Cathode tubes and fading memories...

Back to the trivial…

1) Have a few television comments from this weekend. The Simpsons have now reached an interesting point in that they have been on the air for so long that they are now trying to figure out what they are about. The plots are seemingly made by the random plot generator (they segregate the classes by gender and Lisa dresses up as a boy in order to learn math) and you can’t remember if they did this one already. That’s more a fact of being on the air so long. The bigger problem is that they are trying to be edgy like Family Guy and it fails miserably. Bart making an innuendo just doesn’t work.

2) Though an episode built around the principle that girls are bad at math is one that I…you know, I better keep my mouth shut here. There are people who read this who don’t know me and therefore might actually have a positive opinion of me and lord knows I shouldn’t try to change that.

3) This ties into the 18 year old plagiarizer. If you’ve ever noticed, all of those child prodigies who graduate college at 15 are always math geniuses. None of them ever major in English or history, you don’t see someone known for writing brilliant poetry at 12. It’s all math, which is just logic and rules and with enough focus can be learned by anyone. Even those kids who play Carnegie Hall fall into this category, music is a lot closer to math than most people imagine. If anything, this is why I admire people who do things other than the logical side of the world, it takes effort to make art.

4) Back to television, great bit on Family Guy about Chris becoming a Young Republican in order to touch a girl’s boob. On the list of reasons to become a Young Republican this is, well, it is the only valid reason to become a Young Republican. Or an Old Republican for that matter. At least in this case you have a purpose behind your support.

5) Missed the first part of How I Met Your Mother last night (was on the phone with my parents, I actually do have priorities in my life). Nice to see that they are giving Lily and Marshall something to do and the reflections on their prom/entering college were spot on (and Allyson looked killer with dark hair). It does look like I am in the show’s timeline five years older than they are, which is a bit of a bummer. It also makes me question whether someone would be playing Violent Femmes in 1996 at an east coast school.

6) My prom recollections? It’s been fifteen years hasn’t it? Ok, I’ll tell this story in parts throughout the month of May. Going into prom I never went to a high school dance. Yeah I know, what a surprise. The thing is, it wasn’t like I wasn’t liked or in a weird sense, popular. Everyone knew me, I hung out with the guys on the baseball and football teams, and was liked by pretty much everyone. It was just that once school ended or once I left the basketball game I became a non-entity. As I’ve often said, I rarely got a phone call in high school that didn’t begin with “What’s the answer to problem number seven?”

7) But I was still planning on going to prom and had actually turned down offers to enter college early for the specific reason that I wanted to go to my prom. The girl I most wanted to ask had the slight problem of her being in Minnesota at the time. Yeah, people I went to school with didn’t call me. Meg, on the other hand, would call me long distance, which in 1990 meant something, every week just to see how my life was going. If this was a movie script, I’d ask her and she’d fly down and impress the hell out of the people I went to school with and we’d live happily ever after. Or at least that’s how I hope it turned out in a parallel universe. Instead, my long-time cohort, mentor and English Teacher Kevin decided to play a role in taking things in another direction and seeing if I could become the stuff of legend. And we’ll get to that story soon.