There is an awesome xkcd about perfect phrases:

While xkcd meshes really well with my sense of humor, I like to baffle people a bit more, so from Lost (S05E12) comes the perfect response to someone explaining his behavior:

Is [action] what Jacob wants?

I need to convince myself — again — to stop following links further and further into the bowels of Wikipedia.  But: Yorkshire Dialect and Accent:

One of the closest differences in dialect in the area is between the West of the City of Wakefield (such as Ossett, Wakefield and Horbury) compared with the East (eg. Castleford, Pontefract and Featherstone), areas less than 3 miles apart

What?  Three miles?

I know I’m Californian.  Anglos have had a strong presence in the area for about a century and a half, and not far before the arrival of the Trans-Continental Railroad.  Railroads, I would expect, smooth regional accents.  Mass media, more so — and California, having Hollywood and early television and radio studios, essentially created the more-or-less-standard U.S. accent.  So, bearing that in mind: three miles?  Weren’t people walking in those days?

This kind of fine-grained distinction in accents — and I’m most familiar with the phenomenon in Britain — suggest a kind of dialectal inertia that is baffling to me.  I understand that towns had hundreds of years to develop their accents in isolation, but the fact that so many are preserved into the 21st century, though modified — and just how geographically close-by some distinct accents are — still surprises me.  I imagine that there must be some in-group/out-group identification going on.  British humor seems frequently to revolve around accent — Python, for instance, Wallace and Gromit, and Neil Morrissey’s character on Men Behaving Badly come to mind — and much of that I understand only at an intellectual level, and I presume I still miss most of it.  The Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine film Sleuth (if you haven’t seen it, don’t Google, don’t read the description, just watch it) uses accent for a pointed social commentary, and I entirely missed that when I first saw it.

A book I once read — I’m pretty sure it was Jane Walmesley’s Brit-Think, Ameri-Think — talked about the experience of young British women coming to America and being told their accent was “beautiful, even if they were from Liverpool or Birmingham” (I think that’s exact, but I’ll have to wait for the maturation of Google Books to be sure.)  The book, by the way, is constantly hilarious, maybe never more so than in the dedication of the book to the author’s daughter, child of an American and a Briton, who reportedly describes herself as “half and hahff”.

The title of this post references the seminal Homicide: Life on the Street episode Three Men and Adena, in which “the arabber” tell the detectives that if they say the name of the city — “Baltimore” — that he could tell each of them what street he (the detective) grew up on.  The difference, by the way, frequently seemed to me to be the length of the “ah” in “Bahll-mər”.  This suggests that the phenomenon I’ve described is not unheard of in this country, but I’m just citing television at this point.  More erudite commentary is courted.

In my I-wish-it-wouldn’t-be-continuing series of “learning shit from the covers of magazines at the supermarket”, I was introduced to a (?) Kardashian today, which seems to be a race of bitchy-looking girls with names beginning with “K” (?) with 3cm-deep caked-on makeup (?).

Actually, Wikipedia eliminated a couple of those question marks (the first question mark being “Should I remember you from Deep Space 9?”) and the articles all seem to direct to “Famous for Being Famous”.

I also learned — and I don’t think I will ever be able to unlearn this term, so I might as well inflict it on my readership — the portmanteau celebutante.  This, in addition to being one of the ugliest portmaneaux I have ever encountered, appears to be a portmanteau that applies to some of the ugliest people I have ever encountered.  I mean, I don’t know if they are physically ugly — I think a prep session deflating silicone implants and sand-blasting away foundation would be required — but more like “why do you have to be a bitch?” ugly.

I guess … you can become famous … by stepping in front of cameras, having a sex tape broadcast, and pretending you are famous?

I promise I am not being faux-elitist.  I am honestly curious.  Apparently like Paris Hilton, these KKs had a reality show?  I’m not going to Google for a link, but I think that is true, from what I’ve read.  And I am genuinely inquiring as something I could not learn by Googling: Do people who watch such shows aspire to be these girls/women, identify with these girls/women, hate these girls/women and want to see them be humiliated, are entertained by the antics of these women, or … um … at this point I could randomly insert verbs phrases.

Honest honest honest question: what is the draw?  I don’t imagine many of my readers to actually experience these verbs, but through cultural osmosis against which I have insulated myself … please?  Help?

I just slogged through about half an hour’s worth of text on Wikipedia to try to find a reference I swear I remember reading about on IMDB in its earliest days (1997?)  Both discussed the MPAA ratings system, but the IMDB feature/article — crucially — discussed the MPAA’s own wording that NC-17 rating:

can be based on violence, sex, aberrational behavior, drug abuse or any other element that most parents would consider too strong and therefore off-limits for viewing by their children.  [emphasis added]

The IMDB piece listed examples of “aberrational behavior” which included — and I am sure I am not making this up — homosexual sex and cannibalism.  Other stuff, too, but these criteria are way out the window, aren’t they?  Movies are getting Best-Picture Oscars with the former, and, cannibalism?  You’re going to want to quit this post if you’re squeamish, and stay away for the rest of the post, OK? –

So I’m giving your eyes a chance to decelerate –

Which continues here –

Thanks.  It’s an R cut of the tedious Hannibal — right? — that showed one character eating the brain of a simultaneously living, speaking human being onscreen.  Yiee.  We’ve discussed movie ratings on this site before — here is Bob Mike arguing more eloquently and persuasively than I, par example — and those links exist to follow if one desires.  But a couple of points stand out, which include:

