Once again I don't know whether to file this under "politics" or "television"

Julia mentioned this to me a few days ago, and now it's in Slate: our government got several of its torture ideas from none other than Furdell.com favorite TV torturer Jack Bauer.

In other TV news, to follow up, another Bachelor engagement has been cancelled. It turns out picking your fiancée from a randomly-selected group of thirty doesn't work.

If you hate love, you'll love ABC's reality programming

Why does anybody watch The Bachelor(ette)? Can anybody explain this to me without me getting violent? (Answer: no.)

Who among ye is so cynical that you believe "true love" means picking the most acceptable of 25 reality show contestants? The one saving grace of these shows (besides the fact that their advertising money keeps me employed) is that they never work. Wikipedia has a helpful guide (which you can totally edit to contradict me) shows that only two out of twelve couples from the show have stayed together. One is from the most recent season, so give them time; the other has already been involved in a hilarious domestic battery arrest. Last season's winners? No...last season's LOSERS.

What brought this on, of course, is the season finale of the latest Bachelorette (thanks again, Wikipedia!), in which the woman pretended to be surprised as she was dopily proposed to by a man that couldn't possibly love her, because they're both hollow and soulless.

Oh, and how nice -- they've set the date! May 9th, 2008! Right during sweeps. How romantic.

What a scoop!

This is moderately old news, but it's local to Eugene and only received minor national attention: my old station, KEZI-TV ("We're on it!"), stirred up some controversy when lead anchor Rick Dancer announced his candidacy for Secretary of State during his last broadcast. (Standard practice is to wait a couple of days after resigning and announce your candidacy elsewhere.) Here's the video, complete with KEZI's fancy new open animation, backdrop, desk monitor, and CGs.

RICK DANCER
This is the official announcement. Nobody gets to beat me with the official announcement, because it's our station.

HOLLY MENINO
Right.

Rick goes on to talk about how, as a news anchor, he worked for the community and acted as a voice for people and whatever, and he'll continue to do so if elected Secretary of State. I know we have an unusually large number of journalists reading this -- what's your take on the ethics there? Kinda iffy? Out of the ballpark? I'm interested.

Rick for Secretary of State? I have to admit, from the couple of years I got to know him, Rick reminded me of Martin Sheen's portrayal of the President.

IN THE DEAD ZONE!!!!

You've already seen this...

...but it's worth watching again, if only for Sarah Silverman's absolute glee as she reveals a shocking secret to longtime boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel.

Kimmel later did a response video that was, predictably, not nearly as funny.

Imaaaaginaaation

People of my age group and background (hi, James!) might be interested to note that Southpark just aired a 3-part storyline in which a zany man in a bizarre flying contraption whisks the boys away to Imagionationland, while singing a song familiar to anyone who went to EPCOT back when it was still an acronym.

The Interactive Sitcom of the Future

With the continued success of shows like Scrubs, The Office, 30 Rock, My Name Is Earl, and whichever ones I'm forgetting, a lot of people are acting like we're seeing the last of the traditional 3-camera, studio audience-having sitcom. (New 3-camera shows The Big Bang Theory and soon Cavemen don't make great counter-arguments.)

But the most innovative comedy on television the last two years has been an old-format one: How I Met Your Mother. For those who don't know the premise: in the year 2030, Ted tells his children the long, rambling title story. Pilot episode's last second twist: TV reporter Robin, who Ted meets, falls in love with, and pursues for the entire series, isn't your mother. (Last season ended with Ted and Robin breaking up, presumably for good -- we'll see.) The mood is lightened by Ted's friends: Willow from Buffy, the really tall guy from Freaks and Geeks, and Dr. Doogie Howser.

I appreciate that this sitcom, like Seinfeld before it, rewards loyal viewers with sly references to previous episodes, and doesn't feel the need to explain, for example, why one character suddenly slaps another for apparently no reason. But what really sets this show apart, I think, is its unprecedented use of the Internet to flesh out its characters. Yes, the Internet -- you're using it right now, friend.

Obvious example: Neil Patrick Harris's character, Barney, often makes reference in the show to his blog. Explaining his reflective silver disco shirt, Barney says: "One of the 24 similarities between women and fish are they're both attracted to shiny objects. Don't you ever read my blog?" Sure enough, he actually did write about that.

