Styx vs. Monkees: A never ending conflict

Ok, I did watch the fan produced ending for How I Met Your Mother today and if you had shown that to me yesterday and told me that it was the real ending I would have thought, “Aw, what a sweet ending.” It would have been a happy ending for everyone, or at least Ted. You still have to figure out Barney and Robin and Marshall and Lilly but you could make them all happy in the end. In a sense I like the fact that they did not make it nice and neat because life is certainly not and neither has been Ted’s life. But that said, the more I watch the original ending the more it seems totally off. That is what happens when you are writing to scenes filmed by child actors seven years ago. At some point you can accept that you should change plans.

Anyway, I wanted to tell the story tonight of how I am a hypocrite in general and especially when it comes to music. If I am nice this is just an example of how I can be a bit of an arrogant snob but at worse it shows some of the lesser side of my personality. Either way it is a pretty fun story.

So a few weeks ago someone asked me if I wanted to go see Styx in concert and my response was a) laughter and b) “why would you want to see a band without their lead singer and where half of the band is dead.” Now let me start by saying that I really like Styx. I actually owned Kilroy was Here on cassette. They are a Chicago band and two of the band members lived in the suburbs in the same neighborhood as kids from my high school. Hell, when my sister was in high school the school won a radio concert which gave the students free tickets to see Styx. I can’t say that they are my favorite band of all time but I did grow up on their music.

But with all that I have no desire to see them in their present form. Dennis DeYoung is no longer the lead singer because the rest of the band hates him and it is hard to think of Styx without him. Tommy Shaw is still a good guitarist and probably worth seeing but it isn’t Styx. It’s Tommy Shaw, one or two of the other original members, and a bunch of other guys filling in roles. I didn’t want to spend money to see the show. I didn’t care that it would be silly fun. I pretty much shot it down as the dumbest idea I had ever heard and that was before I found out it was a double bill with Foreigner.

Fast forward a few days and I check my email to see that Ticketmaster has let me know about the latest shows scheduled for Kansas City (most likely on the hope that I would start buying tickets again as I believe that my moving resulted in a significant hit to their profit margin). In the email I found out that the Monkees are playing at the Uptown Theater. Not only was I getting ready to buy concert tickets I was ready to buy plane tickets, get a hotel room, and then camp outside the front door of the Uptown for a week ahead of the show so I could be in front of the stage. Oh, and while I was camped out there I would be getting signatures for my petition for the Monkees to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Of course this makes absolutely no sense. Davy Jones died a few years back so it is clearly not the Monkees of old. Even with Mike Nesmith there we are missing the heart of the band and everyone is older and let’s face it, they never played their own instruments to begin with so it is not like they have gotten any better. But it’s the Monkees! I grew up on their music. It would be a lot of silly fun.

So I’m a hypocrite. One band from the seventies reunites and I consider it a personal affront that it would even be suggested that I see them in concert. Another band from the sixties, one that was created solely for a television show, reunites and I am willing to travel across the country to see them play at a venue that is conveniently located across the street from a place where you can sell your blood plasma. If I was internally consistent I would probably be a lot easier to live with.

Wednesday Night Music Club: Nothing makes life better than a new Drive By Truckers album.

The Sense of an Ending

It will probably surprise some people to discover that I did not watch the finale of How I Met Your Mother last night. That will be slightly less surprising when I provide my excuse that I was on a plane at the time as “I’m on a plane” is basically my default state of being at the moment. However, I have read the reactions and watched the last scene and felt that I must provide my thoughts on the ending of the television show that most paralleled my life.

Let’s talk about the parallels. The show debuted in 2005, just under a year after I started the blog so when Barney talked about nobody reading his blog in the first season I totally got the joke. The characters were a few years out of college and five years younger than I am. I was a few years out of grad school and most people would be generous in saying that my social and emotional immaturity would make me five years younger than I actually am. The main characters seemingly lived at a bar, drank Red Dragon shots and lived in a world of in jokes and bad decisions. It was my life in a nutshell.

I should also note that I stopped watching the show weekly in the spring of 2011, which not coincidentally is when I stopped blogging regularly. The fact that I decided that the show that I once threatened to sue for stealing my life story had gone on too long at the exact same time that I got married is an interesting sidebar. It wasn’t that we disliked the show; it is just that the schedule of our lives had grown too crowded. I still kept up on the show by online reviews and have bought all the seasons on DVD so one day I will catch up. From what I can gather is that the three things that people are most upset about are 1) Barney and Robin break up, 2) we meet the mother only to have her die and 3) Ted ends up with Robin. I’ll go through these one at a time.

Barney and Robin’s marriage falls apart: I will admit that this is something that I am not really happy with especially given that the past several seasons were dedicated to getting the two of them together as a couple and having Barney mature into a better version of himself. I remember the season where they first started dating and you could see that as a storyline and I truly wanted it to work. I was more upset when they broke them up the first time than most people because I just thought they made a great couple and were treading water apart. The fact that their marriage ends, Barney returns to being a player but finally gains his center by becoming a dad as a result of his one night stands ends the story of Barney on a bit of a sour note. But, to be honest, I can easily point to so many friends who had seemingly gotten their lives back on track only for them to derail and then find themselves again in a simpler way.

We meet the mother only to find out that she has been dead for six years: To be honest this was not a complete surprise. I read a review of an episode from a few weeks ago that made it pretty clear that the mother had died and I know that years ago that was one of the predominant theories about the mother. Once it became clear that the mother was a character that we had never met one of the few ideas that made sense was that Ted was telling them the story about how he met their mother because she couldn’t tell them herself. It seems strange for a sitcom and when the show started I would never have assumed that ending but now I can understand it. Maybe it is because I look at my list of Facebook friends and see several who have died over the past few years. As you reach middle age the idea of one dying young goes from being a bad Billy Joel song to a horrific truth.

That said I understand that one could be in one of two camps here. The first is that this is a total rip off. The entire show was about how he met her and the moment she is introduced she is killed off screen. That is tonally dissonant and in watching the last scene the entire conversation with the kids where this is revealed feels completely wrong (and not just because of Ted’s makeup). If you viewed finding out who is the mother to be the pinnacle of the series then this was a total gut punch of an ending.

On the other hand, I stopped thinking about the importance of the mother years ago once they decided once and for all that it wasn’t going to be Victoria. Who Ted totally should have married in season one like they had planned if the show had only lasted thirteen episodes and we wouldn’t be having this discussion today. Instead the story was about Ted’s journey and finding out who he was and what he needed to be happy and yes, in the end, the story was always about Robin. He started the story with how he met her and ends with getting permission to try one last time.