1. A lot of people consider Requiem for a Dream to be a more NC-17-deserving film than I do (is it “that scene” for everyone?)
2. I’ve stated, then taken it back, then taken my takeback back, that the Kill Bill franchise really should have had a harsher rating than Erin Brokovich in any even-partially-enlightened society (I haven’t phrased it that directly before), and
3. I’ve forgotten my third point

But while Requiem was a captivating, horrifying, brilliant viewing for me, why oh why oh why didn’t Saving Private Ryan get an NC-17?  I would understand an actual war footage being shown on TV-PG History Channel or something.  But this was different.  This was a director staging scenes of a soldier walking around holding his severed arm and people literally getting their heads blown off.  Because it was Spielberg (honest question)?  But as squeamish as the latter made me, Ôdishon, which I watched on DVD, had me progressively squirreling back further into my chair, as (the squeamish are gone already, right?) the film depicts a captive, crippled prisoner being forced to eat vomit, acupuncture needles being stuck into eyeballs, and a limb being extremely graphically severed with a pipe saw.  For that I was thinking “Holyfuckingshit what are they allowing in R-rated movies these days?!” all the way until I got up, shivered, and put the DVD back in its case, at which point I realized it was “unrated”.  So, yeah.  Going back to read my post, because I think I had a point.  Be right back.

Oh, right, Rachel Miner.  While, yes, it creeps me out to catch myself dreaming about someone who used to be married to Macaulay Culkin, it’s fascinating that she is essentially repertory cast (right word?) in the After Dark Horrorfest, of which I’m immensely fanboy.  They had her at the booth at ComiCon, apparently, which would have been reason enough for me to go to the festival, pay the admission fee, and deal with the crowds, but then I’d have to admit that I did all that to meet Rachel Miner.  She has a fantastic quote cited at IMDB:

Basically, I get paid to be crazy.  I get paid to believe I’m someone else, live in a completely false reality, and believe it’s real.  And that’s a little scary.  I do it to the best of my ability.  But it’s kind of like swimming out to sea.  You have to leave enough energy to swim back, and sometimes you get scared you swam too far.

Which is, I think, both immensely creepy and totally indicative of the devotion she brings to her roles, which (along with the left eyebrow) I queue to see.  Or, Netflix-queue.  Whatever.

Cannibalism.  Fear Itself (previously), a series that featured shorts directed by  different horror auteurs, I saw in shuffled order.  They were shown on network TV and several of them had the horror plot or reveal to be “cannibalism”.  In one — Skin and Bones? — well, rent it, if you’re into shock-value cannibalism.  On broadcast TV.  The Rachel Miner episode, which was a different episode, had a foursome of criminals (?) seek shelter in the commune of a pseudo-Amish group of cannibals.  At least, I’m pretty sure that’s where it was going, but I turned it off for being too tedious (not shocking).  “Abberational” indeed.  Let me get my thirty-year-old’s panties in a wad — parent of a five-year-old, remember — and get freaked out, not about what’s being put into R-rated movies these days, but about what they’re allowing on network TV these days.  Not that that’s strictly relevant — I don’t have a TV (Really — I know every middlebrow says that, but I really don’t.  I had two but didn’t want them any longer and sold them.)

MPAA.  Aberration.  TV, standards, and all that.  I think this all vaguely knits together, but I’m not quite convinced.  So, yum cannibalism yum.  Yum homosexuality yum.  Oh, and Rachel Miner.

Applying an antibiotic ointment just now to a burn on my abdomen that scabbed over, broke open, and started to bleed profusely (yeah, ouch), I was reminded of a Neosporin TV ad from some (many) years ago.  It showed a woman’s index finger, apparently the same finger, on each side of the screen.  There was a similar cut on the fingers in both frames: on the left, it was almost healed, and on the right, it was infected.  The voiceover or caption said something like “after five days, the cut with the Neosporin healed much more quickly.”

OK, so, a couple of options.  One is that they faked it: that the cuts were clever bits of makeup, and, therefore, clever bits of lying.  But otherwise?  Think about the call sent out to talent agents, which would have to be something like this:

Needed: Adult female hand model.  We will cut the model’s finger, apply an ointment, then photograph it five days later.  We will wait for the wound to completely heal, then we will cut the model’s finger again, apply no ointment, allow it to get infected, and then photograph that wound.

What was going on?

I’ve been speed-watching Dexter, and, like other modern shows with more sophisticated story grammars than were prevalent in the past (Dexter is two-thirds of the way there, and Lost is there to such a degree that fans are bitterly annoyed when remembering the NPC episode) there is a large amount of mythology in even ‘monster-of-the-week’ (ha!) episodes.  And I’m struck by this show, and Lost, in that the “Previously on Foo” montages at the start of the program are, themselves, pretty huge spoilers.  While most reasonably astute viewers of Dexter will remember, say, who George King is from episode to episode, most Lost viewers are not fanboy enough to recall, “Oh, yeah, I remember in S03E07 when Desmond said that in passing to Jack: that was 36 minutes in, right?”: the previously reels do help.

Therefore, I am proposing that the writers (editors?) of mytharc-rich programs put half relevant scenes into the intro montages and half random scenes that might conceivably be relevant.  It will leave us waiting for the midgets.

I formulated “McGee’s First Law” in college:

Everything is more complicated than it at first appears to be, even when McGee’s First Law is taken into account

Startlingly, someone else (presumably Mr. or Mrs. McGee) also formulated a “McGee’s First Law”:

It’s amazing how long it takes to complete something you’re not working on

I’m not sure which I like better, but one of us has to reindex.

