF anyway.

Still, all that is forgiven in the case of the Bushman.

The Bushman is a street performer whose schtick is pure genius in its cleverness. Basically he gathers up a bunch of random tree branches; medium-sized ones, obviously never anything that requires a large amount of effort to obtain. He gathers two fistfuls of these branches and squats on a little stool or empty bucket, clutching the branches in front of him so he is basically hidden from one side of the sidewalk. He does this right on a regular sidewalk so to careful observers he basically sticks out like a sore thumb. But most people aren’t that observant so if they’re coming toward the “bush” they will probably dismiss it as nothing spectacular and continue on their way.

When they get close, Bushman drops the branches just a bit a scares the heck out of the passerby.

The good thing is that he doesn’t go out of his way for the huge scare. That would probably be a little mean. And part of the joke is that once you’ve been burned, you realize how silly it was to not notice a random bush in the middle of the sidewalk.

The best part (and where Bushman makes his money) is being in on the joke as an observer. Bushman is pretty good about understanding when to try his scare (too often and people would see it happen up ahead and be prepared, too infrequent and the constantly gathered crowd would get bored and drift away). A few folks with good senses of humor will tip Bushman after falling for his trap, amusingly it is often the boyfriend or husband of the startled woman (girls react far more entertainingly than most guys) who drops some cash for the laugh. But mostly the Bushman hits up the crowds of laughing onlookers for tips.

Sitting up in Joe’s Crab Shack (right across from Bushman’s favorite haunt), you can observe his prowess without being prone to his requests for donations. It’s a good time. And the crab ain’t bad, either.

TiVo is Hurting Itself

Much has been made of the demise of TiVo. Granted, they have and will continue to have a hard time competing with cable-company and satellite TV company offerings, despite the constant complaints about those knock-off interfaces and feature sets being sub-par. Users will put up with a lot of crud for the sake of convenience.

But there are things that TiVo could do to help itself, and it seems to me that they aren’t doing them.

For one thing, they move slow. I would expect the behemoth cable companies to be playing catch-up to TiVo, but I haven’t seen that to be the case. How long did it take TiVo to get a unit out that could record HD? And when it did come out, they priced it at an insane $800 MSRP. Whew.

And don’t even get me started on Mac support for the TiVo2Go software/feature. After “working hard” on the issue for like two years, we get this back in January and then nothing for nine months. Look, it takes less time to fabricate a human being than it’s taken to even see a beta of this product. Come on.

What really frustrates me is the simple things. TiVo’s features should be fairly easily updatable and yet there are so few service upgrades getting pushed out to users it’s kind of criminal. Take a look at this list of requested enhancements. Most of those are very reasonable requests, especially stuff like complete boolean capabilities for Wish Lists. I can’t tell you how badly I want to have my “49ERS” season pass not pick up junk like “49ers Preview Show” and “49ers Total Access” and “49ers Playbook.” I want the game, not the rest of the junk. But 49ers games show up on a title search as the generic “NFL Football” so I can’t just get a Season Pass to that or I’d get the stupid Jets vs. Dolphins games and stuff, probably at the expense of Niners games or at the very least at the expense of something else I’d rather watch. If I could say “Title = ‘NFL Football’ AND Description CONTAINS (‘San Francisco’ OR ’49ERS’)” I would be golden.

This has been a problem since the Series1 TiVos, so what’s the holdup? In the meantime I end up juggling my Season Pass list constantly, trying to find a happy medium. For example, I want Sharks games almost all the time. But sometimes it depends on when the game starts and what else is playing. I can put it below something like Lost or Heroes and know that the Sharks game will always be pre-empted for those shows, but what frustrates me is that if the Sharks game starts at 5:30 and a show I don’t want to miss will start at 8:00, I’d rather have the first two and a half hours of the game and then switch over to the show. I thought that was what the clipping feature was supposed to do but unless I’m doing something wrong it doesn’t work like that.

At the time it hardly matters, I’d rather have my TiVo than not and I don’t really qualify (what with our freakish cable situation) for any other options. But eventually we’ll move out of this apartment and when Comcast comes knocking on my door offering me a $9.99 additional fee for dual-tuner DVR functionality with a higher capacity than I have now my loyalty to TiVo is going to be tested because I just don’t feel like TiVo is working hard enough to keep me loyal.

So what do you say, TiVo? How ’bout you step it up and keep a once-happy customer?

I need to talk about ‘Lost’ so for those of you who aren’t caught up with the most recent episodes (including last night’s episode, “Further Instructions”) may want to skip this for the time being; I’m not going to bother spoiler-tagging anything.

After watching last night I started thinking about what I mentioned the other day where the viewers seem divided into two camps: One are the ones who watch the show to see the characters develop and the other contains the people who are interested in the story of the Island and how the castaways work to figure out where they are and what happened. To a certain extent the producers of the show have indidcated that they’re approaching the show from the perspective of the first camp: To them, the characters are the key and they will devote their time to telling the stories of these characters.

But I think what people miss is that you can’t do either/or. In many ways, the stories of these characters are the stories about the Island and the plane crash. You have to deal with what the Island is, where they are, how it all happened and how the survivors are going to deal with their situation or else why would you even introduce all those elements? But the context for that is the characters themselves: They react to the situation they’re in because of who they are, who they were and to an extent who they will become because of this ordeal they face. It is important to show the flashbacks so we have a sense of what motivates these people to do what they do here on this Island, as a castaway. But it is equally important to show what the outcome of those previous experiences are now that they relate to their current dire situation. It’s what makes the story a story.

