If Life Were Like TV...

If life were like TV:

Every third criminal would be a serial killer.

Big fat loudmouth guys would always have thin hot wives.

Computers and databases would be lightning fast and always give the correct results.

Cell phones would never run out of battery power. Unless it would serve a dramatic purpose or let the cops catch the serial killer.

No one would ever go to the bathroom. Unless it would serve a dramatic purpose or let the cops catch the serial killer.

Blackout alcoholics would be clever and witty instead of mumbly and scary.

Gay men would always advertise themselves by being flamingly flamboyant.

People with Southern accents would always be ignorant and racist.

People with New York accents would always be pushy know-it-alls.
   Okay, maybe that one's true.

Right before you left the living room for the kitchen, you'd have to take a dramatic pause to let the music cue you off.

Everything would have a happy ending after thirty minutes.

This Is Humor?

I don't usually watch sitcoms. I make an exception for The Big Bang Theory - because it's about my people - and I do watch Modern Family from time to time but only because Sophia Vergara is a luscious handful. But tonight I decided to watch some sitcoms that normally I avoid.
   What a colossal crap sandwich.
   Seriously, it's bad. Very bad. Alarmingly bad. Not funny in the least, which is the best you can say, and insulting to boot. I think it was Seinfeld that started the trend of not-funny sitcoms, which continued with Friends and all those related mind-numbingly dull and awful programs. But it's even worse now, if you can believe. A room full of monkeys could write better jokes and situations.
   Or someone with a blog could do the same.
   So here, with absolutely no forethought or editing, is a list of sitcom premises that would do better than everything on TV today. Or at the very least they couldn't be any worse.

A wacky short-order cook leads a double life as a cannibal chef in an underground forbidden-foods club.

A motley collection of ne'er do-well itinerant jugglers decides to leave showbiz and settle in a small town where juggling is illegal. When beanbags are outlawed, will only outlaws have beanbags?

A frazzled young weather girl tries to find love in the big city alongside her work friends, all of whom hate her guts and are secretly trying to murder her.

An agoraphobic man meets a woman under house arrest on video chat. They find love and romance through the internet, and never realize they're next door neighbors.

A Victorian-era genius inventor must deal with the chaos that ensues when his half-wit lummox of a brother moves in with his ill-mannered, dirty family, complete with adorable talking piglet. Will our hero ever perfect the steam-powered zoetrope?

   See? Just off the top of my head and any of those would be better than 'How I Met Your Mother.'
   And I swear to God, if I see any of these ideas become shows I will find you and I will cut you three ways: hard, deep, and repeatedly. Try me.

I Want To Shake The Hand Of The Man

I was grocery shopping yesterday and I forgot to make a list so I was kind of wandering around the store trying to think about things I needed and what kind of meals I was going to make. And then I got thinking about how much I really wanted fajitas right then and there, in the store. But since I wasn't in Costco there was no chance I was going to get any. The first time I had fajitas was back in San Antonio, in high school, when Taco Cabana was just one store on Hildebrand that used to get closed down every two months when La Migra raided it and sent all the illegals home.
   I wanted to shake the hand of the man who invented fajitas, but the origins of that delicious food are lost in the mists of time. So I got to thinking about other great things I can't thank anyone for.

French bread pizza. It should be a travesty but it's oh-so delicious.
   Star fruit. It's fruit... shaped like a star. Sounds like a marketing ploy, but it's all natural.
Bogs. They're like swamps but without alligators and with mummified Stone Age people.
   Australian $2 coins. The best thing for scratching your scratch-off Lottery tickets.
Gyros meat. I know it's processed to Hell and back, but... mmmmm....
   Craftsman furniture. I could try to shake the hand of Gustav Stickley, but he's been dead for decades.
Carnies. God love 'em, they're so crooked they make Louisiana politicians look honest. Only hot chicks win the huge stuffed Pink Panther, how's that fair? I could shake one of their hands, but, really, I'd rather not.
    Gun shows. The only place where you can be amused, horrified, disgusted, and intrigued in the space of five minutes. Why is it the people you least want to have guns have the most?
Revell models. Really I'm more a fan of Testor's model glue, but they don't make it same way now as they did when I was a kid. No good fumes anymore. And, actually, one of the Revell founders is still alive, but he's in Florida and I never go there.
   Coca-Cola Santa Claus. Other than Nat Cole singing, nothing puts me more in the Christmas mood.
Undershirts. The thin, thin, thin kind you wear under a dress shirt. The kind Marlon Brando wore as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar. Nothing makes you feel more like a hard-boiled 50's detective than putting on an undershirt.