A lot of TV characters have blogs. That's de rigueur. Characters in Mother took it a step farther last year with the charmingly simplistic Swarley.com, after an episode in which they decided Barney's new nickname should be Swarley (with innumerable variations such as "Swarles Barkley"). Take a look at the thought that went into this website. The title, "Page 1," immediately indicates that this is not a polished, professional effort. A look at the source code reveals that it was made with an online web development tool -- an easy way to get a site up quick, just what a real Ted and Marshall would have used. You can even imagine the circumstances behind the site's lone photo.

Obviously the folks at NBC are capable of a much more sophistocated website, but Swarley.com looks like what it's supposed to be, which makes it that much stronger satire. The Mother crew imagined a fan's MySpace page to coincide with last season's revelation that Robin Scherbatsky used to be Robin Sparkles, a much more ridiculous, Canadian version of Tiffany. (If that doesn't sound hilarious, it's only because I'm not describing it right.) Just like Robin Sparkles, and just like a MySpace fan page, it is everything tacky crammed together at once -- garish colors, autoplay music, and don't forget the robot. (That's a line in the song. As Robin explains in the show, "The 80s didn't come to Canada until like '93.")

In fact, that episode's name was changed from "Robin Sparkles" to "Slap Bet", so that alert viewers wouldn't find the MySpace page before the show aired. In that episode, Barney and Marshall wage a "slap bet" on Robin's big secret (loser gets slapped, hard). Barney, seeing only the beginning of the Robin Sparkles video and convinced that he guessed right -- that Robin starred in Canadian pornography -- slaps Marshall. As punishment for "premature slapulation," Marshall is allowed to slap Barney five times -- but those slaps could come any time, any place. Two already happened, and both were hilariously unexpected. At the end of this week's episode, Marshall called Barney and told him to check out SlapCountDown.com. Just like in the show, it's nothing but a red countdown against a stark black background.

Perhaps I underestimated you, cartoon

After eleven episodes, I'm starting to warm up to Legion of Super-Heroes, a "Kids WB" cartoon on "the" CW.

Mostly quick and painless background: the Legion is a group of teenage super-heroes, 1000 years in the future. In occasional comic book appearances in the late 1950s, they generally would travel to early/mid 20th century Smallville and whisk Superboy to the mid/late 30th century for either an adventure or a practical joke. (It was about a 50/50 chance each time. Kept things interesting for Superboy, I guess.) Their three-member group quickly attracted more and more future-teens, each with their own super power; and eventually they became popular enough that they were allowed to have adventures even if Superboy wasn't around. Almost 50 years after their comic book debut, the Legion has its own cartoon, although they've once again been saddled with a young Clark Kent. (They're calling him Superman, but they actually plucked him from his Smallville youth, before he had adopted that identity.)

For the first ten episodes, I was mildly disappointed and mostly unentertained. The Legion has a rich, completely tangled background, complete with dozens of worlds populated by super-powered alien species and soap opera romance, but the cartoon predictably avoided scratching the surface. We got the occasional appearance -- in the background, silent -- of lesser-known Legion characters like Blok and Tyroc, but the stories always seemed to be about the same core team: young Superman, Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Brainiac 5, Bouncing Boy (an odd choice), and either Triplicate Girl or Phantom Girl. And we had two appearances each from the Fatal Five and Lightning Lad's moderately-malevolent brother Mekt, but each episode really felt a little too self-contained.

What really bugged me, though, was the lack of tension. Brainiac 5 -- in this incarnation a green robot with body-modifying Inspector Gadgetesque powers to go with his supposedly superior intellect -- is all friendly and super-nice to everyone, and never seems particularly smarter than any other character designed to provide exposition. Lightning Lad is about as rebellious as Raphael, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle who was a total dick to everyone (but still loved pizza). Saturn Girl was your typical totally weak female mental-powers superhero sans personality. These people are supposed to be angry at each other, or trying to have sex with each other, or both.

