C'est Non Un Blog

It seems like I’m busy all of the time, and yet I really don’t have much to say for myself. I rarely go out. I don’t talk to anyone. And yet when I come home there is stack of movies for me to watch, TV shows (both new and on DVD) that I have to see, a pile of books half-read that need to be finished, blogs to read and of course post on. The day doesn’t seem nearly long enough to get done everything I want done. I’m really not sure why that is. Maybe I just waste the good time I do have, I don’t know.

Things are going well at work, otherwise.

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Mark your calendar’s! Tell your friends! Arrested Development should be back on this Monday. Everyone must watch! Get the word out! I’m not letting this show down without a fight.

OK, here is why Fox sucks.

Fox is like, well, imagine you go and buy a beautiful puppy. You have grand plans for this puppy. It is going to be the best dog in the whole wide world. Everyone looks at the dog and can see its greatness. But then you ignore the puppy. Sooner or later you are kicking it. Then, once you are good and ready for it to be a good dog, the dog doesn’t respond in kind because of all of the abuse. Be a great dog, you say. How, the puppy says? So you drive the puppy out into the middle of the woods and do him Ol’ Yeller style.

Of course I could be talking of a good many shows right now. Like the delightful greatest show ever, Arrested Development. But today I am speaking of Firefly. Fox totally screwed the pooch, so to say, on this one. I have to admit, I wasn’t one of those people who gave it a shot. I watched the first 30 minutes or so of the first episode, thought it kind of lame, and gave up on it. Give me a break! I had a girlfriend. Sex won out.

What I didn’t know was that I wasn’t actually watching the first episode though. See, Fox was being Fox. Instead of showing us, oh, say the two part pilot, which happens to probably be the greatest pilot I’ve ever seen, Fox thought that it didn’t have enough action so they skipped up to episode three. See, you think they’d know when they decided to work with Joss Whedon that his shows, despite the sci-fi or horror setting are really about character. Come on, no one remembers the fights in Buffy. They remember Willow and Xander and everyone else. Likewise, Firefly is all about character. Instead, I’m thrown into a world I don’t know with characters I don’t yet care about with a plot that, let’s face it, wasn’t THAT exciting (train robbery? Yeah, lots of action Fox). The title I still don’t like. Firefly? I like Serenity as a title a lot more. Yeah, I gave up on it. My fault. Or Fox’s? Yeah, I think it’s more Fox’s.

Thank God Serenity did get made and I did go see it and thought it interesting enough to take a chance on the boxset of the (unfortunately) complete series. I’m halfway through and loving every minute of it. Thanks again Fox. You know that I’ll be pissed when it is all over too soon.

One expects to be carded when they go into a store or bar to buy alcohol. There’s nothing wrong with that. They’re just doing there job.

But yesterday I actually got carded…wait for it…for buying a lotto ticket. I don’t know how many lotto tickets I’ve bought in the pastbut I know I have NEVER been carded before by anyone. I was so surprised that I almost blurted out “Why?” when he asked for my license. I’m pretty sure he was just being a prick. I sighed and took out my wallet. Then he asked me to pull it out of the wallet and sighed again and did as he asked. He poured over it as if he were translating Latin. “When were you born?” With my snottiest tone I shot back, “August 25th Nineteen Eighty-ONE.” “This picture doesn’t look like you.” “That’s because I was 17 when it was taken. You might notice that I don’t look SEVENTEEN anymore.” What a jerk. I mean, come on, I only wanted ONE ticket. It’s not like I was showing signs of gambling addiction or anything.

OK, just about the ONLY thing that is wrong with the new volume of Invincible is that there is not nearly enough of it. I need more new issues, dammit! This comic is the greatest!

BTW, Invincible is now definitely my favorite comic series.

Every morning it seems that I face a similar dilemma: Do I go to work with pants or no pants today?

Somehow, pants always win.

Question: We all (hopefully) know that if you shave off your eyebrows it takes forever to grow them back, right? Why is it then that the unibrow likes to make a weekly appearance in my life, huh?

Here is a date for everyone to put on their calendar: December 5th. What’s happening on that date, might you say? Arrested Development is coming back! Tell all of your friends. Make sure you watch it and make everyone you know watch it under threat of physical violence. While cutting a season’s order of episodes in half is usually a good sign that a show is going to die, it is not officially dead yet. Fox is going to air the remaining episodes in December no-man’s-land. Which means, if we can get a significant hike in ratings for the show they might just order up the remaining episodes. While that is a really big IF it could still happen. Arrested Development fans, don’t lose hope! Just keep December 5 in mind for me. I’ll make sure to remind you again before the day comes. Just start working on your friends, family and coworkers NOW.

I am SUPER bad at keeping up with my emails. Just writing these posts takes all sorts of time I could be using to be doing other (pointless) things. So yeah, don’t feel bad if I don’t get back to you immediately. Because you all know that if you really wanted to talk, I do have that cell phone thingy that never rings. Seriously, the other day I poked it with a stick to see if it was still alive. I’m glad Verizon is charging me $50 a month for the cheap plan. God help me if the salesman ever made me delusional enough to buy the medium plan.