Setting that aside for a moment, I’m fairly confident, after the sixth or seventh spontaneous occurrence, that I have “McGee’s Third Law”:

If I see an actor in a role, I don’t recognize him, and he creeps me the fuck out, I’ve seen him play a villain on Law & Order: Criminal Intent

(I will avoid officially enumerating a new law I just discovered a couple paragraphs ago, namely, “There are infinitely more ways to misspell occurrence than to spell it correctly.”)

It should be clear to readers that I have no objection to casting beautiful women in roles.  But this screenshot from Dexter:

There is not one British woman in the world, addicted to heroin, with teeth this nice.  They don’t, you know, cancel each other out or anything.

Problem: Attempt to watch Dollhouse

Attempted solution: Visit Fox On Demand

Result:

We’re sorry, but only the following operating systems are supported at this time:

    * Windows XP or Vista
    * Mac OS X 10.3 or greater

Passing the Torch — contributions still courted.  Advertisers, heads-up: the page gets shloads of traffic.

Readers will know I am no friend of the Republicans (this as one of a billion possible links) — and though some attentive reader is going to claim that this is another instance of my thinking that a prominent black man is full of shit, Andrew Breitbart was fucking railroaded on Bill Maher by Michael Eric Dyson, the studio audience, and (to a somewhat lesser degree) by Maher himself.

Did anyone see this bullshit?

Breitbart confronted Maher by asking him to provide references when he accused Rush Limbaugh of racism.  This is not impossible to do, and Dyson did provide some (one of which was even relevant) — but Maher?  He passed the buck, asking if Dyson “wanted to take” that one.  Back up your own fucking claims, man.

Dyson (and, look, I’d say this in a moment about Dershowitz, Paul Kurtz, or any number of other people — this is not a black thing) indeed did try to steamroller Breitbart with ten dollar words (yes, I knew them all, and I would still be a dick if I spoke like that in an argument, which I expect I’ve done); insinuations of speaking in “code words” when it was very clear (to me) that Dyson was doing this very thing; and self-conscious affectation of urban African-American diction at precisely the points one would choose if one were suggesting that Breitbart was himself a racist.

Breitbart was completely right that Social Security is a “box of magic” that needs to be confronted.  Breitbart was completely right that it is disingenuous — he didn’t use these words, I’m speaking for him now — to hold up Obama as a paragon of virtue and call Clarence Thomas a “ventriloquist’s dummy” (yes, Dyson said that — actually, he said “a ventriloquist”, but I think I got what he meant.)  Breitbart was off the map when he laid into “black studies” professors and “post-structuralist” intellectuals, and in a number of other places, but look — ok, don’t look.  I have no idea who is going to jump on this thread, or what accusations they are going to make.  But I will stand to my last breath demanding that someone fights fairly.  What I’m saying:

1. If you make an accusation and you cannot cite references, you are a dick.
2. If you respond to someone’s point, delivered in simple language, by laying in with long words and demanding the other person “let [you] finish” when you did not allot them the same courtesy, you are a dick.
3. If you continue to rework your argument when challeneged, and then claim that that’s what you’ve been saying all along when it is completely clear that you have been doing nothing of the sort, you are a dick.
4. And, yes, I’m a dick.

Oh, and by the way: what the hell is a “talking eTrade baby”?

Maybe if I attempt a brain purge onto the net:

I cannot stop dreaming about Katee Sackhoff.

Probably unrelatedly, I am awakened by back pain every morning.

The pain I can deal with.  The subconscious obsession is creeping me out.  It’s as if I’m stalking her in my sleep.  I’d steer clear of myself if I had the option.

In a show full of cover models, she is not, probably, the likely candidate for this.  But talent playing crazy-intense-complicated wins over boobies almost every time (cf. Jodie Foster).  If a politician emerges with anywhere near her ability to control microexpressions, we’re in trouble.

So, Katee, forgive me.  I promise I’m not stalking you consciously.  Just go on surfing.

Or, you know, email me.

</purge>

You ain’t seen nuthin yet.  Just try to get there from your remote.

Time Warner Cable, in Los Angeles, carries an On Demand station called FEARnet — the on-demand version of the website, wherein you can watch free horror movies, television episodes, and shorts to your heart’s content.

Deciding that I wanted to learn how to get to FEARnet intentionally, rather than by hitting random buttons, I searched out a reliable method, dear Reader.  Namely:

Hit the big orange button in the middle of the remote that says “On Demand”.

You’re welcome.

It’s OK, I’ll wait.  Go try it.

Type type type wait quick brown foxymophandlemama backyet?good.

Ha.  Ha ha.  Bet you fell for that.  Ha.  Loser.  Of course you can’t access free, on-demand horror programs by going through the On Demand menu.  What you really need to do is hit the triangular button marked “A”, which maybe-stands-for-or-it’s-just-a-fortuitous-accident “Access Menu”.

Go try.

Back?  Yeah, it’s not in the list, is it?  Look on the bottom of your screen.  What looks like a status bar is actually a scrolling menu that you access with the horizontal buttons on your remote, rather than boringly scrolling up and down through the Actual Menu.

Remember, dear Reader, that we’re trying to access free horror movies, TV episodes, shorts, and maybe other stuff.  So, scroll long enough, and you will see a button that says “Free On Demand”.

You’re welcome.

And then — um — hmm.  What category does it fit into?  Not “Local”.  Not “Kids”.  Maybe “Entertainment” or “Cutting Edge” (voting for the latter, if for nothing else than the play on words.)