I Need A Catchphrase

Ah... the good old days of 70's TV... when everyone had a catchphrase. Everyone worth knowing, that is. That's how you knew they were a regular cast member. I'm feeling a little lost now, back in the corporate grind, and I need to know that I'm a regular cast member in my own life, and not just a bit player. Or, God forbid, an under-5 featured extra. I figure that there have been some catchphrases so long out of use that one of them has to fit my purposes.

   So here's a short list:
Dyn-o-mite!!
And that's the name of that tune...
What 'choo talkin' 'bout, Willis? ( a personal favorite because of all the apostrophes)
Aaaayyy!
Consume mass quantities.
Gotta put the hammer down.
Kiss my grits!
Hey hey hey! (this was Rerun, not Dwayne)
Who loves ya, baby?
You wouldn't like me when I'm angry...
I love it when a plan comes together.
I'm coming to meet you, Elizabeth!


COMMUTE: there - 35 minutes back - 50 minutes (I took a different way)
CONTRACT COUNTDOWN: 86 days

For Your Convenience

Last night was sitting on the couch eating dinner, as I usually do since I don't have a dining table. What can I say? I'm a guy who lives alone, it never occurred to me that I should get a dining table. Still hasn't. Anyway, I tried to eat healthy, so I had some baby carrots, apple slices, dried cherries, walnuts, and a whole wheat English muffin with a little peanut butter on it. Proud of my dietary restraint, as I munched away I realized that I had spent a total of two or three minutes arranging my meal, because all of the food preparation had been done for me.
   The carrots came already peeled and washed and in a bag, the apple slices too, the cherries had the pits and stems removed and the walnuts were already shelled. The English muffin came pre-sliced. I did have to stir up the peanut butter - I get the kind that separates - but that was the only real effort I had to expend, aside from plugging the toaster in.
   Wasn't this a Twilight Zone episode? The one where modern man becomes so dependent on others to do menial tasks like peeling and slicing carrots that in the end he becomes irrelevant? When did I become so busy that I can't cut up an apple? Or slice my own English muffin?
   And what about the packages these things come in? When I slice my own apple the only thing left is the core, which could become compost. If I did that sort of thing. Carrots would leave tips and stems and peels. But when I'm done with my pre-sliced apples, and carrots, and cherries, and walnuts, I have four plastic bags. Thick sturdy things with zip-tops, that don't biodegrade in the least. I hope hermit crabs find a nice home in them when they wash back up on the beach.
   I'm not advocating a return to the 19th Century or anything - I'm not really down with the idea of eating what I kill - but, jeez, what is consuming all this convenience food freeing me up to do? Watch more TV? I do enough of that already, thank you very much.
   Time to make my own sourdough starter, churn my own butter, and smoke a ham. Or maybe I'll just hit Jack-in-the-Box, COPS is on tonight...

Get Dressed To Make A Phone Call

When you're a kid your life is nothing but a series of firsts. First steps, first teeth, first broken bone, first driver's license, first kiss, first run-in with John Law, the list goes on and on. But as you get older the list grows shorter and shorter. You've done many things at least once, and the older you get, the less inclined you are to doing anything new or anything dangerous. If you haven't ever jumped from an airplane once you turn 30 chances are good you never will. And I'm over 30. But I did buck the trend today, and had another first.
   I had my first Skype call.
   Since my computer has a camera built-in I've had this capability for a year and half now, but I never downloaded Skype, never installed it, never felt the need to. But a friend of mine is doing some freelance work and is using up her cell phone minutes, and she was under the mistaken impression that I used Skype regularly. She is also one of those people who doesn't have a land line, for some unfathomable reason. I did a quick install, set up my account, and she called me. It was interesting, much like video teleconferences they've had for decades, but from the convenience of my own living room.
   I gotta say, I don't like the idea of having to get dressed to make a phone call.
   I knew she was going to call, so I combed my hair. Not something I'm used to doing for a phone conversation. That's the great thing about phone calls, you can do anything - and I do mean ANYTHING, just ask my sister - while you're talking to someone. But not with Skype. I have to sit in my chair at my desk, stare into the camera so I look engaged, and be careful not to make any noises that the microphone might pick up. And trust me, I make a lot of noises no one else wants to hear.
   It's convenient for keeping in touch with loved ones, foreign exchange students talking to their parents back home, for instance, but for a quick chat or what have you, I'm not so sure video phones are a great idea. If I gotta make sure I'm wearing pants before I answer the phone something's not right with the world.