The latest episode aired in the states, "Chain of Command," has raised my expectations. Legion leader Cosmic Boy made his first appearance, which pissed off acting leader Lightning Lad, and I suspect that their mutual animosity wasn't fully resolved by the end of the episode. Triplicate Girl -- whose cartoon redesign is, well, pretty sexy, actually -- is starting to show affection for Bouncing Boy. (They married in the old comic books, but she wasn't nearly this hot back then, and he wasn't quite so rotund.) The action took place on Lightning Lad's homeworld of Winath, where we saw that almost everyone is a fraternal twin (evil brother Mekt being a notable exception -- not having a twin on Winath makes you an angry loner, you see).

Best of all, in this episode Cosmic Boy introduced the team to Ferro Lad, the disfigured (thus masked) boy who can turn his body to iron. Introducing Ferro Lad into a story is like bringing in Spider-Man's old girlfriend Gwen Stacy: you can be pretty sure someone's going to be taking a nose-dive off of a bridge pretty soon. Ferro will probably only make it another couple of episodes before he heroically sacrifices himself to stop the Sun Eater in the season-closing two-parter (which, true to the original story, will also involve the Legion turning to the Fatal Five for help). This is perhaps fitting, as Ferro only lasted seven issues in his original incarnation. Personally, I'm just happy he wasn't killed off in his introductory episode, like how the also-not-adult-enough Teen Titans cartoon botched the Terra story. Having a character around even a little longer makes their inevitable death or betrayal a lot more interesting.

Whedon sighting

I noticed that this week's episode of The Office, in which a main character turns into a vampire (sort of), was directed by Buffy auteur Joss Whedon. Stunt casting perhaps, but the episode was pretty excellent.

I hope they replay this

Right now NBC is showing a remake of The Year Without a Santa Claus, you know, the one with Heat Miser and Show Miser or whatever.

I'm at work, and to my right are three TVs (one for KEZI-ABC, one for KVAL-CBS, and one for KMTR-NBC). So I happened to look up when Chris Kattan, wearing an elf-green muscle suit, delivered -- if the closed captioning is to be believed -- this awesome line:

SPARKY defiantly, to Santa
"Sparky was my slave name. I'm Extreme Santa now!"

Please replay this movie, NBC. I will watch the shit out of it.

Andrew's Local News Adventures Continue

I started working in local TV in Eugene back in late October. In under ten months, I've been promoted twice, from part time to full time technical director, and then from technical director to director.

I had been directing the weekend news shows -- the simplest and least watched news shows, where they put all the newbies like me -- for only a month or so when the possibility of another promotion reared its head. A higher-up director, the guy who hired me in fact, moved to Spokane.

It's not clear if I'll get promoted to the weekday 5 and 11 o' clock directing spots, and if I had to guess I'd say the odds were against me from the start because of my relative inexperience. But, in the interim while the people upstairs figure out what to do, I've been filling in on the 5 o' clock show, which is about 10 times more complex than the weekend shows I'm used to, and it has been awesome.

That's the setup. Now you're ready to read about yesterday. Press on, true believer.

The last time I had an adrenaline rush on the job was when I started, as technical director on the morning show. My station's morning show is the most highly-rated one in town -- more watched than the other two stations combined, even though we're the #2 station overall. At any rate, there's an easy-to-understand thrill in live TV, when you know that if you make a mistake it will be instantly noticed by thousands of people simultaneously.

After a couple of weeks I stopped making mistakes, and the adrenaline stopped flowing, which is a relief, because the morning show lasts 90 minutes. When I learned how to direct for the weekend show, I didn't have the same butterflies. As you probably realize, I'm a pretty confident guy.

Well, weekends are pretty easy. There's one anchor, who also serves as a producer, and she's great at both, which means less work for me. The show is divided into five predictable blocks:

1. The first and longest block is mostly just a string of "VO-SOTs" as we call them, or "V.O. Bytes" is another one I've heard. VO is "voice over" and SOT is "sound on tape," meaning a taped soundbyte, usually under ten seconds long. Other than commercial breaks, VO-SOTs are the most routine part of the job. A news show at its simplest will be just VO-SOT after VO-SOT.

   Also during this block (for the 6 o'clock, but not the 11 o' clock) there's a reporter, who shows up once during the show, either "on set" (next to the anchor at the desk) or, as she says, "cam nining it" (reporting her story from camera 9 in the newsroom, a camera whose only function must be to prove that there's a newsroom back there).