OK, I’ll wait while you go through “Entertainment”.  Remember to scroll vertically through all the options.

No?  Well then, they are clever.  It’s in “Cutting Edge”.  See?  Cutting Edge?  Slasher flicks.  Fits!  There you find the free horror content.

Easy.

Ha!  Psyche!  Trick!  Other stuff they used to say in junior high!  Why in the world would free content be under the “Free On Demand” menu in the first place?!  You blithering moron!  What’s wrong with you?

What you actually do to watch free horror content, which includes (just reminding you) television episodes, is go to “Movies On Demand” instead of “Free On Demand”.  Note to self: television episodes are movies if they’re horror television episodes.

OK, whew.  Wanna take a break?

No, you can’t, can you?  You have to do this quickly or you get thrown off the menus.  So we’ll do this properly.  We’re in “Movies On Demand” now.  And now a vertical menu!  Woot!  Scroll up to “Free Movies”.  That’s all there is to it.

I think I’ve cried UI wolf.  You don’t believe me, do you?  Yeah, I admit, FEARnet is not on the first screen.  But we may actually be getting closer.  Hint: it’s a horizontal menu again.  Scroll right, it’s faster.  FEARNET.  Just hit “Select” to, um, select that content.

Grrumph.  Frak.  No no no, that’s not at all what we want.  Turns out, the FEARnet content is in a vertical scroll menu in the upper-left on your screen.  Scroll up and down.  “Select” does things better left to horror movie screenwriters.

We’ve made it!  It’s actually pretty cool.  Hit “Info” for info about the shows, “Select” to play them.  Start your movie (warning: High Tension is pan-and-scan and dubbed.)

OK, how far did you get before the DVR unceremoniously kicked you out of your movie?  If it was more than ten minutes, you’ve beat me.

You’re kicked out because you scheduled two broadcast shows to record simultaneously, and one (or both) just kicked in.  Graciously, they give you a message explaining this.  They give you a pop-up menu through which you can easily cancel one of the tuned programs if you want to watch your on-demand program.

OK, don’t wait too long for the pop-up menu.  It won’t actually, um, appear.  You’ll just be kicked out of your movie.  Fortunately it seems to pause the movie where you left it.

Now the trick is to get out of the On Demand menu.  Just press “Exit”.  I mean, “Stop”.  I mean, “A”.  Or “B”.  Or “C”.  Elephino.  Usually I just type in a channel number and it takes me there, wherein I can do DVR-type stuff to my heart’s content.  Your still-beating, tell-tale heart.  Yum.

OK, I’ll wait.  But not long.  I have stuff to watch.  Wait.  Thought I did.  Frak.  What’s step two again?

The complete series megaset of Danger Mouse (the show, my clever electronica fans) is available for $10 on preorder.

Believe it or not, I’m not getting a kickback on this one.

Starting this October, U.S. television network NBC will be running an action series starring Christian Slater.

Startled, I contacted NBC/Universal, and was given the following explanation:

We at NBC were initially reluctant to risk a high-budget series with Christian Slater in the lead roles.  But that’s before we secured Scott Weiland to score it and Terry Gilliam and Orson Welles as co-directors.  With this combination of talent, we decided there was no way we would lose our time and money.

(Nerds, hover over that Christian Slater link.  He is assigned a number that implies that he was the 225^th added to IMDB.  The first?  Serq Afgnver.  Bracketing him?  Nyvpvn Fvyirefgbar at 224 and Jvyy Fzvgu at 226.  WEIRD.)

On an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Detective Tutuola (played by actor and rapper Ice-T) walks into a bodega and asks for “Two coffees: one black and one regular.”

Huh?  Question for New Yorkers, please: what is “regular” coffee if it’s not black, drip, American-style coffee?  When I was a barista mumbleteen years ago, if someone asked for “regular coffee”, I’d probably ask them if they wanted “room for milk”.  That’s it.  The black, drip, and American-style would have been automatic.

Sunday, I lay down in the early afternoon, about 2 p.m.  I wake up, and look for about five minutes for my tiny, hard-to-find glasses.  I look at my phone, which said it had updated itself for DST.  It said 4:30.  I went to my computer.  It said 5:30.  Neither made sense, as it was dark outside.

I went to time.gov (bookmark that one) and found out it was 5:30 — the following morning.  So I slept for about 15.5 hours.

Kind of scary — weird things happen when you are sick — but a good way to accumulate shows on your DVR.  I started watching a Law & Order: CI episode I had previously given up on.  It’s a Logan episode, starring David Cross and, they said, Kristy Swanson.

I like David Cross.  I like his writing, I like his stand-up, I like his insight.  But I think it’s fair to say that he has no dramatic chops.  If we find out he’s the killer and has been lying about everything during the episode, it may be better, because the fact that I don’t believe a single one of his motivations could be viewed as a choice.  The episode is dreadful.  And Kristy Swanson?  Kept looking for her.  Beautiful, beautiful Kristy Swanson from when I was in high school.  Here is how I remember her:

Here are three more-or-less NSFW images.  SFFD fans, remember to check back when you are home.

Finally found her: she’s playing a bottle-blond floozy.  A latter-day Marilyn Monroe, a comparison they keep making more and more explicit.  And she’s — how to put this gently? — obese.  Not Monroe-by-today’s-standards-big, but obese.  Maybe some of it is a fat suit, and she certainly looks worse because of the Playboy-style caked-on makeup and garish lipstick, but her upper arms looks like they weigh as much as she used to in total.  IMDB reports she’s almost 40, now.