OK, for those of you who care (AKA: no one) here is my second opinion on Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. It doesn’t (completely) suck. Not like the first two anyway. (Anyone else notice how much I love parentheses tonight?) Now don’t get me wrong. There are large parts of the movie that seriously suck. The first, say, 45 minutes of the film, for example. So BORING. That space battle that starts off the movie? Talk about disappointing. The fact that it makes my TV look awesome, and thus boosts my own ego, could barely even keep the lids of my eyes from drooping. Whenever it is that Anakin starts to make the turn to idiot badass is when the movie (and all the prequels) actually starts to get interesting. I have to admit, I missed some of the finer points of the turn due to my constant eye rolling and frustration with George Lucas the first go around. Not that I didn’t have grounds for these feelings. I mean, come on, every time Padme opens her silly little mouth I want to stab massive ice picks into my brain. And let us not forget my favorite horrible line of dialogue ever, a line of dialogue so insanely stupid and poorly written that I missed how cool the ending of the movie was through no fault of my own. Yes, you know what I’m talking about. Obi Wan: “But the Sith are evil!” Wait for it… Anakin: “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”

Come on! Seriously here people, who the hell has ever said anything remotely as stupid as that? Is that supposed to be some sort of inner monologue? Can’t be, his lips are moving. Who the hell is proofreading this crap? George, was it so hard to just change a few words to make it more like, oh, I don’t know, “You’re wrong, the Jedi are evil!” Now I’m getting angry over geeky shit. I must stop before someone sees me caring.

I woke up this morning around 5 or 6 to my ears ringing. I mean really ringing. Like I just got out of a rock concert ringing. Scared the crap out of me. I fell back asleep and woke up to find my ears only ringing at their “normal” level. Fast forward to noon when I get the mail, find a new Rolling Stone, excitedly open it up to read it, only to find the first article I see to be about rock music and how your iPod is ruining your hearing. Shit.

So far we’ve gotten theories on why I hear ringing in my ears. Nothing solid though. No real answers. It scares the crap out of me. Is this a real problem? Just a medical one? I don’t know. I pretend it doesn’t exist, like most of my problems, and that usually works for me.

The fun thing about television season boxsets on DVD is that you can watch an entire season of a show in a very short period of time instead of over a year. In doing so it is much easier to see slight shifts in plot that you can miss when the changes appear over a period of months. The other benefit, of course, is that in spending 13 hours of your day with a TV family you tend to take on characteristics of that family. Like when I watched the first season of Sopranos in a day and couldn’t stop using the F-word, or when I watched Deadwood and everyone became a cocksucker. Oh, good times. I just finished up Scrubs Season Two (When is this show coming back? Hello? NBC?) and of course my overly active inner monologue has ballooned to all sorts of messed up degrees. Oh, you didn’t know I have an over active inner monologue? Yeah, it’s bad. I once talked to someone for five minutes about why I carried my backpack a certain way, and I wasn’t rambling. Wait, how can that be? Yep, I had already quite thoroughly thought out all of these details way ahead of time. There of course is no way to accurately know this, but I think I think much more than other people. I’m always in my thoughts. One of my best excuses for not working out is that when I push my body my mind shuts off and I can’t think straight and it scares the bejeezers out of me. Yeah, I know. I’m psycho.

So for November we actually achieved over 90% of our bonus! This is awesome. Considering we haven’t gotten bonus in like 3 months this is damn near the greatest news ever. And I need it. My funds are running so low it isn’t funny.

I’m not really a crier. Hey, I’m a guy. We don’t do that kind of thing. That doesn’t mean I’m not an emotional person. I enjoy a good chick flick every once and a while (as long as it’s good). I love the big emotional climax. I love to see the two lovers finally get together. I just don’t cry when these things happen. If it’s really good I’ll get misty eyed, but hey, that’s about all I can muster. When I cry we are talking complete mental breakdown. Run away.

That said, about the closest I’ve ever come to actual real tears running down my cheek while watching TV happened this Sunday when I watched the “article” on 60 Minutes about the earthquake in Pakistan. What’s going on over there is just horrible. They aren’t nearly close to getting the help they need. That said, 13 NYC paramedics went to help with no prompting or any connection to Pakistan. They just wanted to help.

The part that really got to me though was when the paramedics were talking about American aid, how America is the country that has spent the most money helping out the victims, mostly because they believe the humanitarian aid will help combat terrorism. That’s not why those paramedics went, but they do recognize that for generations those 13 men are going to be remembered as Americans who came to help them. 13 American men with no money, just their time and their skills, came to help out the “enemy” in their time of need, asking nothing in return. And those actions are more powerful than any 100 million-dollar propaganda campaign could ever be to change Muslim opinions on America.

That the simple act of human kindness could make such a big difference on a worldwide scale really touched me.

Have you seen these commercials for Choxie! by Target? They’re fucked up, but oddly I still very much enjoy them.

On the eve of one of our busiest weekends of the year we broke our elevator. Grrrrrreat.