2. Block 2 is for weather. The meteorologist, who is, impossibly, much younger than me, predicts the future for three minutes while I sit back and relax, turning on my headset every thirty seconds or so to give a time cue.


3. Block 3 is like a very short first block, with just one or two stories, both read by the anchor. National or world news might get put here if it's not big.


4. Block 4 is sports. This is the hardest part to direct. There's a lot of ad libbing, so you have to use telepathy to figure out when to go from one tape to the next; and, depending on the sports anchor, there's a danger that he might go way too long and leave us with no time for the last block. I remember a weekend broadcast (back when I was a part-timer, and therefore was just doing audio on the weekend show) that ended with a fifth block that was exactly 1-second long and consisted of the anchor and the sports anchor looking into the camera and saying, and I quote, "Bye!"


5. If you have enough time, the last block has a story, a ten-second weather update, and a goodbye from the anchor, the sports anchor, and the meteorologist. If you don't have time, the first two are expendible.

That's a lot of set-up, I know. But I want you to fully appreciate the complexity of the 5 o' clock weekday show, and specifically the one I directed yesterday.

Like the weekend shows, the weekday 5 is a half-hour show broken into five segments, and the first one is the longest. There's no sports -- that shows up in the hour-long 6 o' clock show. And instead of one anchor, there's two -- a seemingly minor variation, but it's another thing to think about when you have to specify whose microphone should be turned on and who should be reading what.

But the biggest difference of all is the remotes. Whereas the weekend show has one reporter, the weekdays could have half a dozen, some in distant bureaus like Coos Bay and Roseburg and Corvallis. All of these people need to be coordinated by me, and they all seem to show up in the first block, which makes for some hectic directing.

My confidence started waning around 4:15 yesterday when I still didn't have scripts in front of me. It takes me about 15 minutes to mark a half-hour of scripts with the complex monologue I'll be giving -- commands to the audio person, the switcher, the tape ops people, the floor crew, and to the ominous Master Control. Yesterday's would take even longer, because I could see from the rundown that it involved a lot more remotes than usual, and hence was much more complex than any show I had done before. Even scarier, one of the remote reporters wasn't one of our people, but somebody on loan from another affiliate. I needed time to talk to all these people, check their microphones and make sure they could hear me and knew when they'd be on air.

The first block would have an on-set, and a reporter at cam 9; Ben at the Coos Bay bureau on receiver 27; Nicole in Corvallis on receiver 3; Casey, reporting from the fairgrounds, on receiver 1, and she would be handing her microphone to meteorologist Stephanie for the weather segments, which presented its own problems; and this guy, whose name apparently started with 'P' (Pete? Paul?), God-knows-where, reporting on a fire on receiver 17.

When I finally did get scripts, I found that many pages were blank -- they hadn't been written yet. That can be frustrating. I could mark them immediately, but then someone will come in later with reprinted pages and I'll want to mark those. It sounds like a minor concern, but it's important to know what a reporter is going to say and when they expect you to go to each tape.

About fifteen minutes before the show started, we learned that Pete or Paul or whatever wasn't going to be on eceiver 17 at all, but rather on receiver 3, Nicole's receiver. That meant we should check P's microphone now so that we could then switch receiver 3 over to Corvallis, since Nicole's story came before P's. Then, in the middle of the first block, Master Control would have to switch receiver 3 over to this guy whose name I couldn't figure out.

Unbeknownst to me, this receiver-swap was necessitated by a problem getting tape from Pete/Paul. First of all, we thought he'd be introducing a package -- a minute-or-more full-sound tape with narration on it -- but instead it was going to be a VO-SOT, which we were supposed to receive at 4:45. Trouble on our end delayed the transfer, so my producer -- who is, thankfully, the best producer we currently have -- was not in the booth sitting next to me at 4:56:25, two minutes and three seconds from broadcast time, when my confidence began to falter.

I had been unable to contact Pete or Paul on receiver 3. We could see him and hear him, but I couldn't communicate with him. I was sure my producer knew how, but she had vanished. The floor director offered to fetch her, but I decided against it -- wherever the producer was, she was probably doing something important. I had Master Control switch receiver 3 over to Corvallis, and the show began.

