The Netflix sleeve for Season 1, Disc 1 of Weeds claims that the show is "hilarious and poignant." Having watched the first episode, Julia agrees with poignant but I think they're wrong on both counts. (That said, I think I'm more willing than she is to keep watching.)
I've never seen Desperate Housewives but my wild guess is that Weeds has a similar feel (with slightly racier subject matter).
One general premise behind this whole category of entertainment is that suburbia breeds vapidity and ennui. Seems plausible to me, but whether it's actually interesting is another matter. I'm not sure whether we're supposed to identify, to empathize, or to pointedly do neither.
(There's always a "protest too much" element when someone claims that potentially controversial material is boring. But I'm libertarian enough to sympathize with your friendly neighborhood drug dealer, be it a newly single mother, an awkward gay teenager, or whoever we become acquainted with when we finally get to The Wire.)
Two things bother me about the same subplot at the end.
1. A Chinese man flees to a Chinese consulate after collaborating with a terrorist named Marwan. If masked men subsequently abduct the Chinese guy, then wouldn't the presumptive suspects be the U.S. government and Marwan himself? Why go out of your way to frame some random dissident group when it would make so much more sense for Marwan to have done it?
Cleverer David Palmer: "OH NO! We think he's in Marwan's hands now. Care to help us track him down?"
2. The Chinese wanted [the appearance of] justice, with Bauer tried and sentenced under their laws. How does a dead body fulfill their wishes, especially if the death is under mysterious circumstances (and the corpse in question isn't actually Bauer's)?
Continuing the "courtesy of YouTube" theme:
I just listened to a bunch of Arcade Fire, and then sought out a particular Metallica song. Which Metallica song was it, and what's the connection?
(This is gettable as-is, right? I'll add more if nobody gets it (or nobody bothers to guess).)
How does my taste in music compare to Big Daddy Drew? Courtesy of YouTube, my take on his top ten:
1. "I'm Designer," Queens of the Stone Age
I don't think I'd heard this before. Didn't see the big deal. Bailed after 15 seconds.
2. "Reckoner," Radiohead
I have "In Rainbows" (the first disc) and heartily agree. I just listened to the whole thing via YouTube despite having it at my fingertips on iTunes at work.
3. "Misfit Love, "QOTSA
I gave it about 90 seconds (ditto the rest unless otherwise noted), didn't seem to be going anywhere. What am I missing about Queens of the Stone Age that everyone else sees?
4. "Killing the Light," Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Live version seemed fine.
5. "Teddy Picker," Arctic Monkeys
Meh.
6. "The Prayer," Bloc Party
Not bad. "Tonight make me unstoppable." Really picked up.
7. "Era Vulgaris," QOTSA
Better than the other QOTSA on this list.
8. "Come Alive," Foo Fighters
Meh.
9. "Intervention," Arcade Fire
Nice instrumentation.
10. "The Silence Between Us," Bob Mould
(Couldn't find on YouTube.)
I'll give him credit for pointing me to the Arcade Fire track.
Week 17 fantasy football is so degenerate, but ESPN does what it does. With some sort of cheap ESPN swag** at stake (trophy? T-shirt? I still haven't bothered to look up exactly what), would you start Plaxico Burress (risking his leg and the coach's decision to save him for the playoffs) or hit the waiver wire*?
[*- There's no middle ground because of the L. Coles injury and my certainty that neither J. Galloway nor D. Branch will actually play much if at all. And having already picked up I. Bruce, that sentence should end "hit the waiver wire further."]
**- It says here To be eligible for League Winner prizes teams must be in a Prize-eligible league. The top overall team ranked the highest in its fantasy football league at the end of the season will have the choice of a Fantasy Football 2007 League Champion T-Shirt, a Fantasy Football 2007 League Champion Mini Banner or an NFL Bobblehead. Approximate Retail Value ("ARV"): $15 per League Winner (including shipping).
I guess I'd take the bobblehead. Blah.
Mickey Kaus condenses more wisdom into a single paragraph than Gretchen Morgenstern (Sunday NYT Business section) has in several weeks worth of columns on the same topic:
"Are you impressed with a drop in home values of 6.6% over a year? It doesn't seem like such a big correction, given the dramatic run-up in prices over the last decade or so. ... And don't declining prices make housing more... what's the word? ... affordable? ... This evening NBC Nightly News billboarded a "housing CRISIS." (Link available here.) I thought a "housing crisis" was when people couldn't find housing, not when it got cheaper. (NBC's expert: "It's very, very difficult to find any silver lining." No it's not.)"
