Television You May Not Be Watching

I watch a lot of television. It's a legitimate artistic medium! And you can stop lamenting the cancellation of Arrested Development and Firefly, because there's plenty to watch this very autumn!

The four comedies I've listed here are the funniest things on television right now. I fear that the newer shows will get cancelled in their prime, due to low viewership.  The other two shows are on seasons five and six, respectively, and still haven't lost their sparkle.

I've also included Smallville, for some reason.

Fun fact: I don't recall any of the shows listed here ever using painfully prolonged cringe humour.

Disclaimer: These programs are rated 14+, as they may contain violence, profanity, and depictions of sexual activity.

Relative Newcomers

Cougar Town 

Wednesday 8:30 (ABC/CITY) - New episode November 17th
The only cougar remaining on this program is a peripheral character. It's the most improved show of last year.

If you watch Modern Family, I implore you to keep the television on for another half-hour. Because, with a name like "Cougar Town", this show needs all the spill-over it can get. More than any show on television right now, Cougar Town gives me the feeling of hanging out with friends and family. It played out the title's appropriateness in the first six episodes or so, but the real premise is a woman who at 42 was never prepared for single life (or for her son to grow up) learning where she can find meaning in her life. Like the next "relative newcomer" on this list, Cougar Town has managed to live up to the promise of its first season. The other feel-good family comedy to share the 8-9 block, Modern Family, deserved it's Best Comedy Emmy last year, but I can't help but feel that it's losing momentum in comparison.
Fun fact: I never see the title card coming. You think it must have passed already, because it is very brief and it's 8:37... then, BAM!, there it is. This season they've made humourous additions to the title screen including "(Still) Cougar Town", "It's not what the show is... Cougar Town" and "Titles are Hard: Cougar Town"


Community
Thursday 8:00 (NBC/CITY) - New episode November 11th
It shares its time slot with The Big Bang Theory, but this show is doing way more interesting things with it.

I've heard this show compared to the early seasons of The Simpsons (yeah, I played that card). The characters are wacky and the situations are surreal, but I must care about the students at Greendale Community College because this show is so gosh diddly-darn heartwarming at times. Setting a show at a community college is a genius idea, because it puts together characters that are so diverse in terms of age, race, faith, political views, family, and interests. It's great to see how they learn to learn from each other AND how they all get sucked into the same craziness. You may have heard of their big concept episodes like "Modern Warfare" (action movie parody), "Contemporary American Poultry" (mafia parody), and  "Epidemiology" (zombie parody), but lower-key episodes like "Accounting for Lawyers" and "Psychology of Letting Go" have a lot of emotion with a good measure of crazy.
Fun Fact: It has the catchiest title sequence I've seen since 30 Rock first came on the air. Also, in a recent episode a main character had an entire plot play out in the background of other scenes, with no commentary.

Stalwarts

30 Rock
Thursday 8:30 (NBC/CITY) - New episode November 11th
It's still got it, even if it looked like it might lose it.

I'm mostly recommending 30 Rock to those who jumped ship because they felt the quality drop. The latter half of Season 4 had over-arcing plots with great returns, namely Liz's "future husband" plot with guest star Michael Sheen and the purchase of NBC by Kabletown. This season had a great premiere, and last week's "Reaganing" used each character really well (even Jenna and Kenneth). Since the premiere also used Jenna well, I'm wondering if there's a correlation there. If you're watching season four, a low tolerance for Julianne Moore's Bostonian impersonation may discourage you.
Fun Fact: I got nothing. I considered doing some research for a fun fact, but you could do that if you wanted to.

American Dad! - New episode tonight!! (November 7th)
Sunday 9:30 (FOX/Global)
It's simply hilarious. It makes me laugh my weird, loud, suffocating-seal laugh -- and more often than most other shows.
 
