It's Not TV, It's...
After watching four-and-a-half seasons of The Wire in two weeks and then trying to catch up on my DVR, it hit me that The Wire was so compelling that everything else I watch is boring by comparison. Everything I've read proclaiming how excellent the show is has been true...
I even found myself struggling to keep myself awake while watching the season premiere of Lost!
UPDATE: Barack Obama's favorite show is The Wire. You can't watch the show without being affected by David Simon's handling of the issues of poverty and race. Point for him.
Labels: 2008 Election, 2008 Primaries, Barack Obama, TV
Here's to Random Foods
This one's for Kevin...
So, for those of you who don't know (and a lot of you do because I've been bitching about it for weeks), I'm getting all four wisdom teeth out on Thursday morning.
I don't know what that's going to do to my eating abilities over the next few days, but I'm assuming I'll be drinking shakes for most of the next week. So, I'm eating whatever the heck I want tonight. And what's that? Twix, Doritos, and scotch...
I was a little iffy on these particular Twix... I came home to find that I bought the newfangled peanut butter Twix instead of the caramel ones, and yelled, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" when I realized it. But, y'know, they're almost indistinguishable from the originals.
The Doritos are Cool Ranch, always a good choice; and boy, do I like my Johnnie Walker Black Label.
And man, I just cannot stop watching The Wire. I've plowed through three-plus seasons in like two weeks.
And that's my life...
Labels: Personal, TV
Chris Matthews is "Scared" of Hillary Clinton
There's been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about
Chris Matthews picking on Hillary Clinton.
I don't get to associate with TV types much, but my one brush happened to be with Chris Matthews in 2002. I never have before because I figured I might get some of his staff in trouble, but it's been more than five years and I'd imagine most, if not all of them are gone. Anyway:
I did a few days of volunteer work for Hardball when Chris Matthews came to town in 2002 to interview Hillary (I chauffered him around and helped some of his staff run errands)...
Nearly to a person, his regular staff told me and whispered among each other that Matthews was never afraid of any guest, but he was "scared" (in at least one case, "scared shitless") of Hillary.
During the time I spent with him, he totally antagonized me, a 22 year old kid at the time -- the first thing he told me was that I must've been helping the show out because I was a "Hillary lover" like it would've been a horrible thing (I've never particularly liked her -- I even volunteered for Tasini against her for a while in '06), but he'd have none of it). He proceeded to ask if I was the "love child of two hippies" (I'm not sure what the hell that's supposed to mean) and on a couple of occasions accused me of being gay (I'm not).
Going into the few days with him, Matthews was my idol (I was in the middle of a neocon phase at the time before becoming an uberliberal the last 3-4 years) and I rarely missed his show... However, he is exactly in person like he is on TV. A mega-asshole!An asshole, a homophobe, talks all the time at the top of his lungs, and scared of Hillary... I'd guess the dude is pretty damn insecure.
Labels: 2008 Election, 2008 Primaries, Hillary Clinton, TV
Albany, NY -- Tonight's Lost
After a couple of really good episodes of Lost, tonight's was pretty weak, until the last 15 seconds or so.
Major plot hole... If Sun knows that her pregnancy is going to cause her to die, why doesn't she ask Juliet to give her an abortion? Is she Catholic or something?
Labels: TV
Albany, NY -- New Addition to My TV Lineup
I'm in the middle of the second season of House on DVD (after watching the first back in February), and I am really starting to enjoy it. The first season was good, but was mostly about the medical cases. The second season delves more into House as a person, and it's much more interesting. I can't wait to catch up to where the series is this year (Season 3).
House: "I'm not sad, I'm complicated. Chicks dig that."