What distresses me is that after last night’s show I started to get the sense that the writers aren’t really doing that. Instead it seems like they’re spinning their wheels, revealing neither anything further about the Island mysteries nor revealing anything useful or pertinent about the characters themselves through flashbacks. Consider Locke’s story this week: We’ve already previously established that he’s an overly trusting sort of guy and that things go badly for him quite a bit because of it. He’s been hurt by people who’ve taken advantage of his nature and his vulnerabilities that he wears on his sleeve and more than once. His obsessive nature and his need to see himself as a real man, as a salt-of-the-Earth type who can take charge of a situation or even of his life contrasts with his misfortune and leads him to places that he doesn’t want to go. He’s proud without really having a reason to be so and each time life hands him lemons he squeezes them into his previous wounds and becomes ever more disenfranchised.

But we’ve learned all this from previous Locke-centric episodes. Everything that happened last night only reiterated these same themes and revelations. The only thing we learned here is that Locke’s gullibility has negatively impacted the people around him, the people he cares about; it hasn’t just been limited in scope to his own life.

But so what? We could have inferred that already. It doesn’t have much impact on the way he conducts himself on the Island because it only tells us what we already knew. We wouldn’t have been surprised to see Locke act exactly the same way he did even without the backstory of him ‘cleaning up his own mess’ because we expect Locke to be the kind of guy to handle his own business already. He’s been established as that kind of guy.

I’m worried that the Lost writers are starting to get to the point where they aren’t just being stingy with their revelations, they’re actively afraid to reveal anything at all. If I had to speculate I’d say it’s because they’re terrified that when the revelations do come, people won’t like them. I think they may fear that they will reveal something irrevokeable that will be ill-received and there won’t be anything they can do about it. Perhaps they are second-guessing their direction and want to try to make the magic last as long as possible: You can’t lose viewers as long as they’re still tuning in hoping to find out what’s going on. Once you start to tell them what they want to know, they can start judging you and being critical for the decisions you’ve made.

And truthfully, they would be absolutely correct. Someone—likely many someones—aren’t going to be happy with whatever explanation the writers come up with for the myriad of mysteries they’ve introduced. Someone out there has probably already theorized something that comes very close to what the writers had in mind all along to explain the bizarre events thrown at us since the very beginning. Most of the theories I’ve read have come across as kind of stupid. Chances are, I won’t be happy when I finally learn what’s really going on.

But that’s the way it goes. And the difference between a dumb explanation and a brilliant one isn’t really going to be the explanation itself, but rather the execution of that revelation. Even the popular purgatory theory, as lame as it is stated flatly like that, could be intriguing if done in a novel way. Consider the X-Files as a prime example: The real truth behind that show’s mysteries was uninspired. Aliens were working to colonize the Earth using an extraterrestrial parasite and the conspirators were working to save a handful of powerful individuals (mostly themselves) from the inevitable fate of the rest of mankind. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff. But the problem was that the execution of the story was ham-fisted and when the truth was finally revealed, most viewers weren’t even sure they had the whole story. “So… what is the conspiracy?” they asked. “We already told you. Didn’t you get the memo?” the producers replied. “Oh,” viewers said. “We just thought it would be… something better.”

A lot of that had to do with the fact that the writers of the X-Files had no plan to reveal the information. The doled out details sparingly, painfully slowly, in unrelated bits and pieces until we were just supposed to know we knew all there was to know. If Lost wants to avoid this fate they need to have a clear plan for getting some of the questions they’ve raised answered. So here’s my list of things that we (as the audience) definitely need to know by the time Season 3 is over, and a few things we shouldn’t know just yet.

Things We Need to Know By the End of Season Three

• Who are the Others? Where did they come from? Why are they doing what they’re doing? The motivations and origins of the Others aren’t really all that interesting when you get right down to it. Their existence as a source of conflict for our heroes is enough but we don’t need season upon season of this air of mystery that surrounds them. At some point it is reasonable that some protagonist will either find out or get an Other into a comprimising enough situation that they can extract the pertinent information about the Others’ motivations and origins. By the end of this season we should be more concerned with how the Others are going to go about executing their plans than what those plans are in the first place. We should know why they kidnap people; what happens to people who get kidnapped by them; how they got to the Island, how they have contact with the outside world and why they choose to stay on the Island.
• What was the relationship between the Dharma Initiative and the Others? We don’t need to know everything about the Dharma Initiative just yet (see below), but we should at least have an idea about whether the Others are decended from the Dharma Initiative or if they are completely unrelated to them or if they are the new face of the DI. We should know why the Others seem to be comfortable in Dharma facilities but don’t seem to necessarily need them for their survival. We should learn why the Others disguised themselves as uncivilized jungle people for the sake of the Losties and whether or not that has anything to do with the Dharma project(s) or the Dharma representatives who obviously continue to operate at some capacity.
• What happened to Rousseau and her team? What is ‘The Sickness’? Rousseau remains something of an enigma but for no good reason. She seems to trust some (if not all) of the Losties and considers the Others either direct or indirect enemies which gives her every reason to come clean with the Losties. They should be able to figure out that Rousseau’s daughter, Alex, is still alive and living with the Others by asking a few people the right questions; they should also be able to figure out that Alex’s heart is not entirely with the Others and that a reunion between Alex and Rousseau could be arranged. We should figure out the particulars of The Sickness and why it affects some people but not others and whether or not the Losties have begun to see some of their members exhibit symptoms of The Sickness.
• Why is the Island so difficult to find and/or leave? This may be difficult to explain without revealing all the Island’s mysteries (see below) but it would be useful from a suspension-of-disbelief point of view to have some sort of explanation (probably from one of the Others) as to why Desmond wasn’t able to leave the Island, why Sawyer, Jin and Michael couldn’t escape and why no rescue attempt is likely (even accepting the explanation in the Pilot of the plane being 1,000 miles off course, after almost two months I doubt the media or the government would write off a commercial jet carrying a Federal prisoner and a multi-millionaire lottery winner as “just one of those freaky things”).