The 5 o' clock starts with a bang called the Grabber. It's a brief tease of three or four stories, super-fast, and often with bureau people involved. It starts with an animation, which reveals -- via an effect called a "lumens key", which replaces the "pure black" on the tape with whatever we want to replace it with -- to a VO. Then we wipe to Nicole, then to another tape, and finally to Stephanie, before mixing to the shotbox animation that identifies and opens the show.

In a span of something like fifteen seconds, here's what I say:

"Stand by, ready Y¹ revealing to A and theme, roll Y, sting it², ready A roll A, key their mics³, cue⁴, stand by⁵, ready receiver 3, key Nicole, wipe, go Nicole, ready B, stand by⁶, key anchors, roll B wipe, ready receiver one, stand by⁷, key Stephanie, wipe, go Stephine, ready shotbox open, roll it, and mix.

¹A, B, X, and Y are tape decks. Y is the backup deck, used for animations or story-adds. Why X and Y? Because C and D sound too much like B. Also, they call eleven "yo" in craps because it sounds like seven.

²"Sting it" is my cue to the audio person to play a musical theme that starts suddenly.

³The audio person knows I mean to turn on the anchors' microphones specifically. I've also heard directors say to "open" mics, but I think it's important to save the extra syllable.

⁴I'm telling the floor director to tell the anchors to start talking.

⁵I'm speaking this directly into Nicole's ear by pressing a button corresponding to her earpiece.

⁶No special button this time. The floor director will inform the anchors that their mics are about to be hot.

⁷You guessed it -- I'm talking to Stephanie, the meteorologist, on receiver 1.

That's the first fifteen seconds. If I forget any of those cues, I'll stumble and start messing up other cues, and the whole thing can unravel and look like a mess on screen.

I have to hop in the shower and ride my bike to work now. (I've been trying to get some excercise, you see.) So, long story short, somehow everything worked out. We switched receiver 3 after Nicole's story, we figured out the cues for Pete/Paul's VO and SOT even though we didn't have a complete script from him, Stephanie managed to hand Casey her microphone without both of them bursting into flames or something, and we got through the whole show without a single mistake. I still think I'm not likely to get promoted, which is a shame, because the 5 o'clock provides a pulse-pounding challenge I enjoy a great deal. But at least nobody can say I'm not ready.

Six Degrees of Awkward

I just came up with a great idea for a game you can play at home! All you need is a cell phone, a high school education, and a group of drunk friends. Here's how it works...

Think of someone you knew at least 10 years ago, either in high school or college, but that you lost touch with completely after graduation, and so did (probably) everyone you still keep in touch with.

Starting with only the numbers currently in your cell phone -- no fair using outside sources like the internet -- call one of those friends you're still in touch with. You're only allowed to ask them for a phone number from their cell phone.

(Note: If you're too old to own a cell phone, I guess you can use your address book or rolodex or whatever old people have.)

You have one hour, during which you'll phone people you haven't spoken to or thought about in a decade, to find the person you had in mind in the first place. And you're not allowed to tell anyone why you're looking for this person, either.

If, within the allotted hour, you do manage to get this person's phone number, then you must call them and keep them on the phone for 15 minutes while you catch up in front of all your drunken friends, who watch in rapt attention as a completely awkward moment unfolds before them.

Well, now that I'm writing it out it doesn't sound so awesome.

We watched the first six hours of MTV so you don't have to

Recently, VH1 Classic aired the first day of MTV programming in celebration of that channel's 25th Anniversary. I've just finished the first six hours. Here's what I've learned...