--Kausfiles (lots of HTML formatting not carried over from original)
(Bias alert: I am an aspiring first-time homeowner who's waited for prices to become plausible again.)
(Or not.)
Two otherwise unrelated notions:
1. I want New England to finish 19-0. I realized this while on the phone with Chad at the end of the Patriots-Ravens game a few weeks ago.
2. Even before reading this article, I had more sympathy for the tiger than for the humans. The article just supported my immediate suspicions.
Now I feel a bit of shame myself, to have read all sorts of sports news before I even saw that Bhutto was assassinated. (I first learned of it via Instapundit.)
We've been catching up on several weeks worth of Sunday editions of The New York Times. I'd been skipping all the Pakistan stories on the theory that the news was already far outdated.
ESPN's Featured Comment of the Day is so frequently stupid, inane, or both, that Deadspin rightly set up a recurring feature to highlight some of those comments. That said:
"I think the Pats still only have a 50 percent chance of winning it all."
You may think that's a little low (I'd put them at 65%, as in a 90% chance of winning any given game from here on out -- your mileage may vary) but my goodness, the misplaced vitriol among Deadspin commenters made me think I'd stumbled onto AOL, or Foxsports.com, or even ESPN itself.
Nice work guys. Good luck ever being taken seriously by people who didn't already.
According to TV.yahoo.com local listings for Alameda, CA, our local stations get:
NBC = News from 5 to 6:30, Tech Now! at 6:30, Access Hollywood at 7, two hours of Dateline NBC at 8
CBS = This Old House at 5, news until 7, Without A Trace at 7, then the movie Good Night and Good Luck
FOX = Half-hour shows promoting the Raiders and 49ers from 5 to 6, news at 6, two syndicated Friends, a 7:30 Seinfeld, then back-to-back Cops at 8
ABC = News until 6:30, At the Movies, Jeopardy!, Wheel, then four consecutive reruns of Samantha Who?
Two of those four are out of date.
It happens late in Season 4, right around the time that Iowa is inexplicably identified as "mountainous terrain." (A few minutes after a point at "115 degrees west" had been grossly misplaced into Iowa.)
But the geographic ignorance isn't the problem, just the symptom of a problem that manifests itself from midnight onward.
(lots of spoilers follow, but only through Season 4)
The first 16 hours of 24, Season 4 -- and the first 88 hours of the series itself -- are magnificent television. Even the big plot twist at 11 p.m. (the shooting down of Air Force One, which I believe Bill Simmons of all people spoiled for me) leaves open all sorts of possibilities.
The 11 p.m. to Midnight episode focuses entirely on recovering the nuclear football, and nicely accomplishes two things: drama in and of itself, along with exposition.
Then two things in particular happen:
1. The writers abruptly stop being even-handed, particularly about torture. I don't think any sane person could accuse the first 88 hours of the series of political hackery. All previous scenes of torture, or potential torture, had been morally ambiguous at best. In Season 2 we see a president about to rely on faulty intelligence to start an unwise war(!), and even a few hours earlier in Season 4 we see corrupt defense contractors. Even immediately before Air Force One goes down we see the catastrophic consequences of intelligence people doing their job badly, i.e. failing to observe procedures and letting a big lead fall through the cracks until it's too late. But the last few hours of Season 4 are agitprop: They support a position I agree with, but very ham-handedly.
2. As a plot device to bring back a super-popular character (and also support the aforementioned ham-handedness), they make vice president Logan out to be a complete pansy. Now, 24 asks people to believe a lot of far-fetched things (of which my favorite is that Jack Bauer would find it a uniquely good idea to knock over a gas station (and take hostages!) as pretext for stalling a suspect). I love David Palmer as much as anyone (Julia loves him even more) but this I just can't buy.
In any case, some of my left-minded acquaintances have scoffed at 24 and made allusions that had previously made no sense whatsoever to me -- until I realized that the plot and even the tone they had in mind where what we start to see at the end of Season 4.
Bonus points for "can you torture a guy who might know where a nuke is about to go off in an hour?" AND the hoary old rail-switch problem into the same episode. (OK, not literally one man versus five on train tracks, but instead one sure death versus millions in peril, in that "Jack points a gun at a surgeon's head" scene just before 3 a.m.)
Several places have a Seoul House with a higher Google page rank than the one in Oakland, including but not limited to Houston, Melbourne, Vancouver, and Fairfax. The Oakland one does have the dot-biz domain ("COMING SOON SUMMER 2006").
Some reviews and another review.
We went there last night with some friends who go there every December 24. The food was reasonably good; the atmosphere was depressing. (Nondescript place-of-dining decor; clock on the wall claimed that it was "Friday the 15th"; inexplicably they had a framed painting of JFK.)