Ted ends up with Robin: For as much as I question the last scene having it close with Ted holding up the blue French horn outside Robin’s apartment is one of the best ways to end the series that I could possibly imagine. And in this case, and the last example of the parallels between my life and this show, I am completely biased.

Twelve years ago I saw a girl in a bar. After meeting her I told my buddies that I would marry her. At the time it didn’t work out. We never even dated. We liked each other but were in different places in our lives with different goals and dreams and while I always thought that she was “the one” it was never right. Years passed. I drifted away and went on adventures and had a serious of relationships that could be alternately called comical, farcical and fictional depending on your point of view. Then one day, six years after I first met that girl in the bar, she emailed me and I decided to raise the blue French horn to her window one last time.

Kim and I celebrated our three year wedding anniversary last week. Sometimes you end up with “the one” though the journey is never the one you expected it to be. All my best to Ted and Robin and to quote a much wiser man than I, “Fair play to those who dare to dream.”

The five random CDs for the week (and yes, back to blogging regularly)

1)      Big Head Todd and the Monsters “Beautiful World”

2)      Josh Rouse “Under Cold Blue Stars”

3)      Beausoleil “La Danse de la Vie”

4)      Jay Farrar. Will Johnston, Anders Parker, Yim Yammes “New Multitudes”

5)      Sting “The Soul Cages”

The Case for Ted and Victoria

Thanks to Google providing some advanced statistics I can now tell precisely which of my posts bring the most traffic (as well as the search terms that bring people to my blog. According to them I am apparently the go to website for any and all information on Strawberry Shortcake’s antagonists.) Anyway, it seems that people were really interested in my thoughts on Ted and Victoria on How I Met Your Mother so tonight I am going to break down just why the two of them should be together.


1) Chemistry: It is pretty amazing that in a show where the theoretical focus is on how Ted meets the mother of his children he seemingly dates women where there seems to be no connection between the two. I never understood the whole Stella storyline where other than the one minute date they never even felt like a couple. I wasn’t really upset when he was left at the altar because I didn’t think they should be together. The less said about the entire Zoey storyline the better and after that we pretty much go into random guest star category. Even the Slutty Pumpkin wasn’t a good choice. In the entire history of the show there are only two women who Ted has dated who any reasonable observer would say is a good fit and one of those is Robin, who isn’t a good match for a few paragraphs worth of reasons.

However, the chemistry between him and Victoria has always been amazing. I don’t think there ever was a scene with the two of them in it that wasn’t awesome. To the point that I wonder why Ashley Williams does not get more work on television because she certainly seems like a great actress. The fact that for years that whenever anyone would post a poll on who should be the mother she would always win, even when she hadn’t been on the show for years. That means an awful lot.

2) Destiny: In a sense, the entire show is about destiny and how certain things are meant to be and that the universe will just force events to happen. So much of the show has been about how things just happen and this would fit that perfectly. Now this isn’t destiny in the sense that there is only one person who is a match for someone, which even I don’t believe. It is more that there are certain people in this world that you just connect with and you can come together again and again and it just feels right no matter how much time has elapsed in between. It just makes sense for the two of them to be together.

3) Reference to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset: Ok, if you did not immediately think of the last moments of Before Sunset at the end of this episode that can only mean that you have never watched Before Sunset (which you should immediately do but only after watching Before Sunrise because if you haven’t seen one you probably haven’t seen the other.) I am a sucker for any relationship that can parallel Jesse and Celine.

4) Personal Bias: Given that I happened to marry someone who I had originally met years ago, someone who I felt was my perfect match then but was unable to connect with due to timing and geography and being at different points in our lives, I really would like to see Ted and Victoria work out. If you go back to my posts in 2004 and 2005 you can see me complaining that they were stealing stories of my life for episodes of the show. I still state that the “Red Dragon” shots were plagiarism of the highest level. But this means that I have a personal interest in Ted and Victoria making this work.

5) Victoria doesn’t have to be the mother: One of the main arguments against Victoria is one of plotting. She can’t be the mother because we had already met her and then the storylines would make no sense. My workaround of this, and I am not sure if there is anything in the How I Met Your Mother canon that would make this impossible, is that while Ted is talking about how he met their mother he may be talking about their biological mother and not the woman who is raising them. This would allow for a bit of wiggle room without causing the entire logic of the show fall apart. (For those wondering, the favorite as to who the Mother actually is right now is Barney’s half sister. Who we have never actually seen.) Also, they could always just say that we are constantly meeting the same person anew with the last time being when he knew she would be their mother. That would get around the issue completely.

Now I will have to address the whole taking Victoria away from the wedding issue. Yes, that is a douche move but we are talking about Ted here. The guy has been a douche for nearly a decade now. Yes, it is horrible to leave someone at the altar and Ted knows that first hand. But this isn’t a case of him showing up at the church and yelling “I object!” and then storming to the front and sweeping her up in his arms. As crappy as this is, sometimes in life you make a selfish decision because it works out best for you. If what is best for you turns out to be finding the person you want to spend the rest of your life with maybe you can get away with being selfish. Maybe this is me showing my romantic side over my practical side. I just think Ted and Victoria belong together.

Ted and Victoria, together thank God

I admit that I only saw the second half of How I Met Your Mother and that we have been told on more than one occasion that Victoria is not the mother but if you didn’t feel a tug at your heart when Ted and Victoria drove off into the sunset then you have no soul. From the first season I’ve felt that Victoria was the absolute perfect match for Ted and given the fact that Ted always is referring to the Mother and not his wife I am hoping that they end up together with the kids being someone else’s. If not, as someone who did end up marrying the one who got away at least my televised doppleganger has been able to experience the same moment that I did.


Plus we always knew that Barney and Robin were going to end up together. Just a matter of time and a few magic tricks.

I will have to say though that since I am constantly on the road I have really fallen behind on my television habits. Guess that one can’t consider that to be a bad thing but it certainly is odd when you end up following shows by reading reviews online as opposed to actually reading them. I probably saw most of How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory though I know that I missed episodes here and there. I watched most of Awake which only meant that when NBC decided to cancel it that I could feel as though I had completely wasted my time. I’ve fallen out of most reality shows other than occasionally watching The Biggest Loser on the hope that one day it will be a show that actually inspires you to lose weight as opposed to deciding that every single contestant on the show is a horrible human being. (They walked off the show this year because it wasn’t fair. Yes, a show about weight loss is unfair. I have yet to figure that one out.) Luckily there are always episodes of Hoarders to catch up on and to inspire me to clean the garage.