Things We Shouldn’t Know By the End of Season Three

• An explanation of the Island’s apparent supernatural powers. Why is Locke able to walk? How did Rose’s cancer go into remission? What’s with the black smoke/Island monster? How are people always having visions? The supernatural elements of the Island are among its most enigmatic but they work on a storytelling level very effectively. However, once you start explaining the supernatural, the explanation is almost always a letdown and the storytelling power of those elements dissapates almost instantly. If we ever have to have a reason for why these thing are or how they work, I hope it comes at the very end of the show when it is no longer of any consequence. I’m just as happy having the Island’s power be one of those things that just can’t be explained.
• The Dharma Initiative. The truth behind the Dharma Initiative is something that will hopefully be a fascinating series of revelations, and the capacity at which they continue to operate could lead to some very tense and compelling stories. But it’s too early to start revealing all that. Season Three needs to be all about getting the truth behind the Others out in the open and once that is out of the way, they can start worrying about how to deal with the Dharma Initiative. Until we know what role the Others play or played in the Dharma Initiative’s work and what they want from the Losties and the Island, explanations about the DI are going to be hollow and uninteresting. I think it is completely possible to have the Others be related to and/or decended from the DI and still have the Initiative be shrouded in deeper mystery to be revealed later. But until the immediate threat is dealt with, any details or conspiracy plots relating to a mysterious research firm are going to be beside the point.
• The links between the Losties. Any discussion as to fate or the greater purpose behind each member of the ensemble surviving the crash or being brought to the Island is something that would have the most narrative impact toward the end of the show, once we’ve had a chance to see more of the spiderweb of interconnected links unfold during the flashback sequences. Any sort of “Eko is here for faith; Locke is here for his tracking; Claire is here for her nuturing; Jack is here for his leadership, etc” team-building rah-rah is dumb and clichéd and lacks punch unless it all becomes clear in one startling moment just before they are all resuced or some final confrontation ensues.
• The truth about Penelope. The end of Season Two showed us that the outside world still exists and people are actively searching for the castaways. That’s intriguing, no doubt. But as soon as the outside world starts to become a factor in the lives of our heroes or the events happening on the Island, we can no longer just blindly accept things like smoke monsters and parapalegics that can miraculously walk. These things have to start having explanations because the outside forces who are converging on the Island are going to demand answers. Right now with no communication and complete isolation, the characters (and by proxy) the audience can simply accept what they see without question. But when real life in the show starts to seep in, real life questions have to be asked by both character and audience alike. That’s something we can stand to do without for a while.

So there you go. I’ll revisit this after the Season 3 finale and see how they did. In the meantime I hope next week’s episode has more to offer than this week’s.

A few thoughts:

• I mentioned yesterday that NBC would be re-airing all the non-Pilot episodes of Heroes in case you missed them. That’s happening Sunday, October 22 or this coming Sunday evening at 8/7c.
• I’ve had a chance to play with the iPod adapter interface for the new head unit on Nikki’s car stereo. I have to say, this is the way to listen to an iPod in a car. It sure beats the heck out of the clunky cassette adapter interfaces and FM transmitters. Very much the way to go as far as that kind of thing is concerned.
• This is sweet as those LightScribe devices are something I’ve been interested in for a while now. Nik and I have been burning a lot of CDs lately since I’m much more comfortable having a CD folder crammed full of 100 burned disc copies than I am having 100 of my $15 CDs sitting around in a car and it’s nice to be able to make minor adjustments to certain discs (leaving off songs you don’t care for, etc).
• Of course with the Sirius radio and iPod connection, CDs seem a bit less useful than they may have been previously. The one instance where they are useful is with specific mixes because both Nikki’s Nano and even my 20GB iPod are too small to hold our entire collection so we have to update via playlist which prohibits having multiple playlists on the iPod itself (which is not a limitation when your iTunes Library is smaller than the capacity of the iPod). I haven’t really paid close attention to the latest iPod models but it looks like I could get an 80GB model for about what I paid for my 20GB 4G. Unfortunately as is fairly common with Apple their options aren’t really ideal for what I’m looking for. 80GB is excessive, but 30GB is a bit too small (my Library is running around 26GB at the moment) and the price differential between the two is kind of baffling. $249 for the 30GB and $349 for the 80GB? Especially when the 8GB Nano is also $249? Huh? In my mind the pricing would be $79/1GB Shuffle; $99/2GB Nano; $149/4GB Nano; $199/8GB Nano; $249/30GB; $299/50GB (what I would consider, if it existed); $349/80GB. That leaves the bottom and top end models at exactly the same price and doesn’t have any crossover from one model or price point to the next. It does make the jump from Nano to regular iPod pretty hefty in terms of price-per-gig but at least it makes more sense than offering 8GB and 30GB for the exact same price. Good grief.
• While I was sick I watched a lot of ESPN because it is a heck of a lot more interesting in the middle of the day than any other channel. What drives me nuts about ESPN is their obvious sports bias: This is ostensibly a channel devoted to 24/7 coverage of the world of sports and yet they run about seven and a half hours of repeats per day, of which the breakdown by sport is something like 75% NFL, 15% MLB, 5% NBA, 3% NASCAR, 2% Golf and the remaining 1% being split equally among the NHL and any other sport they can come up with which happens to have a “newsworthy” highlight that particular day, including horse racing, ping pong, professional bowling, poker and that Scottish sport where they throw the telephone pole straight up in the air in an attempt to… uh, not get conked on the head by it when it inevitably lands and tips directly back toward the tosser as though he were some sort of cartoon lumberjack. I fully understand that part of the problem is the American sports audience who would rather watch NFL press conferences than see potentially exciting Soccer highlights or definitely exciting hockey recaps but to a certain extent I wonder exactly how much analysis people are really clamoring for at the expense of decent sports news. Especially when they seem to struggle as Sunday fades and it gets to be Wednesday, Thursday, etc to come up with new stuff to talk about. Football teams only play once per week so there’s really only so much to say. At some point the news itself starts to create stories just to have something to talk about (“T.O. brushes his teeth left handed and Parcells tells him he’s jeopardizing the team’s unity!”) which is something that simply wouldn’t stand in any other type of journalism. I just wonder if it would really be so bad for ESPN to go ahead and do nothing but highlights and cover all kinds of sports from all over the world. I certainly wouldn’t mind being kept aprised of the English Soccer leagues (or, heaven forbid, the MLS) and amateur gymnastics or track and field events in non-Olympic years. It sure beats listening to John Clayton babble about how important Shaun Alexander is to the Seahawks for the sixth day in a row.
• They decided to install a new application to manage all of Support at work. This is both a blessing and a curse: The old application had some very specific quirks that made it something of a pain to work with and it was also based off of old versions of our products so it was kind of embarassing for us to be so far behind our own customers in a lot of cases (especially since we spend so much of our time trying to get people to upgrade). Also the server that was central to our day-to-day work was very much showing its age and had started to become a serious liability for us. So the new application addressed a lot of those problems, which is a good thing. But the old application had been around long enough for several user-created interfaces to pop up that were designed by Support people which meant they did what we wanted/needed them to do. Now those interfaces have to be re-done to accomodate the new systems and most of them haven’t been updated yet. As a result my return to work has alternated from mild to severe pain as I’m forced to work with clunky, IT-designed interfaces that don’t work they way they should and in a lot of ways severely hamper my ability to do my job. Of course being out for almost two weeks means I’m behind as it is and this certainly isn’t helping me get caught up.
• My dad posted a bunch of old movies for me to check out that I added to my Netflix queue this morning. If anyone else has any suggestions, I’m all ears.

The Sharks game last night was a lot of fun; the seats were row nine of the upper deck just above and behind what ended up being the home ice goal. The great thing about the Shark Tank is that there really are no bad seats in the whole place and we had a nice view of the far side of the ice as well as some really great visuals of the near goal.

Of course the enjoyment of the game was helped by a 2-0 Sharks victory in which Nabokov looked as solid as I’ve seen him play in about three years. This was Nabby of old and near the end of the game the crowd was in a fever pitch chanting “Nab-by! Nab-by!” to spur him on to complete the shutout. He had some help from some solid defensive play including some nice physical work by HB‘s favorite whipping boy, Kyle McLaren.

I was also impressed to see the same play that Cheechoo and Bell scored on in the season opener work again for the Sharks second goal, it’s good to see that even when Cheech isn’t really finding the net that well he can still help out with some setups. It’s kind of surprising where all the points are coming from this year: The Sharks have one of the highest Goals For totals in the whole Western Conference (I think they’re actually tied for first with—of all people—Chicago) but Joe Thornton hasn’t scored one, Patrick Marleau has been pretty quiet on the scoring front and aside from that one freaky game where he nailed a natural Hat Trick, even Cheechoo hasn’t had any goals. Instead they’re coming from guys like Mihalek and… the defense.

Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t complaining. The Sharks are going to need contributions from everyone this year if they expect to be legitimate Cup contenders, and it’s nice to see that they aren’t having to rely on their top two lines to do all the offensive work. I just hope they keep it up; one thing that has stunted some good Sharks teams in the past has been the fact that whenever their top scorers go on the schnide for a while there has usually been no one around to pick up the slack. It looks like that might not be so much of a problem this year.

The one thing that has me a bit worried is this whole goaltender controversy. The problem as far as I’m concerned is that right now they’re both playing well and feeding off of each other to compete for the top spot. But the danger is that if it goes on too long they might both come to the conclusion that there is no top spot to attain and they’ll sort of give up trying as hard and figure, “We’re splitting the duty so I only really need to work half as hard.” Then you end up with two mediocre/underperforming goaltenders that you can’t deal anywhere. So the ideal would be to trade one of them as soon as possible.