Weather Does Not Compute

Do you know what Southern California needs? Cyborg weathermen.
   This time of year the weather is very important in LA, because it's the only time of year we get weather. You can see the giddy excitement building in our local weathermen starting a little before Thanksgiving, when the winds start to change and things cool off. Slightly. But then come Christmas, oh man, they go nuts.
   But there are so many of them, on too many channels. You got your Johnny Mountain, your Fritz Coleman, your Dallas Raines, your Kaj Goldberg and other less-colorfully named weathercasters, a veritable legion of people trying to bring me up-to-the-minute weather. They each put their own spin on what is essentially the National Weather Service forecast, and I don't know who to listen to.
   If we had a cyborg weatherman, though... ah, that would enforce consistency. Cyborgs don't need to eat or sleep, so they could be up all the time, 24x7, during severe weather. You'd only need one cyborg per channel, and you could use the salary expense saved to get more accurate forecasts - for the three months that sort of thing makes a difference here. If the eggheads at CalTech aren't already working on this, they should be.
   Let's see... who to cyborg first? I'd love to put metal parts on Fritz Coleman, but I think Johnny Mountain should lead the pack on this one, he would benefit the most from rigorous computer-based thinking.

I Don't Care

Heretic. Blasphemer. Subversive. Deserter. Turncoat. Commie. I have been called all these things, and worse besides. But I'm a creampuff, really. What could possibly make otherwise sober and level-headed citizens revile me so?
   I don't care about the SuperBowl.
   Yup. Couldn't give a rat's ass. Means as much to me as World Cup soccer, and I don't even know when that is. And I don't mean this particular SuperBowl, I mean all SuperBowls, across all time. It's one of those things that's hyped beyond all reason, pumped up in such an overbearing and grandiose fashion that it couldn't possibly live up to the expectations. And it doesn't. Falls flat.
   'Oooh, but you'll miss the SuperBowl ads,' you say. And I say 'no, I won't.' If I wanted to see them I could watch them on YouTube, but I don't give a rat's ass about that either.
   Don't get me wrong, I'm not an elitist, I haven't turned my TV to PBS and unplugged it. I watch a lot of bad TV, I revel in it, and lately I have watched some football. For God's sake, I watch NASCAR relgiously so I'm not exactly highbrow. I'm just tired of overblown, over-hyped crap that I'm supposed to like if I was in any way a good American. Enough already.

Here's a short list of other crap people seem to think matters that I also don't care about. This is just a sample, the entire list is far too long to share.
   Grammys
   Lost
   Twitter
   Lady Gaga
   Seinfeld - a blast from the past, but it's still a horrible show
   YouTube
   American Idol
   Trans Fats
   Winter Olympics - when somebody non-white wins something let me know

p.s. Yes, I do know the SuperBowl is next weekend. That's how much I don't care about it, I'm letting you know well beforehand.