Might as well reprint those Free Lindsay shirts

(Yes that was a rather heartrending episode of How I Met Your Mother last night. Sadly I had the ending spoiled for me before I had a chance to watch it (damn you Facebook) but it still hit pretty hard. I don’t want to spoil it here but I will say that the episode was amazingly constructed and makes perfect sense when you realize that over the course of the series the show has never been a typical “ha ha” sitcom. There has always been a running plot on how these characters are becoming adults and dealing with a lot of those issues in a very realistic way.)

In a case of good news and bad news My Beloved Lindsay is out of rehab but may have to go to jail on a parole violation. Which of those is good news and which is bad news is really left for the reader to decide. And the whole going to prison thing is so a non-Hollywood thing. Really, when was the last time you saw one of these starlets actually have to do any real time for their actions. I know that the California prison system is overcrowded but I think we could find a little space in a closet somewhere to place a Lohan or a Hilton. They are rather thin and should be easily stackable.

Keeping with the celebrity news Snooki from the Jersey Shore has written a novel so add her name to the list of people who have been able to get a novel published before me. Yeah, fifteen plus years spent slaving away at a manuscript, six years blogging in an effort to catch the eye of an agent, and an orange midget who can’t even properly spell her own name is somehow able to land a publishing deal. I would really like to know if she has even read her own book. We all know that she didn’t write it; I legitimately want to know if she took the time to sit down and read it.

Oh, and Taylor Swift broke up with a Gyllenhall and is now back on the market, which just happens to correspond with my blog post where I say awfully nice things about her. Not that is anything more than a coincidence or anything… Actually, it is totally a coincidence. I’m more than happy with where my life is right now. I’m more upset by the fact that I am aware of Taylor Swift’s dating life given that it has absolutely no bearing on my life whatsoever.

Last thing, corresponding with tonight’s debut of the new season of The Biggest Loser I am embarking on a weight loss program. Actually I’ve already started it but it is always nice to tie it in with the Biggest Loser because at least I know that I weigh less than they do. Anyway, if anyone wants to send me some diet or exercise advice I would be more than happy to receive it. I really do need to knock off these last few pounds so that I will no longer be considered overweight. I will be much happier knowing that I was at a healthy weight on my wedding day.

The triumphant return of How I Met Your Mother

It’s fall so that means it is our favorite season: TV season. I watched the new episode of How I Met Your Mother as I continue to watch the show until I find out who the mother is. If it turns out to be that cupcake girl from the first season, who was such a perfect match for Ted it wasn’t even funny, I will be so pissed because they would have wasted my time with like five years of plot.

Before I get started though I must say that I am very upset at the breakup of my HIMYM / Big Bang Theory Monday night blowout. Those two shows worked great on the same night even when they weren’t next to each other. They seemed to have very similar audiences. Now the Big Bang Theory is on Thursday and has been replaced by a show whose main plot point is that the couple is fat. If I wanted to watch that I would just watch The Biggest Loser (which I DVRd tonight so don’t tell me what happened.)

Anyway, tonight’s episode was a classic in the sense that it follows many of the classic patterns of HIMYM. Ted is trying to gather the courage to hit on a girl, Barney is claiming dibs, Robin is distraught and scummy after breaking up with her boyfriend and Lily and Marshall are having relationship issues over having children. This all takes place in the bar, which I love as that is pretty much how real life works. In the end we find out that we are 28 minutes closer to finding out who the damn mother is, Lily and Marshall are still the perfect couple and we are all waiting for Barney and Robin to run off and get married like they should have done last season.

What interests me more though is that having watched every episode of this show from the beginning who I identify with has begun to change. I started not only identifying with Ted but claiming that entire episodes were being taken from my life. (I mean, Red Dragon shots? How could that not be about me.) Here was a guy out on his own trying to find the woman of his dreams just like I was in Kansas City (though you have to stretch to imagine that KC is like NYC. They’re totally alike except for things like culture and people and pretty much everything you can imagine except barbecue sauce.)

But I’ve been with Kim for over a year and a half now, beating my previous record for relationships by a good eighteen months, and I’m beginning to feel more and more like Marshall. I’ve found my Lily and am working on what it means to be an us. Pretty fascinating how a show can be a barometer for your real life.

Oh and why I might not be a Barney (Super Dave, that is still your role) I will be suiting up on October 13th for International Suit Up Day. Yes, it is real and it will be spectacular.

The five random CDs for the week (better late than never):
1) Cat Power “You Are Free”
2) Damien Rice “B Sides”
3) Various Artists “Preservation”
4) Waco Brothers “Do You Think About Me?”
5) Cowboy Mouth “All You Need Is Live”

More like When Will We Finally Meet the Mother

I haven’t written much about How I Met Your Mother this season but after last night’s episode there are a few points I need to address. Join with me as we talk about our favorite New Yorkers and that douche Ted they for some reason hang out with.

1) Between last night’s episode and her appearance on The Big Bang Theory last week I have now come to the conclusion that Judy Greer should appear on every television program at all times. If I’m watching Deadliest Catch I want to see Judy Greer out there on the Bearing Sea. On TLC’s Four Weddings she should be getting married every week. There is no such thing as too much Judy Greer on television. Especially as a theoretical physicist with some, uh, interesting habits. Just saying.

2) One of the main points of this week’s episode is that when you are in your twenties and dating everything is fresh and exciting but when you are in your thirties and dating you realize that everyone you meet has baggage. This is absolutely true and it is how you deal with it that makes all the difference in the world. If you wait to find someone without baggage, as Ted still seems to be doing, then you will be alone and unhappy for a long time. If you don’t admit that you are screwed up yourself then it won’t work out for you either. Dating in your thirties means accepting the fact that no one is perfect. (Well, except for Kim of course. I’m the one who is carting along several steamer trunks worth of issues. Luckily I have trained a platoon of helper monkeys to help me in dragging the bags along.)

3) I saw a few people say this online and I have to agree: There must be no worse feeling in the world than discovering that you are the basis for a character in a movie and that character is being played by Chris Kattan.

4) With next week being the season finale the show is at this strange crossroads some characters are moving in good directions while other characters seem to be spinning out of control. Marshall and Lilly are progressing as a married couple with their own place and talks about having children. Their characters seem pretty well set and to be honest I would like to see more of them on the show. The other three deserve numbered entries of their own.