So which one? That’s really tough in my mind because some people (I’m not saying me, I’m just saying some people) might argue that the last time this situation came up, the Sharks made the wrong move by sticking with Nabokov and dealing Kiprusoff. So do you fear making that same choice again and stick with Toskala even though you just signed Nabby to a pretty big contract extention last year or do you stick with your only Rookie of the Year and popular hometown netminder? How much weight do you apply to performance last year? Granted, Nabby was hurt and playing through injury a lot last year but it was really Toskala that got them as far as they did in the playoffs. What about performance this year? So far Toskala is unbeaten but Nabokov has two shutouts and his one loss was in a really wild, flukey kind of game.

My personal opinion is hard to sort out because I think I desperately want Nabokov to be the guy, but I worry because he’s had a lot of chances to be that guy and he’s dropped the ball more than he’s stepped up. I’ve never really been sold on Toskala’s panicky playing style and I can’t shake the feeling that he only plays as good as he does when he has something to prove. I worry that with Nabokov out of the picture as the number one guy, Toskala would flounder lacking the proper motivation. The Sharks have a great goalie system and the third stringer/future backup Nolan Schaefer looked really solid in very minimal play last year but I think if you held a gun to my head I would say I’d rather have him backing Nabby than Vesa.

Truthfully, I kind of want to keep them both but I understand that generally speaking that’s pretty pointless in the long run. So the real question becomes: What can we get for whomever we get rid of? I’m thinking if Raycroft sucks in Toronto (which he probably will), what about Bryan McCabe? He’s older but wouldn’t have to play as much in San Jose as he does in Toronto since the rest of the team is so young. Of course I would absolutely love to steal Dion Phaneuf from the Flames but I doubt they’d have a need for Toskala unless Kiprusoff got very badly hurt and I’m sure they’re fine with Jamie McLennan as a backup (not that Toskala would be too hip on going from one second-string spot to another, he’s going to want a #1 job). Plus I’m not sure I’d be too thrilled with handing one of our goaltenders off to a division rival again which is why I’m looking to the East.

Ideally Denis in Tampa Bay won’t work out and the Lightning will start shopping for someone to help save their fanbase and be willing to deal playoff-hero-turned-last-season-goat St. Louis whom I think is struggling less with his play and more with his club and would fit in nicely on the Sharks roster. Still, I think St. Louis probably still has too much name recognition in Tampa to be a realistic option (and I’m sure no one is going to repeat the debacle of the Thornton trade by giving up a franchise player to San Jose) but Fedotenko is pretty good and might be a nice replacement for Steve Bernier whom I like but I feel like should be playing more with Smith and Grier on a grinder line than the talented second line as a finesse guy. In any case the Sharks problem really isn’t offense but defense and Tampa Bay is pretty light in that category. My ideal trade would be to the Flyers who are struggling with a goalie controversy of their own, only theirs is between two mediocre players in Esche and Niittymaki. In return for Toskala we’d get Joni Pitkanen and Jeff Carter.

Whew.

It’s good to be back. Typically when I’m sick I spend a lot of time doing the kinds of things I like to do even when I’m not sick like playing video games and reading, that sort of thing. Then when I end up feeling well enough to go back to work, I kind of miss the free time to do whatever, you know?

Not this time. I had possibly the worst sick week (plus) ever this time around and it was nothing even close to fun. In fact I felt so bad the whole time that it was actually a pain to watch TV or movies, although that’s pretty much all I did. Even with the TiVo and Nikki constantly making runs to Hollywood Video to pick up movies for me to watch (eventually she just rented a whole season of 24 for me to watch which shut me up for a good four days) I was still scraping the bottom of the entertainment barrel quite a bit. I guess that’s what happens when you’re at home sick for 10 days straight, but it left me with a new appreciation for the time I have to do other, more interesting things.

As a matter of fact I got a new perspective and appreciation for pretty much everything in my life while I was sick. Being too miserable to sleep or eat or do much of anything for that long leaves a lot of time for thought and I kind of started realizing how much of my life I spend being grumpy about really pointless things. I came to a lot of other conclusions about some of the unfortunate choices I’ve been making lately mostly in terms of my attitude toward things that are either not worth the bother or indifferent attitudes toward things that actually do matter and hopefully I’ll try to be better about that. I suppose the only positive thing that came from being sick is that I got (hopefully) an improved perspective on my life. Something about absence making the heart grow fonder would probably be aproppriate here, if not tiresomely clichéd.

Anyway, I don’t have a lot of time or anything since I’m still trying to play catch up from all that time I missed out on, but I did have a few things I wanted to say today before I forget:

• One of the many movies I watched last week was Double Indemnity, an old 1944 black and white noir picture starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson. It’s really quite good (although I liked The Big Sleep better) as many of the old pictures I’ve been watching have been. Unfortunately, I’m starting to run out of ideas for old movies to watch. I fully confess that this is due to ignorance and not a lack of quality material to check out; the next couple I have coming from Netflix are From Here to Eternity, All About Eve, The Guns of Navarone, Suspicion, M, Touch of Evil and The 39 Steps. Anyone know some others I should check out?
• I watched season four of 24 like I mentioned above and it was much better than the season that stopped me from following it every year (the piteous season three), but the show still drives me insane. Mainly what makes me nuts is two things: One is why everything has to revolve around LA. I mean, I know the show is set there but c’mon: There should be enough time to make the travel realistic (how anyone gets all over LA in less than 20 minutes is beyond even the most forgiving critic) by spreading the love a little bit to different CTU branches and making things more plausibly spread out. Related to this quibble is why everything is handled by CTU. Aren’t there any other governmental agencies that can do some of this stuff like, say, the military? It makes no sense, especially when they spend twenty minutes of each episode griping about how “stretched thin” they all are. Well, delegate, people! Problem solved. My other beef is that they’re constantly sending like three people to go pick up these potentially well-armed suspects and then they act all surprised when only the main character survives the assault and they have to be rescued by someone else. I’m thinking if I need to bring in a suspect for questioning because they are the only person in the world who might be able to reveal the location of the bomb/terrorist leader/plane/kidnap victim/whatever, I’m sending in a freaking army to get them. I think the CTU people kind of cause more of their own problems than they seem to realize.
• One show that I don’t have a lot of complaints with right now is Heroes. Man, I love that show. Last night’s episode was superb, yet again. The only thing that really bugs me about the show right now are the naysayers. Yes, it is very much like the X-Men. So what? The X-Men are cool, and this gives us a chance to see an X-Men-like story with new characters (so we aren’t bored with the origin stuff if we’ve read the comics already) and a re-imagined take on the whole superheroes concept. I think it’s working very well and the pacing seems to be just about perfect: I’m always left wanting more but they aren’t killing me slowly with the glacial pace of the plot like Lost. One of the great Lost debates is the Characters-vs-Story discussion where some people say they are more interested in the character development and therefore don’t mind the so-slow pace of the Island Mysteries aspect but others (like me) think the characters should really be there to move the story along so the development of the characters becomes almost meaningless since it takes over the whole show leaving the plot to flounder. With Heroes they got it all right by developing the characters at a nice clip but letting those developments also push the plot forward. Very well done and I was quite pleased to hear that the show got picked up for the rest of the season. If you haven’t already started watching this show, I can’t recommend it enough and I’ve heard they plan to run a brief marathon of the last three episodes (not including the Pilot) sometime in the next week so if you haven’t seen it yet, keep an eye out for that to help you catch up.
• So the final consensus on the new Decemberists album is that it may surpass Picaresque in terms of total quality and has quickly shot to near the top of my all-time favorite albums list. Love it. On the other hand, the new Evanescence album, The Open Door is bland and uninspired and quite a disappointment. Nik also picked up AFI’s Decemberunderground album from iTunes on the strength of a couple of singles she heard on the radio. It’s not too bad, really although I need to give it a few more listens. AFI is kind of a more intense Green Day but they have some catchy riffs and some nice melodies going on, so I think it could get some decent playtime.
• I had a bit of a chance to listen to some of Sirius satellite radio driving around to doctor’s appointments and stuff in Nik’s car while I was sick. It’s a pretty cool thing and the lack of commercials on the music channels is really, really nice. There’s a lot of selection available as well which means it usually isn’t hard at all to find some station playing something you like. My only complaint so far probably has more to do with the head unit than Sirius itself, but I’m having a really hard time finding the non-music channels. There is supposed to be a way to choose a channel via category but I can’t seem to make it work the way the manual describes which means a lot of the NPR, comedy and sports stations are ostensibly there but not accessible. This is going to become a problem pretty quickly when I want to start listening to Sharks games on the way home from work and can’t even get to the stations.
• Speaking of the Sharks, I got better just in time since Nikki bought me a three-pack of Sharks tickets for our anniversary and the first game is tonight versus the Dallas Stars. I’m heading out after work to pick HB from work and then heading on to the tank so hopefully my body will cooperate and I’ll be able to enjoy myself. I’m kind of counting on excitement to push me through some of the weariness I still feel, but it should be a really good time.

I apologize to those of you who may have feared that I fell off the face of the earth this week. In fact, I only fell off the face of the Internet due to an absolutely brutal virus that I thought had gone away late last week but came back and brought like, 40 friends. My doctor thinks it’s just influenza but I’m thinking more along the lines of Montezuma’s Malarial Malevolence.

In any case I’ve been running a 103° fever for most of the week (it just today dipped to a “low” 100-101) along with assorted other miseries I won’t bore you with. But I just wanted to expend some of my little energy reassuring you, the Internets, that I still persevere. I should return to life sometime next week and I’ll have plenty to talk about then, I’m sure.

For now it’s back to bed, daytime TV and a gatorade overdose.

Have a better weekend than I will.

Watching the San Jose Sharks beat the St. Louis Blues was weird because as this is the beginning of a new season, lots of stuff has changed in the Sharks organization. Fortunately, most of the change is good. Unfortunately, despite picking up the win, the Sharks managed to falter enough to allow St. Louis to force an overtime win which means they picked up a point as well as the Sharks.

A few notes about the game:

• Watching hockey in HD is really, really nice. It’s noticeably easier to follow the puck on the ice and while Whippy Whipperson and the rest of the camera crew at FSN Bay Area still move the cameras too much (versus changing angles on the play), the blur effect when a fast pass opens a breakaway is lessened by the improved camera equipment which helps catch up with the play faster. It’s still not as good as actually being at the game, but it’s a lot closer than the usual squint-and-shrug activity required by regular TV.
• Marty McBorely is terrible. I miss Drew Remenda already. Sample “commentary” from last night after the Sharks took a second penalty twenty seconds after the first:
  

  Yeah, you really don’t want to go down 5-on-3 in this situation.