It has the wild, manic energy of that other Seth MacFarlane show, except there are no cut-away gags. The humour happens right there, when the characters are interacting with each other. It can be pretty violent, risqué, and off-colour, just like Family Guy, but here the character relationships aren't sacrificed to service the offensiveness. The only real relationship left in Family Guy is between Brian and Stewie, but on American Dad! great episodes have come from the relationships between all five leads. I'd say "passionate" describes each of the Smith family members, but "obsessive" and "delusional" also work.
Fun fact: As of last year, all events depicted in this program may be an elaborate illusion.

Surprising comeback?

Smallville
Friday 8:00, Saturday 5:00 (SPACE)
It's still on the air. I was surprised too. This season, we might actually see some blue tights and the return of Lex.

I have high hopes for Smallville's last season (season ten). The last two seasons had to do without the series' best villains, Lex and Lionel Luthor. It was dark times. They had replacements, but Doomsday was dull and Tess Mercer (female Luthor surrogate) is still all over the place. Even worse, the show devoted way too much time to Green Arrow's melodrama. But the first few episodes of this season teased the viewers with a satisfying conclusion to the series. A disturbed Lex clone is rapidly aging from childhood, Lois and Clark are on the same page, and Clark is getting pressured to be a more public figure. As long as Tess avoids sleeping with every new male character, Green Arrow remains seen and not heard, and Tess avoids being part of every secret organization, this season should turn out great.

Fun fact: Oh god, what am I saying? How about you don't watch Smallville, and I just tell you which episodes are worth it.  Last night's wasn't. If you liked Smallville years ago and forgot about it after the writer's strike, this is a good time to pick it back up.

I Watch, But I Don't Feel Strongly About Recommending

If you didn't like these shows before, you still won't like them.  Some are really good shows, but are so hyped that I don't think they need my endorsement. Some have consistency issues.

The Simpsons, Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, Glee, Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, The Office

But seriously. Arrested Development was starting to get weird near the end, and was on long enough to tell some really great stories, but Firefly barely had a chance! There was so much left unexplored!

Communication is a tricky thing

I recently condensed my life's purpose into a sixteen-word sentence (thirteen if you don't count articles and conjunctions - yeah, that's right, separate and not equal).  It took cooperation, focus, deep thought, a sense of language, and several hours of work, all told. I shared the sentence with my father, who said it was "pith", which I took to mean "glib, empty words" by the tone of his voice. After consulting a dictionary, I realized that "pith" and "glib, empty words" have nearly perfectly opposite meanings. He wasn't dismissing my sentence, no matter his tone; he actually expressed appreciation for my accomplishment. But in that moment of misunderstanding, I inferred from his reaction that pithy words may have volumes of meaning for one person, yet would require significant unpacking to be understood by someone else.  When I read my life purpose sentence, its three verbs, two prepositions, four nouns, four adjectives, one article and two conjunctions evoke all my accomplishments, past and future. When someone else reads it, it could just be sixteen words, taken at face value. In most cases, people will attribute some of their own baggage to every statement ("He's lying", "I agree", "I like this", "This reminds me...", "What's his agenda?").  The chances that two people will read the same words the same way are infinitesimal.

So what's my point? That last statement is common enough knowledge, even without having to give it much thought. I believe the thought part is interesting enough on its own merit!  I'm not posting my sixteen-word sentence here because it's so pithy that it would take pages of explanation to do justice to the work I put into it. And it's pretty personal. But I am temporarily fascinated with the concept of communication, which is a topic that everyone can enjoy!

I want to communicate my thought processes more than my opinions, because I believe it's more interesting and more informative. I dare to dream that it will inspire original thought on your end as well.

So, if everyone's baggage adds a little personal flair to whatever they hear, then I can see why political messages often gloss over facts to make the emotional message as striking as possible. If people are going to react emotionally to the facts anyway, it makes sense to make the preferable emotion part of the message too. The alternative method of reigning in emotion is taking the voting public step-by-step through the background of each issue before making a point, which is hard to do in a thirty second television spot.  The public doesn't have time anyway.