Really unfortunate.  I’m speaking as someone who has put on 120 pounds (British: 8 1⁄2 stone; Bushman: very much; elsewhere: 54 kg) in the last ten years, so I know this can happen, and I know what I’m talking about.  But this is really, really unfortunate.

Episode is half over.  I’m going to go drag myself back and try to finish it this time.

I was watching DIY Network’s program Cool Tools, specifically, the episode on woodworking tools.

A representative from POWERMATIC was showing off their top-of-the-line woodworking lathe: an 800 lb. cast iron Goliath with lots of bells and whistles.  One neat thing was a hollow tailstock, apparently airtight, with a door that opened into a compartment.

“Oh, neat,” I thought.  “You can keep finishes or sandpaper in there without it getting dusty!”

The POWERMATIC representative smirked, “We say this compartment is to hold your favorite beverage.  What that beverage is, we won’t say.”

Whoa, wait!  What are we talking about?  Why the circumlocution?  It’s not infant’s blood, right?  It’s not cat urine.  It’s clearly an intoxicating beverage that he’s suggesting you hide.  While working on a full-size lathe.  Is he insane?

They really need to send woodworkers to tool conventions, not just salesmen.  This has totally turned me off of POWERMATIC.  Drinking alcohol while turning is a good way to lose a limb.  Talk to a turner, and he will give you a list of what you want while turning: a full face shield, ideally one with positive air pressure; long sleeves that button or tape tightly at the wrist; a full apron; something to cover the opening of your socks; no loose jewelry or hair; super-sharp tools; a safety kill switch; etc.  One thing he will not suggest is that you need to drink a fucking beer.

Man.  I’m thinking about writing a letter of complaint.

I wish USA Network would hurry up and air The 40-Year-Old Virgin already.

Surprised?  Let me clarify.  I don’t plan to watch it when it airs.  But I watch a lot of USA Network, and they have had the same thirty second promo for this film debut for a couple weeks, and they always start it right after the fade to black of my shows’ commercial breaks.  I don’t even get a fair chance to skip them.  Awfully sneaky.

Anyway, God, get it over with, USA, so I can start watch your next crappy in-house promo.

(Wow, USA Network’s ad campaign worked, didn’t it?  They successfully, and against my will, infected me with this “New movie on USA coming” meme.  It annoyed me so much, I turned around and passed it on to thousands.  Hmmm.)

I got my twelve gauge sawed off.
I got my headlights turned off.
I’m ’bout to bust some shots off.
I’m ’bout to dust some cops off.
…
I got my brain on hype.
Tonight’ll be your night.
I got this long-assed knife,
and your neck looks just right.
My adrenaline’s pumpin’.
I got my stereo bumpin’.
I’m ’bout to kill me somethin’
A pig stopped me for nuthin’!

That’s rapper Ice-T, from the original version of album Body Count (1992) before the track was removed, under pressure, by their label, and the artist was likewise dropped.  T, when quoted, said “I’m singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality.  I ain’t never killed no cop.  I felt like it a lot of times.  But I never did it.”

So art, yeah?  It’s really jarring, though, and seems more provocative than when Fred Durst sang Break Shit to a crowd of intoxicated vandals.

OK, same year.  Grunge vocalist Scott Weiland (white) pens and records these lyrics:

I am, I am, I am
I said I wanna get next to you
I said I gonna get close to you
You wouldnt want me have to hurt you too, hurt you too?
…
I am a man, a man
Ill give ya somethin that ya wont forget
I said ya shouldnt have worn that dress
…
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come

As far as I know, Weiland never justified that one.  Sober band-mate Robert DeLeo explained that Weiland was singing in the first person of an “idiot” who would rape a woman, and that it was fictional and not misogynist.  Idiot?  Idiot?  That’s like my moron doctor telling me, when I was educating her about the possibility of modifying her triplicate prescriptions, that someone could do that “If they wanted to be mean.”  Don’t worry, that will get its own post.  But  Idiot?

So me?  I went so far as to skip the Weiland song sometimes on the CD, if I wasn’t too distracted, and it wasn’t the great! acoustic version.  Ice-T?  I loathed and boycotted him, and I still haven’t heard the fucking song.  Years later.  No clue.  Heavy metal beat or what?

I was raised in a very conservative Christian suburb of San Diego with deep racial tensions — honors kids at the high school were being arrested for forming KKK factions, and, as a first-order approximation, all Mexican kids were gang wannabes.  (Seriously, if I were under the kind of social pressure the poor Hispanic kids were under, I’d play the part, too.  I’d like to talk to some of them now, the bullied ones — but, oddly, they don’t show up at reunions.)

Why the double standard?  Because Weiland’s lyrics rhyme slightly better?  No, La Mesa, baby!  Or, more honestly, because I was a poser pastor’s kid in La Mesa who always wanted to be “the good kid”.  That act didn’t stick very far into college, by the way.

OK, Richard Belzer.  Whoa, huge turn, right?  Stay with me please.  My good friend Nathan (hi!) and I watched an anthology of comedy club performances, from comedians and comediennes who later became stars, that somehow some two-bit production company got the repro rights to.  Belzer’s doing his routine — and fucking drunk?  Not sure, but Nathan and I both looked at each other wondering the same thing.  Did he do drunken rants onstage?  Anyone know?