I got the spicy BBQ pork; as expected, same recipe as served at the Korean place that anchors Emeryville Public Market but higher-quality meat. (It's been forever since I chose the Korean at the Public Market, partly because I go there at all so sporadically.) I suppose my biggest letdown was that I assumed this would be the kind of hot pot place where they had burners at our table and everyone's clothes smelled like meat. No such luck.
Can you find the Marginal Revolution post (specifically, some hyperlink text) that keeps distracting/startling me?
Car crashes into ABC7 Chicago studio
This is exactly why WKRP needs to come out on DVD (and why I wonder how we ever got along before YouTube).
Some political links, all via Instapundit:
""When I am President, I will work to protect children from inappropriate video game content."
--one front-running candidate
"I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives"
--another front-runner (caveat: he said it ten years ago)
In that second quote, wouldn't the "because..." clause do more to support the statement "I stayed out of politics"?
I presume they have until tomorrow to announce it, but you'd think the final Sunday night game of the regular season would have to be Tennessee at Indianapolis, since that game singlehandedly decides the final AFC playoff spot (and on the other side of the ball features the best team available to NBC).
Teams' own markets aside, I presume Fox gives us Dallas at Washington followed by Minnesota at Denver (both games for the final NFC playoff spot), while CBS gives us the jousting for #3 seed (Pittsburgh at Baltimore, then San Diego at Oakland).
I don't mean to speak ill of the dead, but "the prototype free safety for the new millennium?
This article is why good user interfaces are critical.
I'm all for getting everyone to their floors a few seconds faster, but a system flaw that misleads people into getting off on the wrong floor is far worse than a system that fails to save those few seconds.
"When our building opened, people kept getting off on the wrong floor because the elevator didn’t tell you which floor it was. Traditional elevators tell you where you are by lighting up each floor number as you reach it, but this elevator didn’t bother. It simply listed the next stops it was making. If it was stopping at floors 4 and 7, when the doors opened at the 4th floor, the electronic sign above the elevator doors would be displaying 7 - and people going to the 7th floor would see it and get off. It took months before engineers finally added a feature to the sign showing which floor the elevator was on."
I think it's safe to say the Redskins hold on. Your mileage may vary.
Without consulting any media sources, here's what I think are the relevant tiebreaks, according to these instructions and these standings:
AFC
Patriots and Colts clinched the #1 and #2 (respectively). For the #3 and #4, Chargers advantage over Steelers by conference record. (PIT clinches the division over CLE on head-to-head.) Jaguars clinched the #5. If both teams won, Titans over Browns for the #6 based on common opponents (the difference-maker is the Raiders). [But if both teams lost Week 17, Cleveland would have a better conference record.]
NFC
Cowboys and Packers clinched the #1 and #2 (respectively). Seahawks and Buccaneers clinched the #3 and #4 (respectively). [Ties on either tier would be broken by head-to-head.] Giants clinch the #5 should the Vikings' loss hold up.
Redskins would get the #6 with a 9-7 record; Vikings would get it if they win Week 17 and Washington loses.
If PHI and WAS were both 8-8, Redskins would win the tiebreak (eliminating Philly): head-to-head split, both 2-4 in conference and 7-7 vs. common opponents, but Washington would be 6-6 in conference.
If DET and MIN were both 8-8, Lions would win the tiebreak (eliminating Minnesota), because of a better conference record.
If there were a big dogpile at 8-8: Redskins would have head-to-head sweep over [Lions or Vikings] and Cardinals; however, Saints would win a multi-team tiebreak because of conference record.
