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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.

For those of you who haven’t found it yet, USA Network’s The 4400 is a really good show.  It has kind of an X-Files meets X-Men vibe.

Pearl Jam on Letterman Thursday, May 4th.

Pearl Jam on SNL April 15th.

I have discovered the interesting fact that all the regular male cast members on Firefly are older than all the female cast members on the program, that this span is 1,357 days, and that my birthdate lies in this gap. So, a game. Points to players who:

1. Find other shows where all the men are older than all the women (or vice versa) and the gap is smaller than 1,357 days.  IMDB and the date calculator will help.
2. Extra-super-crazy points if you find one of these gaps in which your birthdate lies.
3. Runner-up credit for finding a show where all the old cast members are older than all the young cast members.

Actress Francie Swift, although I loathe the name, left an impression on me nine years ago on an episode of Law & Order in which she played a supposed victim of multiple personality disorder. I couldn’t tell watching the episode whether she was not quite successful in her portrayal, or whether she was perfectly successful in portraying someone who was faking multiple personality disorder. I actually don’t remember what the answer ended up being, but I clearly remember her ability to smile with vacant, soulless eyes. I’ve seen her in one or two other roles since then, but was just re-impressed with her on the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode “Semi-Detached” that aired recently. Still those haunting eyes, and a lot of neat facial tricks that while not exactly subtle are quite compelling, especially when they are framed together with D’Onofrio’s still-stuck-in-an-Edgar-suit mannerisms which I also enjoy watching. There are more pages of unwritten dialogue in that episode than written dialogue.

The nine years have also done her well physically, and I think she’s even prettier now, in a not off-the-shelf manner.

In the spirit of the Olympics that just ended; and all the concert recordings I’ve been listening to recently; and the comedy shows I listen to on my way to work: I want a ban on that whistle. You know, that one. The two-fingers-in-the-mouth high-pitched summon-the-neighborhood-dogs make-everyone’s-ears-hurt one. I don’t want it to be illegal.  That wouldn’t work, and I don’t want to restrict peoples’ liberties.  I want it to be impossible.  Just impossible.  I wish no one had ever invented that thing.

It feels like a cold, lonely, depressing Christmas at dawn, so well does Homicide set the scene.  I keep expecting frosty white light to be streaming through the windows, and I’m reaching for a blanket.

I got seasons 3 and 4 of Homicide on DVD, and I’ve been like a kid in a candy store the past few nights.

Don Hewitt, of whom I’m no great fan, is retiring from 60 Minutes, of which I’m also no great fan.  I heard him on NPR yesterday talking in a highly opinionated fashion about the propensity of Americans to change the channel repeatedly and essentially “walk out” of the program; he compared the remote to “a gun”. He posed the following question: how many feature films have you walked out of in the theater? He claimed that no one would be able to name five. This is supposed to prove that we have “nothing invested” in television programs, compared to movies.

Well, I’ve walked out of four films, and I’ve fallen asleep in three others (post-childhood.) I’m also a third his age. Extrapolate at will. I have a feeling others have comparable statistics. So, if you’re inclined, post at the board.

OK, if you’re curious: I walked out of:

1. Trespass (1992, 5.9 stars at IMDB),
2. Hard Target (1993, 5.3 stars,  stars),
3. Natural Born Killers (1994, 6.6 stars), and
4. Starship Troopers (1997, 6.6 stars)

I fell asleep during:

1. The Ghost and the Darkness (1996, 6.4 stars),
2. The Core (2003, 5.5 stars), and
3. Cavale, aka On The Run, aka Trilogy:One (2002, 6.8 stars)

Keep an eye on the actor Jason Dohring.  I just saw him in an otherwise poor episode of “Cold Case” and I was very impressed. He had the same intensity that Edward Norton displayed the first time I saw him. He’s not lucky enough to have landed the same choice roles, at least not yet, but with any luck he’ll get a chance to shine in a proper picture, as I’m not about to try to watch the vehicular stalker flick Black Cadillac (OK, I await my brother in law’s response of “No, it was really good, rent it!”)

Continuing the mcgees.org trend of reviews for crappy TV shows, I watched the series premier of “Century City”. It has some interesting things going for it. It’s set in Los Angeles in the year 2030, and its genetically-enhanced-humans-3D-holographic-displays mood reminds me most of — and I know this is unflattering — the ill-fated 1993 sci-fi show Time Trax. But aside from that, the writer seemed to have a lot of fun, and many subtle things increase the enjoyment factor. There is the offhanded remark about characters from LA driving to Thousand Oaks to go to a nightclub (OK, local joke, but trust me, it’s funny), there is the name (”Axl”) of a seven year old not raising any eyebrows, there are the seventy-somethings named Jason and Melanie, which is just about perfect. Kristin Lehman’s character is named Lee May, but watching the show I was desperately hoping her name was actually Li Mae, that there would be nothing odd about somebody with a trans-culture name in 2030 (I know that her character, who is probably around 30, would have been born in 2000, and white girls still aren’t being named Li Mae in large numbers, but it’s still a cute idea.)