Anyway, Belzer tells a “Pollock” joke, and when the audience boos, he quips, “Yeah, like they’re the smartest people on the planet.  Like there’s no reason for the stereotype.”

OK, the tie-in.  Marcia Gay Harden guest-stars on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, playing a white supremacist.  Really great role and great performance.  She is interviewed one-on-one by Fin and Munch — that is, Ice-T and Belzer.  She’s spewing white supremacist hatred at them that I was flabbergasted got by the censors.  They sit there, stoically taking it.  The twist?  Harden is a federal agent undercover, and later, after killing one of the real supremacists, she apologies to Munch and Fin.  I guess that’s why she was willing to take the role.  Fin nods, shakes her hand, and says, “We’re good.”

So, Law & Order: SVU?  Somehow they never went with the slogan Where the black cops are cop killers, the Jewish cops are racists, and the white supremacists are U.S. Marshals!  Funny, that.

Or, to aficionados, CSI: New York.

I’ve discussed the show before, after the standalone (non-crossover) Pilot.  I remarked after that episode, “I’m not sure if they’re taking liberties with the medicine on the show or not, but they are taking extreme liberties with the trigonometry, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect rigorous stuff from the show.”

And how.

The best of the Pilot, the Gothic Horror feel, evaporated after the first episode.  I rapidly lost interest.  It’s essentially a science fiction show now.  Or comic book show.  The frequency of I’mSorryWhat?! moments in the show defy belief.

I tried watching last week’s episodes.  They have frakking tricorders: they pointed a laser scanner at a fragment of material, and the readout said “Silica”.  They concluded it must be ceramic.  Um…

Hold on, same episode.  Their mass spec isolated various points in a chemical mixture, one of which was biodiesel.  Um…

Hold on, though.  The episode has a sub-plot about the sport of street luge.  In Manhattan.  We’re back to trigonometry.  The way-too-fancy visuals on their software (into which, by the way, they entered speed in miles per hour, weight in pounds, and acceleration in meters per second to get their answer) determined that for the street luger to reach the speed at which he was estimated, he had to have descended a 35% grade (for an unspecified time or distance).  The investigators looked for one.  In Manhattan.  They found one a quarter mile away.

OK, forget the fact that a 35% grade, anywhere, followed by flat road for a quarter mile, would not yield a street luger going 80 miles per hour at the terminus.  Let’s talk about a 35% grade for a moment.  The infamous Lombard Street in San Francisco has a native 27% grade, which was considered completely impassible.  They put in extensive switchbacks, taking it down to a 16% grade.  You ever driven down that street?  You ever see anything more than a quarter again as steep as Lombard Street in Manhattan?  To be specific, on 45th between Fourth and Sixth?  Other than, say, the 10 cm drop-off from sidewalk to street?

These writers are insane.  It’s not even fun to watch the show.  It’s less plausible than The X-Files, where at least they’d give Mulder a few hand-wave lines.  There’s no way to figure out a mystery, because the answer might as easily be “mutated chipmunks did it”, in what is supposed to be a procedural melodrama.

There is exactly one compelling thing about this show.  That’s in the next post.  Look up, look down, or click right, depending on how you’re reading this post.

I’ve been catching up on seasons of the two successful Law & Order spin-offs (Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit) on USA.  Criminal Intent’s twist is that it follows the Major Case Squad (who pursue, theoretically, if not in practice, more serious offenders than they do on the other franchises) and shows scenes of perpetrators to the viewer that the cops are not privy to.  This leaves the viewer in the position of knowing more at times than the detectives.  Clever.  SVU, on the other hand, has one twist: it follows the sex crimes unit.  Ouch.

First off, whoever at USA Network thought viewers could stomach three hours of sex crimes per day is out of his (yeah, probably his) mind.  It’s horrible.  Every one makes you want to vomit.  At its best, it’s art.  At its worst, it’s exploitation.  Never is it entertainment.  But moving on:

Criminal Intent is my favored of the two, despite a revolving-door cast and the current status quo, where it’s essentially two shows, with different casts, interwoven into something they call the same show.  I’ve missed a lot of years of it.  And I’ve missed a lot.  At it’s best, it’s up there with the best on television.

I had to take a break from my DVRed episode of one episode of Criminal Intent, entitled To The Bone.  In the first half hour, you have:

* The bloodiest, Mansonesque crime scenes this side of the Saw franchise, more graphic than anything I have ever seen on TV, including gaping machete wounds and severed hands and fingers on whole butchered families including little children,

* Crime scenes with bloody spatter and bloody hand-prints covering the walls,

* A medical examiner at the crime scene with a smock drenched in blood, making her look like a butcher who has just pulled a double shift,

* A creepy-as-fuck Whoopi Goldberg playing a foster mom who I am certain we’re going to find out is masterminding the murder sprees,

* Mike Logan (Chris Noth) trying to break up a brutal gang attack, in the process shooting and critically injuring an undercover cop,

* Noth’s Emmy-worthy, heart-wrenching, stomach-turning reaction to realizing he’s just shot a badge,

* Assorted other goodies, like onscreen copious vomiting and graphic descriptions of minors sodomized with foreign objects,

* And all without a single “Viewer Discretion Advised” notice (which every episode of House, bizarrely, gets), even when this stuff is being aired as a repeat at 6 p.m., on basic cable, on a weeknight.