32. Atlanta (3-12) (Last week: 32) Faint signs of life. (Remaining game: vs. Seattle)
31. Miami (1-14) (Last week: 31) I'd still take the Dolphins over the Falcons at a neutral site. (We didn't have access to the New England game: Did the Patriots just let up or did Miami hold down the score?) (Remaining game: vs. Cincinnati)
30. St. Louis (3-12) (Last week: 30) Just bad (1 of 5). (Remaining game: at Arizona)
29. NY Jets (3-12) (Last week: 29) Just bad (2 of 5). (Remaining game: vs. Kansas City)
28. Baltimore (4-11) (Last week: 27) Just bad (3 of 5). (Remaining game: vs. Pittsburgh)
27. Kansas City (4-11) (Last week: 26) Just bad (4 of 5). (Remaining game: at NY Jets)
26. Oakland (4-11) (Last week: 24) Just bad (5 of 5). (Remaining game: vs. San Diego)
25. San Francisco (5-10) (Last week: 28) Two in a row. Just like when they started the year 2-0! (Remaining game: at Cleveland)
24. Carolina (6-9) (Last week: 23) Steve Smith sighting! (Remaining game: at Tampa Bay)
23. Cincinnati (6-9) (Last week: 25) Spoilers: That's how you do it. (Remaining game: at Miami)
22. Denver (6-8) (Last week: 21) TBA (Remaining game: vs. Minnesota)
21. Arizona (7-8) (Last week: 20) Eked out a home win against a terrible opponent (1 of 2) (Remaining game: vs. St. Louis)
20. Detroit (7-8) (Last week: 19) Eked out a home win against a terrible opponent (2 of 2) (Remaining game: at Green Bay)
19. Chicago (6-9) (Last week: 22) Responsible for 2/3 of the Packers' losses this year. (Remaining game: vs. New Orleans)
18. Minnesota (8-6) (Last week: 15) Rotten egg alert. (Remaining game: at Denver)
17. New Orleans (7-8) (Last week: 18) What a squandered opportunity! Despite the loss, I'd take them over any of the teams below them. (Remaining game: at Chicago)
16. Houston (7-8) (Last week: 17) Winless in their division but 7-3 outside the AFC South. (The division itself is a combined 30-10 against other divisions.) (Remaining game: vs. Jacksonville)
15. Buffalo (7-8) (Last week: 13) Spoilers: You're doing it wrong. (Remaining game: at Philadelphia)
14. Philadelphia (7-8) (Last week: 14) What might have been. (Remaining game: vs. Buffalo)
13. Washington (7-7) (Last week: 16) Oh hi! Somebody really wanted that playoff spot. In with a win (vs. Dallas). (Remaining game: vs. Dallas)
12. Tennessee (9-6) (Last week: 11) This is the time of year for http://www.nfl.com/standings/tiebreakingprocedures . Tennessee and Cleveland did not face each other. Both would be 7-5 in conference if they win next week. (If both lose, the Browns get the playoff spot.) As for common opponents, Cincinnati beat TEN and CLE at home (but lost to CLE on the road). TEN swept Houston; CLE beat Houston at home. Oakland won vs. CLE but lost at TEN. Both teams beat the Jets. I think that means Tennessee is in with a win (at IND). (Remaining game: at Indianapolis)
11. Cleveland (9-6) (Last week: 8) As The Onion reminded us (http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/browns_reject_concept_of), everything is chaos. (Remaining game: vs. San Francisco)
10. Tampa Bay (9-6) (Last week: 9) For what it's worth: 6-1 at home (Jacksonville); 3-5 on the road (Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans) (Remaining game: vs. Carolina)
9. Seattle (10-5) (Last week: 12) For what it's worth: 7-1 at home (New Orleans), 3-4 on the road (San Francisco, St. Louis, Philadelphia) (Remaining game: at Atlanta)
8. NY Giants (10-5) (Last week: 10) Big road comeback in lousy weather? It has to be Eli Manning. (Remaining game: vs. New England)
7. Pittsburgh (10-5) (Last week: 7) Should be downgraded a bit for losing Willie Parker, but that just means a vast gulf between seventh and eighth is instead close. (Remaining game: at Baltimore)
6. San Diego (9-5) (Last week: 6) Chad point out that the "special Christmas Eve time" for Monday's game was only a half hour removed from normal. (Remaining game: at Oakland)
5. Jacksonville (11-4) (Last week: 5) Didn't bother to watch. Did almost start both Fred Taylor and MJD in the same fantasy consolation (3rd place) game. (Remaining game: at Houston)
4. Green Bay (12-3) (Last week: 3) Rumor has it Favre is mortal. The conventional wisdom about him shows a freakish amount of variance. (Remaining game: vs. Detroit)
3. Dallas (13-2) (Last week: 4) I would root for New England in a Patriots-Cowboys Super Bowl. Just saying. (Remaining game: at Washington)
2. Indianapolis (13-2) (Last week: 2) They sometimes toy with weaker opponents. (Remaining game: vs. Tennessee)
1. New England (15-0) (Last week: 1) What are the odds they do it? Maybe less than you think. They have to win their next four, and for example .95 to the 4th is about .81. (Remaining game: at NY Giants)
So I had a long fantasy football related post that I ditched because it bored even me. But then I found this site through an ESPN.com banner ad.
I'm intrigued that Major League Baseball isn't part of this. I'm agape at the Virginia Tech color scheme (as seen on the slide show when I first clicked the link).
Anyway, this is good time-wasting fun. I've decorated several bathrooms in Cleveland Browns and Jacksonville Jaguars glory.