Worthless And Weak

I've been 'between assignments' for a while now, five months, and while I am getting some good work done - fourth draft of one novel, outline for another - I am developing some bad habits.
   I make time for 'The Price Is Right.' Daytime TV is indeed a vast wasteland, vaster than prime time for sure, yet if I'm in my apartment at 10 AM on a weekday I'm watching Drew Carey give away cars and vacations. Call it a habit decades in the making, I used to watch Bob Barker during summer vacation. It's my grandmother's fault.
   I drink waaaay more soda than I should. It's a habit I won't break for some reason. It really is just as simple as not buying it any more, but just as some people smoke when they drink, when I buy Lotto tickets in the convenience store I also get a soda. I'm a prisoner of my addiction, I need a government grant to get the aspartame monkey off my back.
   I go to the same online job boards day after day. This far into unemployment, if these job boards haven't landed me a paying gig by now they're probably not going to. And yet I go back again and again, thinking things will be different this time.
   YouTube. Farting dinosaurs. 'Nuff said.
   I don't shave every day, or even regularly. I'm one of those guys with perpetual five o'clock shadow. You know the kind, you see them in a store and you wonder what kind of job they have that they don't need to shave. Inside tip: they probably don't have a job.
   Mid-day grocery store visits. This far into my vagrancy, I know that most grocery stores are finished stocking by about 9:30 AM, and most old people don't get there until about 11 AM. So I swoop in during the sweet spot between stockers and seniors, when the aisles are blissfully free of obstructions.
   I play Mafia Wars on Facebook far, far, far too much. It's not even a particularly good game, but it's just good enough to keep me coming back.
   Glee. I can't help it, I like the show, and I have this odd fascination with Sue Sylvester. It's nothing I want to explore further, not in a public forum.

I really need a job.

Uh-oh...

After a particularly surreal phone interview in which I was turned down because I made too little in my prior job - yup, you read that right, I didn't make enough to be considered for this new position - I had to take a few minutes to unwind. So I clicked through the broadcast channels and settled on 20.1, which in Pasadena is a Spanish-language channel. I don't really speak Spanish, just the curse words, but I was following the story, and after a few minutes it was all making sense to me. Then, in horror, I made a terrible, terrible, shocking revelation. With that one simple act, watching Spanish-language TV even though I don't speak Spanish, my life had completely changed.
   I had turned into my father.
   Once, years ago, I walked into the house to find him watching 'The Seven Samurai' on channel 41, Univision in San Antonio. The movie was spoken in Japanese, but subtitled in Spanish, and my father neither reads, writes, nor speaks either of those languages. When I called him on it he outlined the story for me and continued watching.
   And now the curse has fallen on the next generation. On me. I can see that I will eventually turn into my own grandfather, no use in fighting it, I'm gonna grab this bull by the horns and ride it to the bitter end. I'll need polyester jumpsuits in colors not found in nature, a fedora, black socks with worn dress shoes, and a great-big American land yacht of a car.
   I drive a Chevy Tahoe, so I already got the last one covered. Pray for me.

Slow Down

Last week, out of the blue, I decided I needed to get my wrist watches running again. I have a few, but one is from a grabber machine at Dave and Buster's and one has Ren and Stimpy on the face (remember them?). The ones I wanted to get running again are my two nice ones, with worn and broken wrist bands and hands that haven't moved in years. So I took them up the street and got new batteries and new bands, and $60 later I have two working wrist watches.
   But when I thought about it, I had no idea why I suddenly wanted to get my watches repaired.
   It's been years since I've worn one, literally. I remember that I stopped wearing a watch because everything around me had a clock, the computer at work, my truck, my cell phone, the cable box, every receipt from every store. I didn't need a watch to tell me the time because time was all around me, all day every day.
   And then it hit me, that's why I decided to wear a watch again. Everything around me tells me the time, demands that I know the time of day, all day every day. If I look at my cell phone, it tells me the time is exactly 8:48. No guesswork, no interpretation. Cell phones, computers, cable boxes, they're all synchronized with the national clock in Colorado every night, so they're spot-on accurate almost all the time. To the millisecond.
   My wrist watches are analog, sweeping hands on a round dial, not blocky digital numbers on a square readout. With a wrist watch, I can decide for myself what time it is. If the big hand is near the 10, it's about ten before the hour. But it might be a little before that, it might be a little after that. If the battery is running low, the big hand might be lagging well behind the 'actual' time. And I'm cool with that.
   I'm the last guy to get all freaky and New Age - I've ranted about that before - but maybe people should divorce themselves from the clock, at least for a little while. Let the digital age slip away, embrace analog again. Get back to wrist watches, to pencil and paper, to vinyl records, to a good book on real paper. Maybe talk to your family a little bit, see what they're all about, instead of watching too much TV and taking a pill to go to sleep.

To Boldly Go...