5) Robin is a character in search of direction. They’ve already paired her up with Ted and Barney and now have to work to explain just why she is hanging out with two of her ex-boyfriends every week. Plus, they have her dating her coworker Don, which would be interesting except that we know almost nothing about him and have never seen anything that would make us think that they make a good couple. She is still an incredibly funny character and you can always make early morning news show jokes but it will never make sense until they connect her back with…

6) Barney. Let’s face it, the network wants to turn this into the Neil Patrick Harris show. So does most of the country. He’ll be getting an Emmy this year for his work. But after spending a lot of time showing that Barney has a heart and finally getting him together with Robin they break them up without much reason or fallout. Barney then goes completely over the top in terms of skirt chasing. They need to bring the character back from being a caricature and give him a little more reality.

7) Finally we have Ted. He’s a douche. Last week’s episode pretty much admitted that is what he is and he accepted that fact. I don’t mind that too much. It does bother me that a guy who is searching for true love dumps women at an alarming rate. But mainly I’m just upset that I’ve been watching this show for five years and we haven’t found out who the damn mother is yet! The freaking Smog Monster on Lost is better defined than the mother. Look, I understand that this is the conceit behind the entire show but enough already. Just have Victoria from Season 1 return from Europe and open a pastry shop in New York that Ted just happens to walk into and they fall madly in love once more. I swear to you, every fan will be happy. Just make it happen.

Frosty is Legendary

Ok, if this isn’t the most awesome thing you see all day then that means either a) you are having a really awesome day or b) you are Neil Patrick Harris. This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything, and I mean everything, is made better by the inclusion of Neil Patrick Harris.

Also, congrats to long time blog fave and vague acquaintance Neko Case on her two Grammy nominations today. Middle Cyclone was a killer album and she deserved the recognition for it. She gets added to a surprisingly decent sized list of people I’ve met who have gone on to some actual fame. Ok, not cover of US Weekly fame but at least famous enough to be nominated for shiny award statues.

I’m still following the Tiger Woods story if only to see what other reality stars are caught up in the mix. Oh what I would give for a way to get Tila Tequila involved in this. It would be the ultimate connection between my love of sports and my love of really bad reality shows. Anyway, the focus now is on the prenup agreement (see, always listen to Kanye) and what additional money may be headed Elin’s way. Apparently cheating sets up some sort of incentive bonus structure where simply not getting divorced will earn her tens of millions of dollars. So at this point she is being paid to be an actress, which actually ties to a point that I wanted to make.

Again people are still raising this issue as to whether this should be news or is it a private matter. I still point to the fact that Tiger is a billion dollar brand for being a man who can hit a small ball better than other people. Hitting a small ball does not equate to a billion dollars of income. That money is the cost of fame for the loss of privacy. Here is my example.

The cast of Friends each received roughly a million dollars an episode at one point. 6 friends times 25 episodes gives us $150 million dollars to do a job that isn’t technically that difficult. Yes, acting is challenging I know but I bet you could walk down the street in LA and find six other attractive people who would do the show for a thousand dollars a week and would not get incredibly fat over the course of a season like Matthew Perry. So here is my question, if I told you I was going to replace the cast of Friends with random actors who would work for a grand a week what would you contribute to the cause to keep the original cast?

At its peak, Friends averaged 25 million viewers a week. Every single one of those would need to donate $600 to keep the cast members on the air. The math just doesn’t add up. You can’t justify what you are paying the actors for what they are versus a cheaper equivalent. So what are you paying them for?

You’re paying them to deal with being famous. You are paying Matthew Perry to deal with the fact that pricks like me are going to spend a decade cracking jokes about him getting fat and having an issue with prescription meds. You are paying Courtney Cox to accept the fact that for some reason people will care about what clothes she is wearing to the mall. This fame and attention is all tied to the show. Since Friends has gone off the air have you seen any tabloid articles on Lisa Kudrow? Yes, Jennifer Aniston gets media play still but that is due to her former marriage to Brad Pitt. She is still caught up in Brad’s price of fame, made even worse because she isn’t getting anything for it.

When you become a celebrity you lose your privacy. It is part of the deal. That is what you are being paid for. I’m not saying that it is fair or even ethical but those are the rules of the game and you have to learn to live by them.

I think I had this date before...

Some random thoughts based on comments and other moments of my life.

1) One of the wonders of having Wii Fit is that you tend to weigh yourself on a daily basis. This really does make you want to do anything and everything possible to lose weight just so you won’t have the computerized voice say “You’re overweight” every single day. Well, on Saturday I weighed myself and discovered that I had lost two pounds, which was a bit of a surprise given that I really didn’t exercise or do much of anything from when I weighed myself the day before. In fact, I realized that the only thing that I did do was get a haircut. As a result I have now decided that the foundation of my weight loss program is going to be full body waxing.

2) It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I was well aware that I could get a Ric Flair branded scratch off lottery ticket. Remember, I am the guy who was working on getting a mortgage through Ric Flair Finance. I mean, he had the patented Figure Four process! What could possibly go wrong, other than a complete meltdown of the financial system due to the fact that people were getting home loans from a pro wrestler who felt that feathered boas were a great addition to his ring gear. Sigh. It is sad that his sixteen world title reigns are matched by a nearly equal number of divorces leaving him unable to keep up with his limo riding, jet plane flying lifestyle.

3) Also, I’m not sure if I can consider the Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff as my least favorite tag team of all time. Sure, we all hated the Sheik but Volkoff was hated only because he was vaguely Russian though you always had the feeling that he was really from Detroit. Personally, I hated Ivan and Nikita Koloff more even though Ivan was from Canada and Nikita was from South Carolina.

4) I will grant the point that Kitchen Nightmares is the best Gordon Ramsay show but only if we are discussing the British version. That show should be required viewing for anyone thinking of opening a restaurant or even running their own business. The American version is so staged that it barely counts as reality television. And I still like Hell’s Kitchen as a guilty pleasure and the only cooking show on tv that gives an indication of what actually takes place in a restaurant kitchen.

5) How can anyone rank Wallowitz over Kuthrapali? True, Wallowitz broke out the Green Lantern belt buckle tonight but Kuthrapali brings it week after week. I am still a bit torn on the Penny and Leonard relationship. I want Leonard to get the girl because, well, I am a sucker for those sorts of things. The problem is there really isn’t anywhere for the story to go with them together. The four guys and Penny is funny. Leonard and Penny with Sheldon and the other two is really awkward.