Labels: TV
Albany, NY -- Brownie, You're Doin' a Heck of a Job
More from CableMonkey in Louisiana:
I just went around to a few of the stores here in the local area I live in. Most of the gas stations are currently out of gas. The local Pilot station has the low and high grade gas, but no mid grade. A no-brand gas station had nothing but the high grade. I think I saw cars at the Exxon station on the south side of town, but I didn't go there. Every Citgo station I saw was out of gas. The Exxon station in Start, Louisiana only had diesel.I actually live just east of Monroe. I've heard reports from West Monroe that there is gas there at many locations. I have heard nothing from Monroe itself.As for food, everything seems to be fine. Rumors are still going around like crazy and its hard to distinguish between false and real information.Maureen Dowd is one columnist who, like me, is seething over the Bush administration's
fine combination of incompetence and indifference in handling the hurricane relief:
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.At Alternet, Jordan Flaherty discusses the race and class implications of the relief efforts in New Orleans:
Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment, deindustrialization and corruption. Simply repairing the damage from this pre-Katrina hurricane will take billions.Rupert Cornwell
answers some questions we've all had on our minds.
A young, talented (and very pretty, I know her) writer from New Orleans named Anya Kamenetz has
published her thoughts in the Village Voice about the ordeal from a Jewish perspective.
Read my pecs... no new...
oops!
The New York Times
reviews Green Day's tour -- I'm going to see them for the third time on the tour in Hartford on Friday. They're great, and American Idiot is a seminal album in punk history, but they unfortunately have been playing the same setlist, night in and night out. I'm really going to see
Jimmy Eat World, whom I saw in Columbus last November and who put on one hell of a show.
Time to watch last night's
Real Time with Bill Maher. One of the guests is Bradley Whitford, who when not playing bass with Aerosmith, stars as Josh Lyman on the
West Wing. Man, I can't wait for new episodes of that.
Labels: George Bush, Katrina, Music, Politics, Republican Party, TV
Albany, NY -- Military Hecklers Don't Like Homos
Just when we thought Cindy Sheehan's 15 minutes might be up, things are coming to a head in Crawford. A small church in Smyrna, TN, is conducting a protest of its own, heckling military funerals, claiming that U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq because the U.S. is a country that harbors homosexuals. Speaking of Christians, how's this for irony in Basra?
The Deep South's one movie studio, the only one in the country where actresses are paid in beads, is in trouble... Hurricane Katrina is set to bear down on New Orleans.
I rarely watch TV news anymore, and was reminded why when I put on Meet the Press for a few minutes this morning. The guests were all high-ranking generals: Wesley Clark, Wayne Downing, Barry McCaffrey and Montgomery Meigs. Even they couldn't put their politics and talking points aside. They were all talking past each other, and in fact declined to answer Tim Russert on several occasions, saying, "You're asking the wrong question, Tim. The question you should be asking is..." Since when do the subjects tell the interviewers how to conduct the interview? I've been seeing this a lot.
Labels: Iraq, Katrina, TV
Albany, NY -- MC Dubya
As mentioned in the last post, the Daily Show was great last night. At the beginning of the episode, Jon did a long piece on Bush's evasion of Cindy Sheehan, reporters, and reality (and did his trademark Bush snicker), which culminated in a rap video montage of "M.C. Dubya"'s repetitive talking points. I couldn't do it justice in text; you'll have to see it. If the Daily Show posts the video tomorrow, I'll put up a link.
The third segment was an interview with Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens. If you're not familiar, he's a British chap who considered himself a liberal for several years, and suddenly became a rabid neocon sometime in the last ten years. He now writes column after column bashing liberals, including a recent one which aimed to portray Cindy Sheehan as an anti-Israel nutjob. According to this blog post, he owes Cindy an apology. Anyway, Jon Stewart ripped Chris a new asshole, giving him a temporary comeuppance. Do catch this episode tomorrow in reruns if you didn't see it tonight.
My OC conservative compadre Tenchusatsu from Silicon Investor got a kick out of this photo he took on the freeways of Southern California. He is right; there is potentially a certain degree of hypocrisy in being a liberal who drives a large SUV; however, if someone needs an SUV (has a large family or a lot of cargo), then there's nothing wrong with that. I have a problem when someone who could do just fine driving a small car that gets 40 MPG and opts for the 15 MPG SUV. But, of course, we all look for the hypocrisy in the other side, and to an extent, we're all often hypocrites ourselves. Good stuff, Ten -- great to see someone else trying to master the art of one-handed photography at 80 MPH!
Labels: George Bush, Politics, TV