But thinking this doesn't make it any more bearable to watch. Blatant emotional ploys (superiority, fear, sympathy) make me feel dirty when I agree with the point being made and offended when I disagree. I like sober reasoning.

Whoa! When did this get all political? Ha ha. No worries, friends. That's as political as I'm going to get in the foreseeable future. I guess opinions are unavoidable.  Communication is a tricky thing.


This is nice. I finally liked a post enough to finish it and display it. More to come...?

Grant makes a saving throw to end "drudgery"

I'm still not sure what this wonderblog is about. There's no real theme, except for "items of interest".  I imagined I would play off Tara's entires more, and vice-versa, but so far our entries have not had any relation.  I've decided to just let "it" happen, whatever "it" is.

And as fortune would have it, I have a continuation on the theme of Tara's Why Can' t We Be Friends? post. I went to bed Monday night feeling irritable and bored. I tried eating, music, cartwheels, whooping, walking, singing, conversation and hugs, but nothing made me feel better. I'll skip the internal monologue (which, incidentally has a neat Wikipedia page) which led to my diagnosis: I had nothing to look forward to. Without something enjoyable and reliable to fill my calendar, my foreseeable future was a grey haze of daily drudgery.

So I left the house Tuesday morning intent on finding a RPG group to join, specifically Dungeons & Dragons (What's an RPG you ask? I found a great RPG podcast, Fear The Boot, which dedicated Episode 115 to explaining RPGs for the layman). I've been meaning to start playing for a year now.  It was surprisingly easy. By the time I got home Tuesday evening, I had managed to find not one, but two groups to join (one of them completely by accident). I'm considering joining both groups too. It's more than the game, it's being able to hang out with some like-minded people. It's nice to know that I still have the capacity to make friends. I hung out with the first group as they smote some undead, and within an hour I felt so welcomed and totally at ease. They even took some time out to help me create my very first character.  I bought some new multicoloured dice, and I can't wait to break them out.  I am seriously nerding out you guys.

I challenge you, Tara: have you asked those fine gentlemen to be your friends?

Na na na na Na na na na

DC Comics is releasing a 75th Anniversary Collection of their most prized theme songs, which will have to wait for it's chance at my wallet until after I've bought a couch, a bookshelf, D&D Essentials, and Metroid: Other M (read: after Christmas). The compilation has some glaring omissions - for example, the failure to acknowledge anyone in satin tights, fighting for her rights.  Also missing is the theme song from Batman: The Animated Series, one of my all time favourite cartoons.

For those who haven't seen the show, it was heavily influenced by Tim Burton's Batman films from 1989/92. The portrayals of Bruce Wayne (Kevin Conroy) and The Joker (Mark Hamill) here are still considered the standard by many fans, myself included. Several elements from the show even made their way into the comics, including new characterization for Mr. Freeze and the completely new character, Harley Quinn.

If you're a fan of the show already, I recommend this audio recording of the show's composer, Shirley Walker, as she walks us through the music from the show. It gets the blood pumping. Near the end of the clip, she touches on the similarity between the themes of the cartoon and the films.  I may be the only one that sees the need to have both themes in the Anniversary Collection, since 1) I think the show is gangbusters and 2) Batman Returns is one of my top three favourite movies.

Ah, this show is one of those children's programs that's even better as an adult. I watched it when I was a kid of course. I was mesmerized by the grotesque villains like Baby Doll, The Ventriloquist, and Clayface. And the heroes... Nightwing was one of my first TV crushes, though at the time I didn't know why I got so excited when he showed up. 

Incidentally, I've just recently gotten into comic books, and I'm hoping some readers could suggest a good story arc that showcases Dick Grayson being awesome.

Hel-lo, Mister Mullet.

As I explored the music of Batman: The Animated Series on YouTube, I came across several recommendations for Batman: The Brave and the Bold. It's the current animated Batman series. Whereas the 90's cartoon took the noir approach to Batman, the new show takes the classic camp approach. I've seen a couple episodes, and it seems like a lot of fun. A lot more promising than The Batman from a few years ago.