  Wow. Is that a fact? I’m going out on a limb here, McBorely, and saying that you never want to go down 5-on-3. If this is the kind of “insight” we’re going to get, I’m about to start muting the TV feed and listening to the radio while I watch the games.

• I was pretty impressed with the play of Mike Grier and Mark Bell. Of course Bell scored on a pretty, pretty play by Cheechoo (in a relatively rare assist role) but the point is, he actually buried it. If that was still Ekman over there, 50-50 chance that he sails it right over the empty net.
• What’s up with the new kid, Marc-Edouard Vlasic? He looked positively terrified out there. I mean, he played okay but that guy looks like he’s about 11 years old. Still, you gotta respect the kid for trying. His official nickname for the season (as dubbed by Gin): Pickle.
• I was quite unhappy with Toskala’s play all night. I felt like the game really should have been a 4-2 regulation win for the Sharks. The only time he really looked sharp was late in the second period when they were down two men and the D had been out there for approximately nine minutes without a line change and couldn’t clear the zone. But especially that second goal: You don’t let that in. Not if you want to be starting goalie for my team.
• How crazy was Cheechoo punching a hole in the boards with his skate? Like McBorely pointed out, it’s always scary to see a guy go hard feet-first into the boards (brings memories of Marco Sturm a few seasons back) but if he’s just going to kick out the boards (in practically a perfect circle!?)… well… what? And what really killed me was that it took them like twenty minutes to fix it. For all the work they did I was expecting something that looked like it had never been broken at all. Instead they screwed a piece of plywood into the back of the boards. Look, I’m no carpenter or handyman or anything, but what was the holdup there?
• Speaking of holdups, that was about the longest game ever. Right after the broken boards incident they paused for a good ten minutes to review (and ultimately make the wrong call) a Sharks goal. You know one thing that I like from the NFL that I wish pro hockey would implement is that when a call is challenged or goes to booth review in the NHL the ref gets on the loudspeaker and explains what it is that was challenged and what they’re going to review. Then when it is done being reviewed, the ref gets back out there and explains why the call was made the way it was. That, I think, can do a lot to put a fan’s mind at ease because from where I sat the puck was clearly across the goal line (myabe they didn’t have HD?) and the live audio feed indicated that it was so well before the whistle blew (which blew way early, too, by the by). The only thing was that the puck wasn’t completely visible before the whistle blew, and the goalie’s leg moved to reveal the puck location just after the whistle so even though you could tell that the puck didn’t move at all before or after the goalie’s leg got out of the way, I could at least buy an explanation that there was insufficient evidence to overturn the call on the ice. Although, the call on the ice was for a review which I think is a major cop-out. In my opinion, if the ref can’t tell on the ice which way to make the call and wants to go to the booth for review without an official on-ice call, then there should be no need for undeniable proof one way or the other since nothing stands to be overturned. In that case it should just be whatever it looks like happened. If that was the case they would have given the Sharks the goal, I’m pretty sure. But as it was they retroactively decided the call was “no goal” so the evidence had to be incontrovertible.
• The 2006 Sharks Team Preview on Yahoo! notes that McLaren is an overrated defenseman because he doesn’t have much offensive power. I concede that his offensive skills are mediocre at best (that’s why we got Carle) but his defensive skills are among the best on the team, maybe second to Scott Hannan. What drives me nuts about McLaren is that during the playoffs the guy is such a difference maker because he absolutely punishes anyone who steps near him with the puck. But during the regular season (and it started already last night) he acts like a little puppy who wants to lick everyone’s faces instead of throwing some checks around. It’s annoying (but don’t even get HB started about it).

Nikki and I went to the Download Festival on Saturday to catch The Shins and Muse play. There were some other bands there like Rogue Wave and TV On the Radio, but those were just filler until the other bands got on stage. Actually the top billed acts were the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Beck, who we didn’t stay to see since I don’t really care for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Beck wasn’t scheduled to take the stage until 10:00 pm. Since we’d already been there since about 1:00 pm, Nik was getting tired and I wasn’t all that excited about sitting through a mediocre band to see someone who I more or less appreciate but probably wouldn’t pay to see by himself.

It was totally worth it though because The Shins are a really good live band and they treated us by playing four tracks from their forthcoming CD (due in January, according to the band) all of which were solid but a couple of which I really dug. Despite the fact that I generally prefer The Shins over Muse, I must admit that Muse rocked the house. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a band that was that good in concert.

Muse is kind of a Radiohead-wannabe band (at least they admit it) only they are probably best classified as Radiohead circa The Bends with all the distorted guitars and angsty-scream vocals which occasionally settle into a bitter—but beautiful—falsetto. But the one thing that Muse’s studio albums don’t (and can’t) capture is that Muse has a certain Queen-like operatic sensibility that, in concert at least, gives their songs this very epic feeling. Plus, these guys can play.

They tend to sound so much like Radiohead at times that when simply listening to their albums you can easily forget that what you’re hearing is musically phenomenal because, well, Radiohead is musically phenomenal so it just seems like emulation. But in truth Muse have a certain wonderful Rush or Dream Theater-like mastery over their craft that is pretty awe-inspiring to watch unfold. I came away from the show with the understanding that if Muse or The Shins ever headlined a show in my area, I’d be there.

