After These Messages
Commercials. Commercials suck. After watching TV shows on DVD and through my Tivo, it's shocking just how much time is dedicated to commercials. I can usually get through an hour long episode of something in just under 40 minutes. There are a few that I think are funny or witty. Endurable i suppose. There are also commercials that make me want to hork.
Commercials I don't mind:Dr. Pepper ad set to the song "I would do anything for love". I just get a kick out of that commercial. It impresses me how accurately the action mates up to the music. How perfectly the line "But I won't do that!" matches up to the girl reaching for the Dr. Pepper.
Capital One ads. Pillaging barbarians, maurading pirates, ice beasts. Fun.
Burger King commercial where the "King" comes from out of no where to intercept a football. Maybe it's because it's just about the last thing you'd expect. I dunno. I think it's funny.
Random commercial #1. This commercial involves two guys painting a house. One guy tries to repel down to get the top of the wall. The rope is tied to a vent spout and his buddy is holding on. Basically one guy ends up in a tree and the other busts his ass. I have NO CLUE what the ad was advertising.
Random commercial #2. Two guys are trying to take care of a bee hive in a tree. It ends with one guy falling on the bee hive and I think the other in a trash can. Again I have NO CLUE what the ad was advertising.
Commercials that make my brain try to claw it's way out of my skull:Cortaslim. Dr. Greg Cynamone can go find the nearest cliff and jump off it. Banishment to some horrible dimension where clowns feed on your soul while beating you with 25lbs pickles is not punishment enough. Not only is the frequency of this commercial obscene, but it jacks the volume by about 3000%. Gaurunteed to be jarring at 1AM. Fuckers.
Drug commercials in general. Any ad that says "ask your doctor about it today!" is just wrong. Our country loves to pop pills. This is the last thing we need. Plus did you go to med school? No? So why do you think you need
??
Any Burger King commercial except the aforementioned one. Mainly because the "King" is freaky. It's creepy. It's eerie. Probably even evil.
PeoplePC commercials. Damn are they annoying. Again, they jack the volume so that your ears bleed by the end of it. Not only that, but "web excellerator" stuff is just crap. Read the fine print. They're just trying to pull one over on an unobservant public. Fuckers.
Old Navy commercials. All of them. Fleece should be one of those bad words the censor happy FCC should ban. Gah! Don't they just make your eyes bleed??
There's probably more, but those are the ones off the top of my head. I'll add more if I think of them.
Thanksgiving and Fire
Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. We ate at our neighbors who had invited us and 2 other families to eat with them. That was great. We don't really do much with our neighbors, so it was nice to interact with them. It tends to be tough because of the generation gap. Most of our neighbors have children our age so most social interactions are awkward. At least we didn't get seated at the kiddie table :) Although the football on really sucked. The Dallas-Denver game was horrid. Neither team deserved to win, and the game just would not end. It was painful.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:
Goblet of Fire. Warp 3. Engage! So we did get to see the next harry potter movie. It was great, although a bit rushed. Tthe plot line seemed a wee bit undersampled. I suppose it was necessary to get a massive book like that into a reasonable lengthed movie. But frankly, I'd have been fine with a
really long movie if it could get through the whole book without feeling so rushed. The next two books are even longer. The sucky thing is that it's not like they could break each one into two movies, unless they released both of them at the same time and didn't try to come up with a hollywood style ending for the first movie.
2Blog || !2Blog
I've decided to give up all pretenses of making some great production out of my blog. I don't seem to have the will to sit down and do it. And because I'm some what of a perfectionist, it would irritate me if I tried and couldn't spend the time to make it rock. For such things please see: shanshu . Instead you get the insane gibberings of my brain.
We went to the Fox theater again on Sunday to see the Radio City Rockettes. It was a Christmas extravaganza. Which completely violated my rule of no Christmas before Thanksgiving. Strange that I'd be for a form of segragation. But it was great. Lots of music, pretty girls dancing, midgets (Amanda seemed very entertained by the midgets) and overall fun. And then WHAM!!! Bible! It ended with a very preachy nativity set. Since it's Christmas we probably should pay some lip service to the actual religious aspects of it. But you should warn someone that they're going to get backhanded by the bible. I walked out of there with very little recollection of the actual dancing and more this general feel of dread and guilt. Way to go.
Oh, and they actually had live sheep, camels and a donkey on stage.
On the way there I saw a minivan going WAY to fast creep up on a jeep sit on its back bumper for a couple seconds then wildly swerve and actually hit the jeeps back right bumper. Keep in mind there was very little traffic. So...WTF?? How could you actually get in that accident?? Although this goes a long way to support my theory that at the heart of every traffic jam is a mom in a minivan. They may not be actually in the accident, but somehow they've caused it. This might be my closing argument. Letterman just used the word "verisimilitude" in a conversation with George Clooney. Isn't it a little impolite to be wielding your mighty vocabulary with reckless abandon? How long has he been waiting to use that I wonder. Oh, and when did Letterman get so old??
How many emails have to go unresponded before I can get pissed?We're going to have Thanksgiving with our neighbors. We've been asked to bring wine. Because we have "great taste in wine". We do?? Our wine selection usually consists of "huh, that's an interesting name, we'll get that."
I've completely given up trying to understand the blog editing window here. Sofar through no action of mine that I can see, it embedded that link to shanshu's site in the html of the paragraph stuff 4 times per paragraph, and would randomly decide to use the paragraph break.
The Seinfeld Effect
There is a scientific principle I've been working on called the Seinfeld Effect.* Bear with me as it's still a little rough around the edges. Tivo has introduced some perturbations to the over all equations so I've had to revise a "Special" form and a "General" form. But the crux of the theory is that everybody has a limited number of shows they can watch, and from each show a limited number of episodes. For any episodic show you watch extremely infrequently, the Seinfeld Effect will kick in and compensate so that you won't use up too many of your finite allotment of shows and episodes.
For example: I have seen about 12 episodes of Seinfeld. I have seen each of them about 47 times.
Any time I was flipping through channels and saw that it was on, and actually thought (because I'm not much of a fan of the show) "I guess that's okay to watch." It always turns out to be one of the few episodes I've seen. So there was a new show on this season: How I Met Your Mother. Kinda lame, but it's got Doogie Houser and Willow in it so I thought I'd give it a chance. It's on at a weird time that I'm not used to having shows I watch in those time slots. You'd think I'd program Tivo to tape them for me but I'm Too Smart for that! Keep in mind this show started this season, like a month or so ago. I've seen all of one episode. And I've seen it twice. The Seinfeld Effect hard at work, not only making a show play a rerun 5 weeks after starting, but for keeping me from remembering to program my Tivo. (The first being the "General" and the second being "Special").
So next time you're flipping through the channels and see that one episode of that one show for the 127th time, be sure to blame Seinfeld.
*
Note this is different from the theory where Kramer kills a bug on Tuesday in N.Y., and you get earthquakes in South Asia and Godzilla in Tokyo on Wednesday.