• The station-opening sequence, in which a spaceship takes freaking forever to launch, takes freaking forever. I can't imagine anyone enjoyed watching that.
• A good 30% of the videos in the first six hours are either Rod Stewart or the Pretenders. Especially Rod Stewart, who plays at least twice per hour. And the Pretenders songs are all pretty obscure.
• One of the videos, Thank You For Being a Friend, was probably an awesome hit to rock out to until seven years later when it became the Golden Girls theme.
• Speaking of Golden Girls, check out Boys Keep Swinging by David Bowie, which ends in a truly creepy runway show featuring middle-aged rockers dressed like old women.?
• I totally forgot how great the video for "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads was. Extremely great, that's how great.
• Watching a lot of 1981 videos in a row reminds you that they only had like three video effects back then. Extremely popular: the chromakey (blue/green screen) effect. Leo Sayer's More Than I Can Say probably blew some minds back then. (The good stuff is towards the end.)
• Carly Simon makes an appearance with a completely awful song called Vengeance, which ends with a hilarious freeze frame of Carly rocking out.
• We've established that 30% of the videos are Rod Stewart or the Pretenders. About 50% are super boring concert videos of bands like REO Speedwagon, .38 Special, and The Who; and another 15% are songs and/or artists I've never heard of. Who the hell is Split Enz, and why do they have three videos in the first six hours?

I'll buy that for a dollar!

It's official: the Robocop Score for 24 Season 5 is now "three." Sharp-eyed viewers will have recognized Paul McCrane, famous for having his face melt off in Robocop, as the Guy With Neat Ear-Phone Who Is Really REALLY The Main Bad Guy For Sure This Time. He joins Vice President Leland Palmer and a partially-dehydrated Robocop himself to attain this new high score.

I haven't seen a 3 since Twin Peaks Season 2, which featured the ubiquitous Miguel Ferrer (in my favorite role, as a pointlessly rude FBI agent who gets results) and The Old Man as the ghost of Christmas past or something, plus the aforementioned Leland Palmer.

If 24 wants to take the trophy from Twin Peaks permanently, they should get the dad from That 70s Show on there. I don't know why he hasn't shown up yet in the series, actually. He's the scariest person on television!

An Introduction to Detective Goren

James, I know you've been avoiding all the Law & Orders all this time. TiVo just Suggestioned (tm) an episode of Criminal Intent for me, and it happens to be the first episode I ever saw. L&O:CI(tm) is even crazier than most detective shows when it comes to the sheer volumes of trivial knowledge its protagonist just happens to have at his fingertips. Really...even more than Monk! Plus, Det. Goren (Vincent D'Onofrio, medium-fat version) uses his patented Lean-Over-Sideways method of interrogation to force a confession every time, so that we don't have to sit through any court scenes.

Anyway, this episode, "The Pilgrim," is about terrorists, and actually it's kind of a lame episode. But it's the one I always think of, since it introduced me to Det. Goren in the most hilarious way. Here's a scene:

SUBSTITUTE TEACHER
(answering a student, naturally)
Randy asked why the Greek Bible is called the Septuagint. "Septua" means "seventy," and the story is that it took seventy scholars to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek.

GOREN
(after lurking around)
At the Great Library at Alexandria, Egypt. Right Mr. Edwards?

SUBSTITUTE TEACHER
Right. The library, and its 700,000 books were destroyed by fire over 1300 years ago.

GOREN
My mother was a librarian.

SUBSTITUTE TEACHER
They just built a new library on the site of the original...this time with state-of-the-art smoke detectors.

GOREN
You've been?

SUBSTITUTE TEACHER
Oh, I've read about it. I'm one of five people who actually reads Smithsonian Magazine.

GOREN
Six. One of six.

Notice the totally unnecessary reference to his mother. That's another tactic he's working on I think.

Anyway, later, Goren patiently explains things to his useless girl sidekick...

SCULLY
What's this?

GOREN
It's the Smithsonian article on the new library in Alexandria. When Edwards mentioned smoke detectors it didn't ring a bell.

SCULLY
You actually read this when it came out?

GOREN
(clearly deflecting)
It's the perfect size for my treadmill.

Riiiight.

Well, this is probably one of those things you have to see for yourself. So, I'll TiVoIze an episode of House, M.D. for its ethics-expanding drama, if you Digitally Video Record (tm) a Criminal Intent. Bonus points if you get an episode with Goren's nemesis Olivia d'Abo, the show's only recurring villain -- for some reason she refuses to confess! So frustrating! How are you supposed to solve a crime if the bad guy won't confess?!?! It's a lesson Goren may never learn...

Sean Astin's dad was Gomez Adams?