6) I really liked How I Met Your Mother tonight. It at least showed that Ted has matured a little over the years (dude, you should have called her back.) It does show that Ted has set his standards so unbelievably high that you can’t imagine him getting anyone that fits his ideal. Ooh, she has cats I’ll never speak to her again. Just seems a little too judgmental. Also, weird in how they didn’t pay off the Barney and Robin arguing in the strip club. They built up tension and it didn’t go anywhere. Still Barney is awesome no matter what the setting.

Now what is left to see in South Bend?

I have some sad news to report. The College Football Hall of Fame is relocating from South Bend to Atlanta. This means, well, it means absolutely nothing to most of you. Heck, all of you unless you actually happen to work there. Mainly it means that those in the South Bend region will no longer have to put up with constant commercials on how they should visit the museum. That and expect a significant reduction in the number of former Notre Dame players inducted into the hall as that was one of the ways they insured a large crowd during the ceremony. It was actually a rather nice museum though and I’ve been at both the South Bend and Kings Island incarnations.

Oh, and best sign seen at the Pittsburgh G-20 protests. “Obama: Put Arrested Development back on the air.” See, that is what we need more of in this country. I am sick and tired of people having reasoned debates about topics like health care and international conflicts. I demand presidential action regarding television sitcoms. It might be the only thing that all of us as a nation could agree upon.

Since I was out of country for the past few weeks I am a bit out of touch with several of my favorite shows. I have finally caught up with Hell’s Kitchen as they are now at the portion of the show where the only contestants left are the ones who can actually cook. Of all the reality shows on the air this one is the most fake (even though the people I know who work on the show swear to me that it is on the up and up.) More than anything about half of the contestants would have absolutely no right working in a top restaurant much less being a head chef so the first few months of the show revolve around Gordon Ramsay swearing at people who can’t cook. It is entertaining but not entirely exciting. I am still a few episodes behind on Top Chef where this season’s cast is a lot more talented than the last but that actually takes out a bit of the drama. There is such a defined top group that we are just waiting to get to the final four or five so that they can all fight it out. Plus, Vegas just doesn’t serve up as many fun food opportunities as the other cities did.

How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory had their season premieres this week. Interesting that the more I read about HIMYM online the more people refer to Ted as a bit of a douche, which to be honest is pretty true. During the first season you cheered for the guy, in the second season you were glad that he was happy with Robin but since then he has grown insufferable. That doesn’t even take into account that he is telling his kids all about all the women he slept with before he met their mother. The show is basically a vehicle for Barney and as long as he breaks out the tuxedo I am still a fan of the show.

Big Bang Theory is at a strange point in its development. The show has become entirely about Sheldon, which is great because he is the best character. Except that the conceit behind the show was that it was about Leonard and Penny as a couple and to be honest, no one really cares. The chemistry just isn’t there and we aren’t as invested in the character as we should be. It will be interesting to see where they take the plot lines this season.

How can you run out of bait on a fishing boat?

My goal of writing an interesting take on the speeches that all graduates are forced to sit through (inspired by the recently released David Foster Wallace speech “This is Water”) will have to be postponed for yet another night. Due to a lack of sleep, lack of creativity and a new episode of Deadliest Catch my mind just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to write what I needed to so hopefully you will have that to look forward to tomorrow.

Instead I’ll just write about television including the strange addiction that is Deadliest Catch. On the surface I’m not sure you could ever think of a more boring show in existence. Let’s show a bunch of guys in a boat throwing steel pot after steel pot over the side and then retrieving the pots and unloading the crab. That is the show, week after week just more footage of guys crab fishing. Yet it is some of the most amazing television you ever see. All of these guys out there on the open ocean in the middle of the Arctic, just suffering like mad and occasionally nearly dying. You really can’t take your eyes off of it. Plus, I now firmly believe that every workplace should be required to have a fifty year old Hungarian who barely speaks English on staff. It just makes the world a more interesting place.

The Big Bang Theory ended its season last night on a rather odd note. They brought back the Penny and Leonard relationship with Penny seeming to fall for Leonard as he goes off with the guys to the North Pole to search for sub-atomic particles. Sounds like a perfectly logical summer vacation to me. (Personally I loved the line “we’ll be able to drink for free at any bar in a college town with a strong science program.”) What this show did portray correctly is the fact that guys like Leonard just cannot take subtlety. We (and I mean that in less than the royal sense) are just unable to read between the lines. Despite the fact that we are brilliant when it comes to relationships we are dumb as a box of hammers that went to school in Arkansas. But we really mean well.

As for How I Met Your Mother at least we can rest assured that Stella is not the mom. However, I am completely confused as to where the series goes from here. Robin isn’t the mom, Stella isn’t the mom, we were just told that Ted is finally on the path to meeting the mom yet there is no one left for it to be. Meaning that there is no logical character that we know about who could potentially be the mother. Though I still hope that the last scene of this season will be a knock on the door and Ted opens it to see Victoria standing in the hallway. That would be a great ending to the season.

(Sorry, I’m just a hopeless romantic at heart and think it would make a great ending to the story.)

I know that part of the story (of the show and of life) is that the journey is what is important. That everything we do until we meet the one is what makes it possible for us to find that certain someone. But it is interesting that we as the viewer are beginning to feel Ted’s frustration. We want to get to the ending or at least a new beginning. But that is kind of the point. Life doesn’t work on our own timelines. Forcing something just makes it go pear shaped. I haven’t learned much in my life (at least in terms of things that don’t involve differential equations) but I’m beginning to realize that at some points you just have to let the universe be. Things will come around much better than if you try to force reality to match your own visions.

How I Met...oh, not her again

I don’t quite understand why people celebrate Cinqo de Mayo. It is a completely made up holiday. Everyone knows that in the Jedi faith that yesterday marks the true holy day. Only Life Day holds nearly as much significance. People can be very strange.

One of the interesting things about my commute home is that I get to drive past churches with rather thought provoking signs. Today’s question was “If Jesus was coming tomorrow what would you do today?” To which my immediate response was “I don’t know, hide the porn?” Actually, if I ever become one of those guys wearing a sandwich board and maniacally ringing a bell I swear that my sign will read “Jesus is coming! Quick, everyone hide the porn!”

Yeah, I’m probably going to hell for that one.