Ioan Gruffudd, despite having a kick-ass Welsh name, is unbelievably bad. Good-looking in a preppy way, but horribly, embarrasingly bad. Some of it might be the effect of having to affect an American accent and having it come out unnaturally shrill and abrasive (the Catherine Zeta-Jones phenomenon), but really he’s the worst thing this side of Elisabeth Röhm (oh interesting, they were born less than six months apart.  There must be something horribly defective about 1973. 

The best thing the show has going for it? It enters the landscape in the middle of the vast Sahara that is American Tuesday “Prime Time” network television. Even if it only lasts until June, it will probably be better than anything else that’s on. Faint praise, but praise nonetheless.

Crossing Jordan from Sunday was actually OK, and it looks like Ken Howard is back.  Best line: “I’m an insomniac and a recovering addict.  When you can’t take sleeping pills, Lifetime Network’s all you’ve got.”

I can take sleeping pills, however, and my Ambien’s kicking in.  I’ll see how my modifications to the spam filters on mcgees.org worked tomorrow.

Following the TV recommendations from a few days ago, it turns out that Mythbusters was a repeat and Crossing Jordan is still as crappy (sorry) as it used to be, except now it seems to be missing perhaps its best actor, Ken Howard (how this will affect the “mythology” episodes about Jordan’s mom is unclear.)  At least it’s on twice a week now, though (Sundays and Fridays), so you can at least see more of it.   And it still, of course, has Jill Hennessy, the reason I watch the show, as I mentioned on the discussion page.  As much as I want her to be, however, she’s still not a very good actress.  Not Elisabeth Röhm-bad, mind you, but not very good.

Alias was good, though.  If I felt guilty about my pleasures, this would be near the top of the list.  By almost every metric I should hate this show.  My brother and I have talked about this.  “It should suck,” as he says, “but it just doesn’t.”  I will complain about the horrible, embarassing, complete sell-out product placement in the episode, however.  They’ve always had a sweetheart deal with Nokia, it seems, and I’m fine with that: the copyrighted “Nokia tune” plays every time Sydney’s phone rings.  But this time was an order of magnitude worse.  The agents were pursuing villains through a parking garage.  The latter jumped in a Mustang to speed off, and our heroes have to nick a car to follow.  They have a split second to decide, and Sydney hollers (yes, hollers) “the F150!”  Not “that one!”, not “the truck!”, not even “the Ford!”, but “the F150!”  Then they cut to a close-up shot of the logo on the vehicle’s side and hold that for a bit.  The heroes begin to drive (no indication of whether the keys were in the car or whether they hot-wired it in approximately 0.3 seconds) but, Oh No!, the truck is boxed in.  That’s fine, “the F150″ pushes the other cars out of the way, then races down the helix of the parking garage, cornering at speed, and generally looking like a car commercial.  When the villains get away (not due to a failure of “the F150″, but because they tried to go out an entrance and were gracious enough not to want to push the innocent occupants of the other car into traffic), we cut to commercial.  There is a still graphic on the screen and a voiceover says, as if we hadn’t gathered, “Alias is brought to you by the new F150.”  And then — wait for it — there’s a commercial for “the F150″.  Presumably this technique is used to combat TiVo users, and presumably we will see this more and more of this as time goes by, but let me state for the record that this sucks.

Not Crossing Jordan-sucks, mind you, but it sucks.

If you read this post tonight, be aware that Mythbusters, Alias, and the return of Crossing Jordan are all on tonight, at 8, 9, and 10 pm, respectively.  If you like the shows as much as I do, that is.

Regular readers of mcgees.org will know what high regard we (that’s a royal “we”) have for the idiots in the ranks of the religious right (the religious right is bad enough, but their idiots are especially bad.)  One of their recent crusades?  Janet Jackson’s publicity-stunt exposure at the Super Bowl.  To begin, here is one of their mighty savants.  Read on, but make sure you invest in Sic Industries first:  “Mr. Powel [sic], I don’t consider myself to be a finatic [sic], but i [sic] do fear the wrath of GOD if our country continues it’s [sic] moral decline.”  The author speculated that if we allow a bare breast to be shown at the Super Bowl, in a few years half the population will be walking around naked.  The author goes on to acknowlege that this “sounds a little extreem [sic]”, but is adamant that what happened to “Sodom and Gamora [sic]” will happen to the United States.

Another petitioner penned the disarmingly honest sentiment that “to mix sex/violence like this gives a really wrong message”.  Surely it is not what was intended, but isn’t that the basic point?  How dare Janet Jackson pervert our celebration of violence with a hint of sexuality?  Regular readers of mcgees.org will know our (that’s a royal “our”) high regard for the Super Bowl as well — no need to cover that ground again — but allow the brief quote of someone who found not at all alarming the introduction of a breast into “a ‘game’ where men are paid huge sums of money to essentially beat each other up”.

Of course, idiocy and inarticulateness is not reserved for the right — note the amusing but not terribly erudite imprecation “Nazi government daughter of an illegitimate street walking hooker from hell“, which I believe should be shortened in casual correspondence to “NGDoaISWHfH” — but the right is always more fun to make fun of.