So a few days ago, the morning news anchors had a satellite interview with Sean Astin. I was hoping they'd talk to him about his role as Agent Frodo from Division on 24, but no go. They just talked about how his mom, Patty Duke, had bipolar disorder. If I was a news anchor, I would've said, "Are you sure you weren't just confusing her with her identical cousin, Sean Astin? Like maybe she'd come into the room, and suddenly she's all British and proper?" Then I'd laugh, and laugh and laugh.

Speaking of 24, this week's torture scene was my favorite yet. We had to rewind and watch it twice. For those of you who missed it, it went something...like this...

Yes, he actually talked in internet slang.

The DVD gods giveth, and lo, also do they taketh away.

It was almost a year ago that I demanded the release of The Flash and the Dark Shadows revival series on DVD, and just five months later I discovered that DVD executives everywhere had cowered and capitulated to my every order.

Unfortunately it seems the knaves, in their haste to quell my insatiable wrath, slipped up. Their Dark Shadows DVDs are inexplicably widescreen, even though the shows were originally shot and aired and intended for full screen. (Apparently DVD execs confuse our preference for intended aspect ratios with an irrational love of wide things.) The Flash, meanwhile, actually has some kind of production error that crashes your DVD player during the pilot episode.

Hey, look, I wasn't even disappointed that there were no special features. As I've addressed, these are DVD sets that only I could possibly want. But come on, DVD execs. You can do better than this.

In other, more pressing news, I'm selling my homemade 12-DVD set of Twin Peaks season 2. So, if you want to see David Duchovny in drag, this may be your last chance for a while.

Julia's new laptop: awesome.

Now that Julia has a new laptop, I can use it to share my most inane and ephemeral thoughts, even more than before!

Example: we're watching Celebrity Fit Club 3, and watching famous fat people reminds me that Star Jones lost like 150 pounds, which is enough to make a whole new person! And if you did make a person out of Star Jones's excess weight, I think it would look something like...The Glop!

I'm so Hollywood

Joe Camareno, whose IMDB page is surprisingly detailed, and who is perhaps best known by you for playing the role of "Charlie" in the blissfully short movie I made this summer...whoa, that's too many clauses. Well, now you know who I'm talking about.

Anyway, my jaw dropped when I spotted Joe in today's episode of my brother's favorite currently-doomed show, Arrested Development. Joe plays one of the Mexican painters who helps Michael and Gob teach George Sr. a lesson. (Specifically, Joe plays the one who was in the Groundlings.)

This is at least twice as awesome as the time I saw one of the guys I auditioned on an episode of Blind Date. (They did not end up in the hot tub, alas.)

Robots on TV

Seriously, so there was a Drake Hotel Bible in one of Jim Phelps's hideouts. How does that tell Tom Cruise anything? Let alone prove that Jim's the bad guy? Couldn't Jim have visited the hideout between his Drake Hotel stay and his death? Or is the fact that he stole a Bible proof that he's the villain?

Anyway, in other television news, tonight's My Name is Earl ended with star Jason Lee performing the "robot" breakdance maneuver for "comedic" effect. Unfortunately, according to Robot Movie List bylaws, TV doesn't count. However, Furdell.com would like to take this moment to commemorate ten glorious years of using the Robot as a joke.

As far as we can tell, the trend started with 1995's Major Payne, which featured the Robot scene prominently in its trailer (or else I wouldn't know, because I haven't yet seen this cinematic gem). We're proud to report that, a decade later, the Robot is still a hilarious way to show that a character is out of touch. Thank you, Hollywood.

No, I'm not kidding about Prison Break

Seriously, it's awesome.

Though last night's episode had one scene that I thought was totally stupid. Michael's prison doctor, who's been treating him for Fake Diabetes, visits his old psychiatrist. The psychiatrist explained that Michael had been diagnosed with:

1.) Some condition that makes him see the components of lamps, or something. Evidently, a person with a low IQ who is burdened with this condition will go insane -- assuming IQ actually measures anything other than your ability to complete number progressions, that is.

2.) Michael puts the needs of others above his own. Gasp!

So essentially, he was seeing a psychiatrist for his smartness and for the fact that he's too giving. Riiiight. And Jack Bauer came down with a bad case of the awesomes.