The most important news to talk about is what we learned last night on How I Met Your Mother. I’ve been a little lax in my HIMYM updates this year as thanks to DVRs I always feel like I need to put spoiler alerts on everything. Plus, with both Lily and Robin pregnant in real life it has meant that this season has become a case of “let’s see what large objects we can place Lily and Robin behind this time.” At least they have had fun with it with Lily showing off her belly as part of a competitive eating montage and Robin last night having jokes involving pregnancy and giant purses.

But enough on that, let’s go through what each of the male characters encountered.

Marshall had the most enjoyable moments of the episode with his love of charts. Personally I will always enjoy anyone who makes a pie chart of his favorite bars and a bar chart of his favorite pies. And when knowing that people will complain of his never ending use of charts he goes ahead and creates a chart to track their discomfort. As someone who believes that every moment and event in life should be chronicled, quantified and graphed this just furthers my belief that Marshall is the coolest guy ever.

We learned much more about Barney this episode than most people would originally think. While it was always known that he took everything he heard as a kid literally (hence the Bob Barker is his dad story) it never quite factored in to how he became who he is today. In fact, it was never clear as to what set him on the path to being, well, a better dressed version of Mystery. Now we know it was to show up a bragging sixth grader who was lucky enough to have a pet Ewok (lucky bastard). That led him to his two hundred conquests, which is an awful lot when you consider the math and the fact that he always seems to be hanging out in the same bar night after night, and a sense of wondering what is next. Obviously that next step is Robin. The interesting question there is could anyone be in a serious relationship with Barney knowing that he is, you know, Barney. That would make for one hell of a plot point next year.

Finally, in the moments that had me going “Oh my God, oh my God” like I was a twelve year old girl we came all that much closer to finding out who the mother is. After four years we finally see Ted pick up the yellow umbrella, we hear that it is only through random events that he met his true love, we see Ted hug random strangers (including a psychotic looking weather clown who I believe gave a forecast of “there is a forty percent chance of rain today with an eighty percent chance that I will devour your soul”) and we find out that the woman who taps Ted on the shoulder is…

Becky from Roseanne.

Son of a…

See, we know that she can’t be the mom because we have already met her. And in the wedding episode Ted detailed what life would have been liked if they had gotten married and that included two blonde haired kids. Also, there is the side fact that Becky dumped Ted at the altar and I don’t know about you but that would probably be a strike on the whole restarting the relationship thing. So we have two more episodes this year before we find out who the mother is. Unless they decide to wait until next season at which point I will just be heard cursing the television set for a good hour.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss why I tend to find Penny in The Big Bang Theory more attractive when she wears her Cheesecake Factory waitress uniform. Or at least I would like to think there is a reason. It’s either that or discuss the parallels between myself and Sheldon and I would rather not go there.

I knew Ted shouldn't have trusted Becky...

As some of you have noticed I now have this little gizmo on the blog that tracks where my traffic originates. It is a rather fascinating little feature especially when it shows that someone in China has read my blog. That just amazes me. I know that with over a billion people the odds of one of them coming across my website is decent but I can’t imagine any of my usual topics interesting someone in Beijing. Maybe there are a surprising number of Lindsay Lohan fans over there.

(And I can’t believe that they’ve decided to cut My Beloved Lindsay’s role on Ugly Betty. I will now officially boycott the show. True, I wasn’t watching it in the first place but now I really won’t watch it.)

The reason I mention this is because I got the biggest smile today when I saw that the circle representing London grew today. To whoever is checking out the site from merry old England a whole load of thanks. It made me feel like I was an international superstar or something.

Completely random TV note: After seeing Sheldon wear one on The Big Bang Theory I’ve decided that I need to get a t-shirt that features the logo from The Greatest American Hero. I think I would wear that shirt every day of my life. I would also carry a boom box playing the theme song, assuming that boom boxes actually still exist. “Believe it or not I’m walking on air…”

Anyway, I’m just in a television mood at the moment and since I am now caught up on How I Met Your Mother I need to discuss what we learned in this week’s episode. As I felt all along, Ted and Stella’s wedding fell apart with Ted essentially being left at the altar. This made sense given that the entire premise of the show is Future Ted telling his kids how he met their mother and you would think they would put the pieces together given that if Stella was their mom they would have a half sister. But it was a little bit of a shock when they actually had Stella in an imagined future scene mentioning that she was their mother.

The more important thing is that this was the first show in ages that felt like a show from the first two seasons when it was actually good. Barney was at his best at the whiteboard calculating precisely how to score with Robin. Robin finally got to do something by arguing with Ted about how he was going way too fast and “that this isn’t the Ted I know.” That is pretty much what all of us fans have been saying as the Ted of the past year has been unlikable and given that he is based on me that is a rather sucky view of my own self. And Marshall and Lilly are funny as always, which is what the show needs.

There was one interesting point raised on the show that I truly want opinions on. The plot hinged on having exes at the wedding and how you don’t want to have them there. While I haven’t come to a wedding question I am really intrigued by how people treat their past relationships. There are some that claim that no guy is friendly with an ex-girlfriend unless he is hoping for their status to change. While I agree that that is initially true with time and distance things can change. I’m friends with people from my past and despite some awkwardness I’m really happy for it.

My question is should I tell a woman that I’ve just started dating that I still talk with an ex-girlfriend? Is this a horrible no no? That even though someone may live states away, that she has moved on her life in such a way that I might as well play Powerball than hope that she will take me back because my odds would be better, that the mere fact that it is known that I care about someone else puts me in a bad spot? Or does it show that I’m mature and understand that not everything works out? I’m really curious as to what people think about this. It would never stop me from being friends with someone from my past but I might change how I present it.

That is all for tonight. Have a great weekend everyone.

Television worth watching, or at least recording

This will be a relatively quick post as I just got back from the Phillies game. Yes, after only a few weeks I am already going “Yay team from vaguely my geographic location!” I mean, I can understand cheering for Philadelphia without actually living in the city. I’ve cheered for Chicago teams all my life even though I did not technically grow up in the city proper. However, I’m not even living in the proper state to cheer this team. I should be cheering the local Delaware team which is the….I’ll get back to you on that.

There is something odd about living in one of those states which when shown on a map simply have a line pointing to it because the name of the state is bigger than the state itself. I’m not even talking in terms of scale on a map. I believe that if you just wrote the word “Delaware” in the middle of the street you would technically cross state lines. And get hit by an idiot on his cell phone so I wouldn’t recommend it as an experiment.

