30 Rock is melting my brain

But I’m enjoying it.  This is the latest bit of laugh out loud business:

Mad men

The blah life has devolved to a constant stream of TV shows (on DVD) and knitting.  Night after night I watch Mad Men and 30 Rock while knitting.  I’ve finished two blankets (both of which I started long ago), two hats, and a scarf.  I don’t think I’m growing intellectually as a result of this behavior.  I mean sure it’s somewhat educational with Mad Men regarding the era and all of its associated drinking, smoking, and womanizing, but it’s not like taking a math class.

Anyway, the streams crossed for me a few weeks ago when Jon Hamm (Don Draper) showed up on 30 Rock as one of Liz’s boyfriends (short-term of course). This means nothing except that it was odd that I happened to be watching both shows at the same time and one character showed up in the other show.  Wow.

To be fair, here’s a 30 Rock clip from a recent episode.  enjoy.

Don Draper

I’ve started watching Mad Men and have mixed feelings on the series. I’ll reserve this discussion until I’ve finished all I can watch.  This may take some time as I am watching 30 Rock at the same time…

Anywho, to anyone who has watched Mad Men, they know that Don Draper is Mad Men.  So I was searching “Don Draper” and came across this cartoon from The Oatmeal. See below.  But actually, you should only see below if you’ve watched the show.  Otherwise it will make zero sense.

 

Arrested Development

The song “Final Countdown” has a whole new meaning for me now that I’ve watched the Arrested Development series. Gob Bluth is a magical genius.

Arrested Development is about a wealthy family that loses most of their money and is left with a failing company and the patriarch in prison on embezzlement and light treason charges.  The family is beyond dysfunctional.  I mean there is a “never nude” in the show and a son with a hand missing that he lost to a “loose seal” and a failed magician that rides a segway everywhere. There is also a frozen banana stand that is featured prominently.  The main character lives in a model home in the middle of a property that was cleared and graded for a subdivision – but there is no subdivision, just bare earth. It’s a little over the top, but it is a sitcom…

As with most TV shows, it took me a while to get into it but somewhere in the middle of season 2 I became addicted. Jason Bateman as the sarcastic and deadpan Michael Bluth really won me over.  Michael Cera as his dorky, adoring son was a typical Michael Cera character but it worked. David Cross, as Tobias Funke who married into the family, was hilarious with his innuendo-filled lines (“I'm afraid I prematurely shot my wad on what was supposed to be a dry run if you will, so I'm afraid I have something of a mess on my hands.”)

Anyway, I enjoyed it and am looking forward to another season that is said to be in the works and will lead to a movie.

Here’s a taste of the absurdity:

Dusty and Lost

I've been checked out lately - still watching Lost.  I'm almost done with season two and am watching (on average) two episodes per night.  I can't stop thinking about how bad they all must smell and where the women get their mascara.  Similarly the men never grow beards but are never clean shaven either. Whatever, it's not as if any other part of the show is believable.

I'm not here to talk about lost.  I want to make you all aware of an important event coming up: the 2011 Road Dust Best Management Practices Conference. That's right in November of this year road dust afficionados will descend on "dusty" Las Vegas.  Conference goers can look forward to a special treat:

To better serve our road dust community, we will also have a Specification Showcase as well as offer a training session on (1) How to Put Down Product and/or (2) Understanding Dust Plume Opacity. Vendor displays and the unveiling of the Road Dust and Fines Management Institute will round out this highly anticipated 2nd event!

This post is the second in a series to spread the word about important and cutting edge transportation research.  Enjoy.

Lost

Lost.  I’ve just begun watching the TV show this week.  The word has something of a double meaning for me at the moment though.  In my current situation and harboring feelings of being lost, I was naturally drawn to the title.

I’ve only watched four TV shows since 1994:

• Sex and the City
• Alias
• Six Feet Under
• The Wire

The reason I steer clear of TV shows is that, if the show is good, I get completely sucked in.  To illustrate my level of addiction, I started watching the first pilot episode of Lost (there are two pilots) on Wednesday of last week – five days ago.  Right now, I am watching episode 18.  Including the two pilot episodes, that’s 20 episodes in five days. 

My progress is now impeded due to some technical problem with the Netflix server or something.  I’m watching in 30 second – 1 minute intervals.  Addiction.

Mindless hotel tv watching

Over the 4th of July weekend we stayed at a the Winter Park Lodge (or something of that sort). It was nice. We took the "cabriolet" to the little village across the way. the cabriolet is a small kind of aerial transportation thing. It was quite fun to ride for the 2 minute trip.


Anyway, once we arrived in the village we had dinner at Lime. Along with dinner we opted for the 21 ounce margarita - it was more cost effective than the 12 ounce. The waitress brought us some complimentary shots too. It was a good time.

When we got back to the hotel we were really only good for one thing - watching tv! This is something we rarely do since we don't have cable. We came across an episode of the Family Guy where in the dad character drinks a lot of beer and his wife accuses him of killing all his brain cells. The clip below is what the show depicted as the final brain cell in the dad's head:

[ok, it's 2010 and the video was "removed by user"!  Essentially we're given a window into Peter Griffin's head and it shows just one remaining brain cell with glasses on.  It is looking around and noticing that it is all alone, "I'm the only one left."  Then it says, "well, at least I have my books."  It promptly trips and breaks the eye glasses and laments, "but, but...there was time now...that's not fair!"]


That was all I wanted share, I just had to set up the context to be able to show the brain cell bit.

TV

The yuppie that I am, I have spent this weekend listening to podcasts, watching movies ("films"), knitting, reading books and magazine articles, and making bread (but *not* in a bread machine). I made blueberry bread but the loaves came out sort of less plump than in the past but still tasty:

Anyway, I noted a theme in a few of my mental consumables this weekend: TV.

The Slate Cultural Gabfest podcast, an old episode of This American Life, and my choice in viewing all involved this. I am not really a TV watcher but this topic comes up occasionally in conversation. It always sounds so uppity when I mention that I don't watch TV. What people usually don't hear is why I don't watch - because I'm a freaking addict. If I had cable I'd be about 300 lbs and have jelly for brains because I'd just sit there and channel surf endlessly.

This past week's Slate Culture Gabfest (The Mature Adaptation Edition) - two of the three Gabfest participants do not watch TV and one does. They had an interesting conversation about network TV versus...what, HBO TV? Where is TV going with things like the internet, Tivo, and Hulu around. They also talked about why two of them don't watch TV. Sadly there was no real answer other than time constraints. The show often discusses TV shows but doesn't usually ponder TV in general. Interesting.

An episode of This American Life (What I Learned From Television) from 2008 had TV as its theme. The most interesting act (the show is almost always performed 3 acts) was David Rakoff's bit. He hadn't watched TV for 20 (?) years and the show's producers wondered what someone who has been away for so long would think of TV today. At first he couldn't watch it, then he got into it too much, but in the end he rejected it. He admitted feeling a bit stupid about the things he found funny (e.g. America's funniest home videos) and not really getting other things (e.g. MTV's My Super Sweet 16).

Finally, we started watching a now ended show from HBO - The Wire. We watched the first three episodes of the first season. I was sort of luke warm on it but Sandy really liked it. It takes a while for me to get into things. It seems we're tentatively moving forward with our viewing of the show and trying not to get totally addicted. We've established a "No Blockbuster" rule, which means that we have to wait for the episodes to come in on Netflix and not cheat by running to Blockbuster (we spent a lot of money doing this watching Six Feet Under on DVD).

Ok, well I've gone on loooong enough. Stay tuned for more in the near future.