It's official: You need to be watching Prison Break

I started watching this show around the fourth episode, and I thought it was pretty cool. Then I watched the first three episodes and found out it was OH MY GOD SO AWESOME.

You may or may not already know the premise: Michael, a structural engineer who's clearly smarter than you (and better looking, says Julia), gets an extremely intricate full-body tattoo and then robs a bank very poorly. (That's the only part I'm not completely happy with -- I know he wanted to get caught, but couldn't he have come up with a more awesome near-miss plan, just to prove he could've pulled it off? Well, I'm not thinking practically.)

Michael pleads no contest and gets put in maximum security prison -- the same one, it turns out, that houses his brother, on death row for killing the Vice President's brother. (And in this week's shocking finale, we learned that the VP is -- wait for it -- a chick! And not Geena Davis! What's that about?) He swears he's innocent, but honestly, who cares? Michael's tats are actually a complicated puzzle filled with mneumonic devices and mathematical formulae that translate into the prison's blueprints and an escape method.

You had me at "prison break."

If you're not yet convinced that this show is awesome, here's three components of Michael's plan that I didn't know about until I saw the first few episodes. Remember, if any of these fails, he's stuck in prison for a long time and his brother will die.

1. Michael needs frequent access to the infirmary. No problem -- he has type 1 diabetes and needs insulin shots. Except that he does not, in fact, have diabetes at all. When he starts to get the shakes, he has to buy insulin blockers from the guy in prison who can get you things (you know...Morgan Freeman), which is unfortunately complicated by a race riot and a menacing guy named T-Bag. (I won't explain that on this site, which is read by my parents.)
2. When they escape, they'll need new identities, and an airplane. Luckily, before he robbed the bank, Michael sought out and photographed a guy in the FBI's witness protection program (for some reason the guy's name is Fibonacci, like the sequence -- presumably a reference to the naming convention in Cannonball Run II). An imprisoned mob boss, played by the crazy guy from Fargo, will join in the escape in exchange for Fibonacci's whereabouts.
3. This is my favorite part. Michael realizes that they'll need a lot of money when they get out. So his plan depends on one inmate actually being D.B. Cooper. Wow.

For some reason, the story keeps getting sidetracked by some other peoples' attempts to get the brothers out of jail legitimately. The writers try to spice these scenes up by exploding people, but it just isn't working. We need more prison! MORE!!! And more of the breaking out thereof.

A warning to you, TV people: if Michael's tattoos also contain the secret for creating zombies and/or time travel, I will jump through my 9th story window knowing that I have seen humanity at its very best, and that there's simply no point in going on.

Just so you don't think all I do is watch awesome TV all day, last night Julia and I went to a play, "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial" starring Ed Asner and The Guy Who Played Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and it was completely terrible. It was like listening to a reading of an encyclopedia article. I know what the writer was going for -- they saw Inherit the Wind, realized it was very inaccurate, and decided to set the record straight. But can't a story be both accurate and dramatically compelling? Does it have to be a bunch of guys reading from transcripts? Ugh.

Months out of date TV post!

Julia and I are catching up on Lost since everyone likes it so damned much.

We're almost at the end, but I thought it important to point out that, in early episodes, the little kid is reading a Spanish language copy of Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends, which I really wanted to like since it has a Mark Waid credit, but which I found mostly incomprehensible. Ah well.

I also think it's important to point out that, while searching for the cover to that comic book, I found about a billion other sites that were able to identify the obscure late-90s comic book in the show. So, you heard it here last.

(Did everyone else catch the reference to The Office, when Merry's girlfriend says her father just bought a paper company in Slough? Oh, only about 165,000 people noticed that. Great.)

Well, in more current news, I'm watching this Prison Break show. I'm pretty sure it's terrible...but I love it! They're trying to break out of prison!!! Have you ever seen a bad television show or movie, besides Life, where people construct elaborate schemes to escape from prison? I haven't! Besides Life.

I refuse to believe this

Oh, sure, like they're really releasing The Flash TV-series and the Dark Shadows revival series on DVD. Uh-huh. Apparently the intend to reap enormous profits from the exactly one copy each they'll sell to me and me alone, and maybe to close friends and family of Ben Cross and Amanda Pays.

So you want to sleep with me, eh DVD executives? Very well.