I watch horror movies, but this network show is enough for me that I’ve had to take a break.  But if they showed a single bare breast?  They couldn’t have aired it in the first place.  Per our previous discussion: I don’t give a fuck, Bob Mike, this is fucking fucked up.  Anyone who would censor above-the-waist female nudity and allow this adult material to be shown to their children are simply wrong.  This is not “parents’ discretion”.  They are fucking wrong.  Anyone who thinks otherwise, I’ll meet you at the virtual flagpole (the comments section).  Come with knuckles bared.

OK.  Deep breath.  Wonderful acting.  Wonderful screenwriting.  I’m just going to hope no children watched this, take a few laps around the house, and go back for the second half.

Maybe.

I didn’t get into CSI during season one.  It was opposite something I watched, or I wasn’t watching TV, or something.  I can’t remember now.  Around season three Jenn got started watching, and I joined her, then she got the DVDs, and I started watching watching the backlog.

I’m glad I didn’t start watching at the beginning.  CSI is a show that got much, much better as it went along.  And now Spike (they may have finally stabilized their name), 7.5 years later, is airing season one episodes, and I’m watching with hindsight.

Season one had promise, in a low-budget, ham-handed kind of way.  No one really had their characters figured out yet, and were playing off-the-rack stereotypes: Petersen played The Emotionally Disconnected Nerd.  Dourdan played The Smooth Brother.  Eads played The Cowboy.  Guilfoyle played The Grizzled Cop.  Eric Szmanda played The Punky Whiz Kid.  With Marg Helgenberger, an actress I admire and have watched for years, they never figured out her hair or makeup that season (trying to make her look young, unsuccessfully?) so she seems to come off as The Self-Righteous Bitchy Woman, even though I think that if I were watching blindfolded I’d find her performances more textured.  The only one who had her character figured out from the beginning?  Jorja Fox, playing a complicated, troubled, multi-layered person with a lot of baggage.

I’m not a fan of her character.  When they need a problem on the show, they usually put it on her, maybe because she can act.  She was frequently badly-written, sometimes did surprising things, but always somehow made it work.  Her character arc became the most complex in the show, and through the whole thing, her character, as a believable human being, was making the journey — it wasn’t just an actor becoming accustomed to new stuff being thrown at her, like it was when Locke punched Charlie (switching shows, but seriously, WTF?  Almost couldn’t watch Lost after that.)  She’s also the least attractive regular on the show, maybe excepting Wallace Langham, and I like me some eye candy.

Mainly, though, I hate alcoholics on shows, and they made her into one, out of the blue.  Writers seem to find them easy to write — maybe more than the fair share through personal experience.  But TV alcoholics, almost without fail, are written badly: they’re not really like alcoholics.  They’re like self-rationalizations of alcoholics, hammed up for the screen.  Denzel in Courage Under Fire and Baldwin on H:LOTS come to mind as two of the very few exceptions in film and television.

The highlight in the first season was probably episode 13, Boom.  Magnificent guest performance by the criminally underrated Stephen Lee, and hints at some of the great stuff that was to come.  But most notably, in the first season, the characters knew less than they do now.

Much less.  Not just simple stuff like having someone on the set to pronounce petechia for the actors.  Not just “the audience knows less, so we have to pretend to be learning for the sake of exposition.”  Big stuff.  Huge stuff.  Like the following Grissom (he’s the Nerd) quote:

[I'm thinking about] how amazing the universe is.  All made of the same Carbon, from stars to trees, trucks to human bones

Pardon me?  Not a chemist here, but let’s do a miniature game of “Daddy, what’s X made of?”

Stars:  Hydrogen.  Hydrogen plasma, fusing into heavier elements, which are ejected as waste products.  H + H = He, H + He = Li, Li + Li = C, so yes, Carbon is being produced, but “made of” implies primacy.
Trees:  Sure, structurally they use carbon.  But a live tree?  Doesn’t it have to be mostly water, and therefore mostly Oxygen?  This is the only one that might have more Carbon in it than any other element.
Trucks: Uh, gonna go with Iron.  There’s Carbon in the tires, in the gas tank, in the Freon, in the seat liners, but seriously, half a ton, folks.  Gonna stick with Iron.
Human Bones:  Oh, for Pete’s sake.  Calcium.  Everyone knows that, right?

I may be wrong there somewhere, but I’m damn sure righter than Grissom.

Duchovny of The X-Files once responded to a question about the premise of his own show as follows: “It’s about a fictional world with alien visitations and supernatural phenomena.”  CSI is fiction of the same sort.  Perhaps the biggest and most harmful fiction?  The idea that, every time a dead body is found, a team of top-notch (at least starting season three) scientists swoop in and do their magic, then interrogate the suspects and arrest them.  In the meantime, they engage in shootings, restrain violent people, and so forth.  Kinda funny how on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, the detectives do all the sleuthing, including evidence collection and examination, along with the cop stuff.  Oh, and on House, the overqualified doctors perform the MRIs, CAT scans, defibrillation, and blood draws.  That’s why the original Law & Order was a neat premise: two very different teams, doing very different jobs, in the same episode.

In the real world, when you die, a team of scientists does not step in.  Not even detectives.  Bumbling cops do, they contaminate evidence, do wacky stuff like tell bystanders to hold the victim’s wallet while they dig in their own pockets (true!), and on, and on, and on.  I understand the need to reassign roles a bit, for effect, to give your actors camera time.  But to go as far as Skeptical Inquirer did by calling CSI one of the best things on television because science was put first?  Maybe if it were real science.  I’m not sure CSI is helping.

(I know I’m off the rails here with posting.  Bear with me.  Save up the posts if you want.  I’m probably going to crash eventually and mcgees.org will be silent for two months.)