And if you haven’t checked out The Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow already, you really need to. Go ahead, I can wait.

Blah

Almost immediately after returning home from the concert I started to feel a bit out of sorts. Sure enough, I woke up on Sunday feeling like garbage and spent the whole day moping around on the couch. I worked from home on Monday like I usually do, but I felt pretty sick the whole time and Tuesday I just couldn’t do it so I called in sick. I felt a bit better yesterday but I still decided to work from home again to avoid passing whatever this weird flu thing is on to anyone else. Today I’m more or less over it although either as a side effect or something unrelated but unfortunately timed, I managed to end up with this weird itchy rash on my hands and arms. The only good thing about it is that it isn’t terribly visible unless you’re really looking for it but man is it uncomfortable.

Rows and Rows of Teeth

Sharks season starts tonight. We’re heading over to HB‘s place after work to catch the game in glorious High Definition on his snazzy new TV. After spending the last couple of months watching the Giants slide into oblivion and the misery that is being a 49ers fan in the 21st century, I’m so happy that hockey season has started again. The difference I think is that I watch baseball for the Giants. I watch football for the Niners (and fantasy football I guess) but I watch hockey for hockey.

Sure I love it when the Sharks are doing well, but I’ll watch any hockey because I just really enjoy the game. Blue Jackets versus Blackhawks in a 0-1 snoozer? Fine by me, it’s not like the rest of TV has a lot going for it.

On the Telly

I haven’t watched as much of the new season of TV this year as I did last year. That’s probably a good thing. So far I’m really, really liking Heroes (anyone else thinking that Sylar is Niki Sanders’ mirror-ego?) and Shark, although I’ve given up on Smith already. I did catch the beginning of Kidnapped and so far it’s pretty good. I’m not sure that there is a whole show in the premise, but I’ll watch it until it gets ludicrous. I also caught the second episode of Studio 60 and… well, I still can’t decide what I think of it. On one hand, it’s entertaining enough that I watched the whole thing but on the other hand it’s kind of stupid. I guess I’ll give it until the first stinker and then cancel my Season Pass.

Lost last night was pretty fantastic despite a general absence of main cast members (no Hurley? No Sayid?). The opening was one of those things that Lost loves to do just to tweak with viewers’ heads and we all love it and the hints about the shark with the Dahrma logo (“It’s an aquarium. For sharks?” “Dolphins, too.”) and Henry Gale’s continued creepy presence were all good. I did feel like the scenes with Sawyer and his fellow captive were either filler-ish or laying the groundwork for something to come later but either way I just wanted to get back to the good stuff.

Veronica Mars’ premiere was darn good as well, with plenty of the familair snark and cleverness alongside some genuinely intense moments. I do think that the whole Keith-Mars-is-in-jeopardy-again schtick is getting a bit old and the Dick Casablancas subplot was… well, I think it was all a set up so he can be the red herring in the campus rapist case but I thought his character was utterly disposable from the very beginning so anytime he gets screentime over, say, Weevil or Keith/Veronica is something of a drag to me. Still, the new characters (Piz and Parker) are interesting enough (I’m seeing another love triangle with Piz/Veronica/Logan forming) and so far the move to college hasn’t dampened the spirit of the show so I’m pretty hopeful for this season.

I did manage to miss The Nine though so that was kind of a bummer.

Tunes

A couple of new albums have come out that I was waiting for: The Decemberists finally released their follow-up to the brilliant Picaresque, entitled The Crane Wife. I picked it up today at lunch and listened to it as I ate in my car. I usually don’t trust first listens of albums because I rarely like anything the first time I hear it, but this album is different. I already love at least two of the six or so songs I heard and like the rest of them quite a bit. I’m thinking this may be my favorite album of the year unless something comes along that is really spectacular in the next twleve weeks.

The Killers also released a much-anticipated follow-up album this week called Sam’s Town which Nik and I listened to on the way to work today. She actually bought it last night and listened to it on the way home while I was still sick. Her initial impression was less than favorable and I think she’s still unhappy at what a departure it is from Hot Fuss even after a second listen. My first time through I thought the first few tracks were pretty mediocre but it picked up steam toward the middle and I heard a couple of songs in there I liked quite a bit so I’m interested to give it a few more listens.

I also decided to get Nik some audio gear as a birthday present for her car including a new head unit, Sirius satellite radio (which, as a digression, I’m not-so-secretly pretty excited about myself, primarily because of the NHL network which, as I understand it, broadcasts pretty much any hockey game you could ever want to hear) and an iPod connector so that she can plug in her Nano (or my 4g iPod I suppose) and control it through the head unit instead of having to resort to some clunky mounted solution or something. I got all that from a mail-order place called Crutchfield and I was very impressed all around with that place. Not only did I get a lot of gear for about $70-75 cheaper than it would have cost me to get from a place like Best Buy, but they threw in a free mounting bracket specific to our car model and included free installation instructions also specific to our car model in—get this—plain English.

The installation is happening on Saturday I believe over at HB‘s place to be followed by a trip to the newly opened Texas Roadhouse restaurant here in town and then back to our place for some games. It should be fun birthday for her, even if a little low-key (although we did invite quite a few folks to dinner/game night so we’ll see how many show up). I figure we can go all out next year when she does the 30 year old thing.