A few weeks back I turned off my cable service - told you I would - and now my TV is pure antenna. I have line-of-sight to the transmitters on Mt. Wilson about 5 miles away, so I get many, many stations crystal clear and perfect. And on one of those channels last night, I re-discovered the original Star Trek.
   Years ago, back when I was in elementary school, I discovered Trek at after-school care. I found myself alone in the Lego room one day, wandered out to the TV room where people were gathered, took one look at the show - it was the one with the rock-eating monster protecting her babies - and I was hooked. Hooked like a perch on a worm, like a duck on a junebug, like a runway model on smack. I watched every episode from then on, forgetting Legos and even abandoning Lincoln Logs. I managed to convince my mother to take me to one of the first Star Trek conventions, where I got a windbreaker and a copy of the Starfleet Technical Manual. Yeah, I was a wee little nerd.
   In the intervening years Paramount has put out movie after movie, and done series after series. But I gotta tell you, none of them match classic Trek. I haven't seen an episode with the original cast in years, and this was actually very well written, Shatner was a far better actor than he's given credit for, James Doohan was excellent, and even if I found faults with the direction and editing, the whole thing was waaaaay better than I remember it being.
   So now, decades later, I'm going back to where it all started. Classic Trek. The wee little nerd inside me is jumping for joy.

A Very Special Posting

You know what I miss? 'Very Special' episodes of TV shows. Time was the TV networks actually made the effort to appear to be serving the public interest, at least a little bit. Back in the day ABC actually had the After School Special, which aired after school - duh - and always seemed to star Christy MacNichol for some reason. The stories explored topics like divorce, or substance abuse, or teen pregnancy. I was a little young to watch them, and I also didn't care. My sister recently gave me a boxed set of the shows on DVD, and they came in a miniature Trapper Keeper. Sweet!
   Then we got a few 'very special' episodes of shows like Diff'rent Strokes or Blossom or Punky Brewster. And it seemed like every episode of Moesha was 'very special.'
   And now... nothing.
   Maybe I'm not watching the proper channels, but I haven't seen or heard of a 'very special' anything in quite a while. As far as I can tell this means either a) kids have wised up in the past twenty years, or b) the TV networks stopped caring enough even to pretend to be socially relevant.
   I'm guessing it's b).

Where’s Scooby?

What happened to Saturday morning cartoons? Time was, not so long ago, there were good shows on Saturday mornings, even as late as last year, back when there was still a thing as Kid’s WB. Now all I see is terrible, terrible anime garbage that is really a 22-minute commercial for some stupid collectible card game.
    So I did some investigating and I found something disturbing. Not that I’m Sherlock Holmes or anything, I just poked around on the Internet.
    None of the networks do their own Saturday morning programming any longer, they contract it out to someone else. Just like lazy American corporations send jobs offshore, lazy, unimaginative American broadcasters get someone else to do their Saturday morning programming.

Here's the lineup:
ABC    ABC Kids, which is just a rehash of the same Disney channel pap that insults kids on basic cable
CBS     Kewl-opolis, a travesty which was sub-contracted to DIC, but now DIC is part of Cookie Jar. When you lose track of things for all the acquisitions and buy-outs you know you're in the realm of weasel corporate monkey-spank.
NBC     programming provided by qubo, a truly frightening conglomerate of corporate amoebae
CW     CW 4Kids, provided - surprise - by 4Kids Entertainment
Fox    used to have 4Kids stuff, they’re not even trying any more, their Saturday morning is sports and infomercials.

    Time was I would have said I was outraged by this. However, in this day and age, this kind of cynical corporate bottom-lining doesn’t surprise me in the least, and since I’m not surprised I can’t really be outraged.
    The real shame here is that the same Baby Boomers who made my Saturday morning experience an amazing adventure have now turned their talents to evil and are ruining the first morning of the weekend for their own grandkids.

Daytime TV

Daytime TV sure does suck. I don’t remember it being quite this bad from when I was in college and had time to watch TV during the day. I tried to watch Young and the Restless - not one of my Grandmother’s “stories” but it happened to be on.
  It’s supposed to be a romance, but it ends up being overwrought and unbeliveable.
In the five minutes I watched: someone back from the dead, people married to keep the baby out of the hands of an evil person, an unhappy groom, secrets from a boarding school, a funeral, and true love denied. Also, an actress who has clearly never given birth playing the mother of an infant.
  Cliched Quote: ‘just in time for the fireworks’