USA or NBC are now airing a series, a part of the Cameron Terminator saga, that occurs in the lost years between T2 and T3.

It’s fucking fantastic.  Not “OK”, like the remake of Bionic Woman.  Not “Good”, like Alias.  Fantastic.

The characters of Sarah (played by Lena Headey, the queen from 300), the character of John (played by a new actor for me), and the female Terminator (played by yowza Summer Glau, made-up as a teenager) are all portrayed very convincingly and likably.  All three are beautiful people, too, which helps.

The best parts of T2 that were missing in its sequel and prequel, such as Sarah’s eloquent voice-overs and the great cyborg one-liners, are present and very crisply written.  I’m a huge fan.

Summer Glau as the Terminator gets the best lines.  An exchange, paraphrased, as her character is applying eyeliner to go to school as John’s “sister”:

John: You’re getting pretty good at that.  But then again, that would be weird, if you were this super-advanced cybernetic organism and were stumped by a dumb eyeliner pencil.  It’s not exactly brain surgery.

Terminator: [Deadpan:] No, it’s not brain surgery.  It would have to be much sharper for brain surgery.

Kind of funny when you read it, but Glau hits it out of the park.

The timeline of the mythology is a bit screwy, if I recall the storylines correctly, but that’s pretty much necessary to set this story in the present.

I hope it stays on the air.  I’m entranced.

Quiz: what do The Bullwinkle Show, The West Wing, and CSI: Miami have in common, as regards international relations?  For bonus credit, add other titles I don’t know about.

OK, I will continue to take it.  But I am bored.

I left early from Hemet, where Jenn and Niall are, to medicate the cat.  I have tons I could be doing, but: the book I’m reading is written on ultra-low-contrast paper that will have to wait, probably, until I get new glasses or the sun supernovas; the TV needs to be smacked about every five minutes to do its job (no comments, please); my Windows XP notebook is dead; my video player is fucking stolen; and I’ve promised myself I won’t start any more projects until I clean up and organize all my existing ones.

So I’m doing the only rational thing: I’m sitting at my computer, poised in case anyone sends me an email.

OK, that’s not “the only rational thing” as much as it’s “an utterly irrational thing”, but hey.

Oh.  Maybe a new CSI tonight?  Maybe it’s recording on the good TV?  Worth checking.  See you later.

Creepy — the priest stalks Conan O’Brien, demanding to hear his confession before he offers “absolution”, refers to himself as a “stalker” and a “dangerous fan”, and even contacts O’Brien’s parents.

Courtney Love on Graham Norton, discussing Prince Andrew dropping by her house late at night, uninvited:

CL: He asked me, “So, what do you do all day?”

GN: Oh, that’s rich, coming from him!

Bionic Woman has been remade.  I actually found out about this because I have a TiVo wishlist for “Bionic Woman”, hoping to catch reruns of the 1976 Lindsay Wagner version.  It’s filled the Alias void in my life.

I called Alias a “guilty pleasure”, but that was rhetoric.  The new Bionic Woman is profoundly a guilty pleasure.  Isaiah Washington, whom I used to have unlimited respect for following his performance on H:LOTS is in the cast, after being fired for confrontational bigotry (which I do not sanction) from Jenn’s favorite show.  I told myself I wouldn’t watch his next show.  But here I am.  Guilty.

And Michelle Ryan, the title character?  She is no Lindsay Wagner, who is smoldering even now, thirty years later.  She’s not even Jennifer Garner.  And they apparently can’t afford a good makeup artist.  In one episode, one sees a “file photo” of her, which appears for all the world to be her casting headshot.  So she can obviously be pretty, even strikingly so, especially windblown, but they just have not figured out how to do it on the show yet.  She is pasty.  And, she can’t really act.  You can’t really jump from EastEnders to being an action lead, I guess.  Her American accent is good, and not offensive, but her Middlesex accent (which they let her use on the show once) is hot.

That said, it must truly suck to be upstaged by your “fifteen-year-old sister”, who can act and is ravishing (and is, bless me, 18 in real life.)  The supporting cast are great, too: Miguel Ferrer is always a fave, and the “the award goes to” Katee Sackhoff is really what makes the show watchable.  That, and the choreography.

Am I recommending the show?  Not really.  It pretty much sucks.  But I like it, and it’s one of two shows I’m watching right now.  I don’t know how long it will last, and what will happen when Sackhoff’s other filming obligations kick in.  But in the meantime: Girl Power!

Chad Donella is really a fine actor of my generation.  He, unfortunately, has not gotten a chance to really shine in a perfect role yet, but the performances I have witnessed have all been fantastic.

He was in the X-Files episode “Hungry”, playing a brain-eating mutant.  Just try to pull off that role in a heartwarming way, but he did it.  And then there’s Taco Bell.  Several years ago Taco Bell filmed a commercial with him overjoyed to be stuffing his face with a taco.  We’ll likely be deluged with the commercial again when the X Games start showing in a few weeks.

Thing is, he filmed the taco commercial after the X-Files episode, as far as I know.  And the X-Files episode has a scene where he compulsively and with great gusto sucks human brain matter off his fingers.  Fictionally, of course.  I hope.  Same expression of glee as in the Taco spot.

So what, did some ad executive see his brain-sucking and think, “That’s the guy for us!  Let’s have him dig into our tacos!”  Did they have an open call for the commercial, or did someone call his agent and say, “Hey, send the brain-sucker over to chomp our tacos!”  Would be interesting to find out.  Probably.