I’ll just spend the rest of this post reviewing my favorite shows on television: How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory. I’ll start with The Big Bang Theory, which still amazes me that it got renewed because there can’t be that many people out there who appreciate physics humor. First off, props for showing Sheldon using the t-shirt folding device that was discussed on this blog a few years ago. It is the easiest and most effective way to have perfectly folded t-shirts. That was the highlight of the episode.

Sadly, that was pretty much the only highlight of the episode (well, that and the whole Indian cinema section). It just seemed to me that the chemistry between Leonard and Penny was completely off. We spent all last season building up to where they kiss and they did and there seemed to be something going there. But in last night’s episode I couldn’t even imagine them being a couple. Heck, even understanding why they were friends seemed to be a stretch. The entire story is built on Penny liking Leonard, maybe not as the man of her dreams but a definite connection being there, while Leonard is totally smitten and completely lost. Last night they just seemed like neighbors who were trying to avoid one another. I hope that is fixed in the future.

(Oh, and the discussion as to what would be required to become Green Lantern was also quite good.)

As someone who has stated that How I Met Your Mother has gone beyond stealing several of the ideas behind my novel but has moved into taking sections of my life and placing them on screen I was rather disappointed with last season on a whole. Ted became a bit of a jerk and a pretty big man slut. (I’m not sure what the technical term is for a guy who sleeps around more than he probably should. A More?) Robin just kind of existed in her own little world and Barney was the only one on the show worth watching.

Well, the show moved in the right direction though I still have some issues. We have luckily quickly forgotten the whole “Barney got hit by a bus” subplot as well as the “We all hate Barney” issue. Ted is engaged to a character who, other than the three minute date, the audience has no vested interest in other than it is really nice to have Sarah Chalke on television. When they brought up how Ted knows nothing about her it was a nice way of saying neither does the audience. I’m not sure where that story is going and since he is our hero (and my surrogate) I’d sure like to know what is going to happen next.

Easily the best part was Barney’s falling in love with Robin. First, yes my new apartment resembles Barney’s in great detail up to and including the life size stormtrooper statue. This is the storyline that will probably carry the show for the rest of the season. We want to see Barney and Robin together because they would make a great couple. Plus, Barney would become human and have to change his ways. Most of all, this is awesome because we have a situation in which Barney doesn’t have a clue how to act. It is always fun to watch someone so put together be absolutely clueless. And the fact is, when she left him at the end of the episode you felt sympathy (and in my case, empathy) for the guy. Not bad for a sitcom.

The harpist in the garden...

First off, I hope that everyone had a very merry Dyngus Day today. What, you don’t know what Dyngus Day is? It is simply the best holiday ever. Consider it a reverse Mardi Gras. Well, not in the “I’ll give you beads if you put your shirt back on” sense of the term but from a theological standpoint it is very similar. See, on Mardi Gras you go wild because it is your last chance to have fun before you have to give up all of your bad habits for Lent. Dyngus Day works the same way as it is the day after Easter and we can go back to our ways of sin and debauchery. Also, sauerkraut is involved. Don’t ask me why, it just is.

Actually, back in my Czech homeland we would celebrate this day in the following way. A young single male such as myself would sneak into the house of the girl he was pining for, pour water over her head while she slept, and then whip her across the legs with long twigs. I’m not making this up. It says so on Wikipedia and we all know Wikipedia doesn’t lie. Sometimes I wonder why we left the old country behind. I think this would be a great tradition to continue, restraining orders aside.

Speaking of things that are going to result in a restraining order after a week of careful deliberation I have come up with my solution to the Say Anything dilemma. Since I no longer have a boom box and holding an iPod docking station over my head seems rather pathetic I have decided that I must up the ante. Yes, one day a lucky lady will find myself outside her window with a backing band. And since I have money and a strange sense of humor it won’t be any band; it will be The Polyphonic Spree. Imagine the sight: waking up to see twenty five people dressed in white choir robes dancing and singing and playing music in someone’s yard while I directed the action in an attempt to prove my undying love for whoever was at that moment most likely calling the cops. That said, I don’t thinking being too awesome for words should technically be considered a crime.

(To get a sense of what this would be like they kind of did this on an episode of Scrubs. And I do look like Zach Braff if I lose the glasses and intentionally dishevel my hair as opposed to its usual unintentionally disheveled state.)



I have a couple of notes on The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother that I have been meaning to mention. First off, while I will always consider myself to be a Fitzgerald in search of his Zelda or a Gatsby in search of his Daisy it might be better if I just say that I am a Leonard in search of his Penny. True, I prefer the Fitzgerald reference (even if he did die an alcoholic in Hollywood) and Gatsby certainly had more style (being shot to death in his pool aside) the Leonard reference is probably more accurate. That’s pretty much me. Good guy, too smart for his own good, who wants to fall in love and be in a relationship but can’t because his brain always seems to get in the way. Also, he did hook up with Darlene from Roseanne so he does have that going for him.

Best reference in last week’s show that explains how my mind works: The guys wiring up their entire apartment so that they can control everything through the internet and then granting open access to the entire world to turn their lights on and off. Why? Because they can. Is there another reason?

I watched last week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother last night and once again that show seemed to be taken from my life. It’s kind of stunning given what I had written right before I watched it. Ted, my slightly cooler alter ego, goes too far one night, wakes up with a black eye, and is finally shown that he is going in the wrong direction. Pretty much dead on to what I’m going through; that realization that you have become someone you don’t particularly like. Since Ted apparently picked up the umbrella of his future life we can only hope that both of our lives are headed in the right direction.

Also, tonight’s episode was classic with the two minute date. Sure, you might not be able to get that to work so flawlessly in real life but in terms of turning a no into a yes it is probably a great move. Plus, I loved the fact that it showed that trying all of the games and schemes failed miserably mainly because I can’t pull them off. Maybe if I just be who I am then things will work out. Wow, be myself. That idea is so crazy it just might work.

Oh, and Brit’s performance tonight? Not bad. She didn’t set the set on fire or anything. I’m speaking literally here as in the fire department was not called in. It was a pretty harmless guest spot, she didn’t blow a line or seem completely out of it and if you ignored everything that has happened in the past few years it would seem pretty inconsequential. For her, this can be considered progress.

Life is like a Vlookup command...

Had one of those days in the office today. The one where you spend the entire afternoon redoing everything you did in the morning because of bad data. Well, maybe this was partially my fault because I knew the data was bad when I started working with it but I didn’t expect it to magically fix itself while I wasn’t looking. As a result I got to spend even more of my day than usual manipulating spreadsheets and playing around with data. I know that I actually enjoy that but running the same stuff over and over again does get a little tiring.