The Assassin

DEATH!

It's only everywhere!

The bedroom in my new pad has a saloon style door.  Each side swings both ways. The other night as I lay myself to sleep, I noticed that I'd left one panel swung open. I motioned to get out of bed to close it, but I stopped. I figured if an assassin came to kill me while I slept, I didn't want the sound of the door to wake me. I closed my eyes, comforted by the knowledge that, should I die, I wouldn't see it coming.

In the light of day, I laughed at how insane I had been. Closing the door was the best course of action. Firstly, any assassin sent to kill me wouldn't be hindered by a closed door. And should a bumbling assassin be sent for whatever reason, any warning would give me a chance to subdue the hapless intruder.

I get anxious about death sometimes. When my mind goes blank, such as during the clip packages on So You Think You Can Dance Canada, my mind wanders to all the ways my neck might get snapped by accident.  Movies make snapping necks look so easy.  I should remind myself that it's usually very strong, muscular men who do most of the neck-snapping on film.  I wonder if the assassin might break into my room to snuggle? I hope the closed door isn't discouraging.

Interestingly, I was offended by my dad's suggestion that a someone might hire a discount assassin to kill me, yet I'm perfectly happy with the notion that killing me takes slightly less skill that opening a door silently.

"People die all the time, just like that. [snap] Why, you could 

wake up dead tomorrow. Well, goodnight!" - Homer Simpson

Things the make me cry/laugh

Emotional parent-child scenes in dramas always make me cry real tears. The Lion King. Stepmom. The Family Stone. Everwood. Heck, even Valentine's Day caught me off guard with a mother-son scene, though I was too jaded by the rest of the film to actually cry.

Similarly, I have a weakness for absurd humour. I like it best when the creators surprise you with something that makes perfect nonsense. It's why I heartily enjoyed Drawn Together's episode "Charlotte's Web of Lies" from season 3, where the famous spider kills Boba Fett and leaves emotionally unbalanced messages around the house. Also, Roadrunner cartoons.

"I will not be ignored!" - Charlotte

On the other hand, poop is not funny.

In that spirit, I give you Episode 10 of Blamimation by Kris Straub and Scott Kurtz. It is basically one extended conversation about taking a dump, but I still find it hilarious.

Seeing and hearing poop is not a joke. It's just gross. However, exploring attitudes and reactions toward poop can be funny. Writers of The Drawn Together Movie, take notes.

One Hundred Push-Ups

...or I'll just go ahead anyway.

I forgot to eat dinner again. I usually end up eating dinner around 8 or 9pm because I get distracted by a productivity streak or Tara's request that I set up our blog.

My body type is what I call "skinny bitch" (Are we cursing in this blog, Tara? Answer your phone so we can discuss this!). I get defensive when the subject of anorexia comes up, since I have a very healthy attitude towards eating.  I just happen to be a distracted young man with a fire-burning metabolism.

The skin-and-bone look isn't really working for me, so I'm trying to get fit. I'm not bothering to bulk up, since my metabolism should slow down eventually. Just working on strength and flexibility. I'm focusing on arms and core right now, with the help of a delightful website: http://www.hundredpushups.com/. It's great for several reasons:

1. There are plenty of options for different fitness levels.
2. Commitment of time, effort, and resources is basically nil.
3. The results are measurable.

I'm on Week 3 of the program, though it's really Week 8, since I've done each week twice and took some breaks. But I've gone from collapsing before five push-ups to doing five sets of ten push-ups.  My biggest obstacle is wrist pain; I suspect that comes from playing video games and using a touchpad -- working on a solution for it. 

One might suggest a better, more effective program for me, but this one makes me feel great.  I can't wait to see how different I look and feel when I hit 100.

Grant

Under Construction

This coauthored blog will commence once the coauthors lay down some ground rules with each other.