My life really is a sitcom

And away we go…

1) Ok, I really need to get this on the public record. How I Met Your Mother has totally stolen one of my characters. The Doogie Howser character is exactly what I had planned for my novel. Which actually was just taking long-time blog contributor Super Dave and turning up the volume slightly. I’m telling you Super, you really should sue here.

2) That said, any show that features characters in a strip club on Thanksgiving is so going on my Tivo always record list. That is just brilliant.

3) Saw this news story come across the wire last week. Apparently, Oprah Winfrey got the advice on how to go into syndication and become richer than God or Microsoft while on a date with Roger Ebert. The news story focused on the advice and how this created a media empire. No one bothered to imagine the visual of Oprah and Roger on a date. I mean, I can’t say anything bad about fellow Illini Ebert but my God, that visual is going to be stuck in my brain for a couple of decades.

4) Another news story was that there are lawsuits against Match.com and Yahoo Personals for unfair practices. According to the lawsuit, both companies were paying women to go on dates with guys whose contracts were about to expire. Which might be a combination of the most immoral yet extremely logical business practices that I’ve ever heard of. And could you actually sue one of those places for false advertising? Wouldn’t that make 90 percent of the people who place profiles out there felons?

5) Why no, my profile is perfectly accurate. I actually am one half of the former world tag team champions. It was a few years back of course and the records are spotty but I swear that it is true.

6) Was at Best Buy this afternoon and already saw people camped out for the Xbox 360. No, I’m not camping out with them. I hire people for stuff like that. (Yeah, I know that not camping out really hampers my geek credibility. Somehow I feel that I have enough lifetime experiences to allow myself to keep it real from a geek perspective)

7) On a comment from last week on my claim of R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People” as their best album. Understand that I consider “best”, “favorite” and “desert island disc” to be three completely separate categories. My favorite R.E.M. record is Reckoning, which tends to stay in my CD player for a month at a time. On my list of five desert island discs (which I really must write about someday) is Murmur, mainly because you could listen to that album for years and still never figure out what every song means and you would still want to find out. But from a critical viewpoint, Automatic is their best work. It’s strong lyrically (and actually has words in it, which puts it above their early work) and has some musically grand moments in it without getting overblown. It is the minor songs like Nightswimming that make the album. It might not be the disc you play the most often but in my mind, it is their most complete offering.

8) By the way, Juliana Hatfield’s “Become What You Are” is an incredibly awesome disc to listen to on a Monday morning. I think when we talk about how great music was in the good old days we are really referring to discs like this. There were about a hundred great albums in the early nineties and most of them were never hugely popular. That’s why a lot of people never throw out their old CDs, they just know that they outpace the current supply.