It did dawn on me that I did a ton of work today without really talking to anyone. A phone call here or there but otherwise it was working with my headphones on for eight hours. This makes me wonder about one of my biggest fears about gainful unemployment: the possibilities of going days without actually talking to anyone. Truth be told, I sometimes do that now so I guess I shouldn’t consider it that much of a concern. Well, obviously it is a concern but at least I should not consider it a new experience. It’s not good in any way but at least I am aware of it. Plus, soon I won’t have to attempt to make half hearted attempts at conversation in elevators anymore. That has to be a plus.

I know I’m talking about work now but I figure that I’m so close to the end that it isn’t worth the effort to try to edit myself anymore. This way I get to complain about being added to an 8 AM meeting tomorrow to discuss the job I’m leaving. Yeah, I am so looking forward to that one. I had a hard enough getting inspired to get into the office by eight when I actually thought about the future. Now I just tend to sneak in the side door so Lumberg doesn’t notice.

Another interesting question that has been asked of me recently: will I tell new employers about my blog. Specifically, would I bring this up in an interview? For some reason I have the same answer as I do about telling someone I’m dating about it; I don’t bring it up but will discuss it if the situation arises. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. If I tell a girl that I run a vaguely successful blog I give the impression that I am creative and artistic. The problem is if she actually reads the site then she finds out more things about me than she would really need to know. Companies would be the same way. It’s a lot of “wow, this guy has a lot of talent along with an apparent Lindsay Lohan obsession.” Makes for a tough call.

Last note for the night and the best example of good news / bad news in a long while. Good news is next Monday we celebrate the return of The Big Bang Theory and the sitcom version of my life in How I Met Your Mother. Bad news is that in order to raise ratings and save the show Brittney Spears is going to guest star on How I Met Your Mother. I am not making any part of that last sentence up. The show that I described as being a brilliant retelling of being young and single has decided to add Brit to the cast for a show. Guess I can’t consider the show to be based on my life anymore. Not unless things have gotten even weirder than they’ve usually been.

We really need a Spears Family Christmas Special

One of the horrible things about the writers’ strike is that it greatly reduces the number of topics I have to write about. No new How I Met Your Mother episodes (by the way, if the series does not resume the creators have informed me that the mother is the coat check girl) and The Big Bang Theory is in indefinite reruns. What in the world could possibly happen that I might be able to write about? I mean, it’s not like the younger sister of a troubled starlet is going to get pregnant or anything…

Oops…I did it again.

(Yes it is a horrible pun but do you know how many headlines are going to have a variation of that in the morning.)

For those of you who have missed the big news, Brit’s little sister and star of the hit Nickelodeon series Zoey 101, Jamie Lynn Spears is preggers. Now when you read Nickelodeon star and preggers that leads to one simple question with an obvious answer; Jamie Lynn is 16 years old. I think I speak for most of North America when I say that is seriously f-ed up.

I mean, being pregnant at sixteen is messed up to begin with. Last night I made fun of people with the Clapper having kids but at least they are adults. At sixteen you should barely be allowed to drive at night much less be involved in raising a child. Now on top of that, imagine having something like this play out in the national media. Does anyone ever dream of being the poster child for unwed teenage mothers?

Now add this to the banner year that the Spears family has been having already. Brit’s a complete mess and can’t even be bothered to make the court dates to argue for custody of her own two children. That’s the sad part of that whole state of affairs; she’s so screwed up that she can’t even be bothered to get out of bed to see if she can gain custody. Brit claims illness but let’s be honest, most mothers would come to court with their leg in a bear trap if it meant a better chance at seeing their kids. Maybe it is understandable that her little sister gets pregnant. It might be the only attention she has gotten all year.

You really have to look at their parents throughout all of this and wonder just what the hell they were thinking. Remember that both girls were raised to be superstars and not kids. This is like one of those beauty pageant moms gone berserk. The idea was to groom the girls into pop superstardom and as a result I don’t know if they have any grounding in reality. One can’t purchase fame and while you can manufacture infamy it just isn’t the same. Now Brit is a tired joke and Jamie Lynn will be handing her kid off to a nanny while wondering how to resurrect her career at 18. What a strange world.

(Switching gears, one story from the weekend that I need to share here. I had a dream that I was in How I Met Your Mother over the weekend. As in I was Ted or Ted was me or since the character is based on me I am me. Either way, I was literally in a bar with Barney and was able to successfully steal a girl away from him. That might be my biggest accomplishment of the past month and it wasn’t even real.)

I even made my own coffee

Coming next fall on ABC: One’s a mascot. One’s a coach. They’re both cops. Mark Mangino as “Thin” Lou Scalzetti and Obie the Orange as Derek Blue in “The Thin Blue Line”.

(Props to Deadspin for the photo)

Can I ask a simple question? Does the University of Kansas even have a school of nutrition? It worries me that I would go to the ER at KU Med when it is clear that they can’t even tell their head coach to lay off the carbs. He’s the only head coach who wouldn’t surprise me if he rode around the sidelines on a scooter. Either that or a band member playing a tuba should follow him around and provide a soundtrack.

So I did something different today in that I worked from home. Now to be honest, the ice storm didn’t turn out nearly as bad as was feared and I could have made it to work. I just would have been a little later than usual. But, I had permission to work from home and I had never intentionally set out to spend a day telecommuting so I wanted to try it. I’ve worked nights and weekends before but never a typical workday. It was a rather interesting experience.

First off, I have to say that for the first time in, oh, over a freaking decade I finally got to work next to a window. Seriously, no one can understand just how much happier having natural light makes me feel. Also, getting to play music without wearing headphones was a nice treat. A little Polyphonic Spree here, a little Ryan Adams there, hell I even broke out the old Jeff Buckley DVD to make it feel like I was in grad school again. Lunch was quick and didn’t cost me money and I was able to spend part of my lunch hour watching my tape of Monday Night Raw from the night before. I don’t typically get to do that at work. I said typically, I’m not saying it hasn’t been done.

(Before anyone gives me grief it was the 15th Anniversary of Monday Night Raw. Sunny came back. Even The Lethal Weapon Steve Blackman made an appearance. For someone who has been watching Raw for, uh, 15 years this was a big deal.)

Back to the subject at hand, the obvious question is whether or not I was more productive. I’m not entirely sure. I definitely was able to pound through a lot of rather challenging work without any distractions. Heck, the fact that I figure things out by talking them out and was able to do that was good (talking to myself in a cubicle is apparently frowned upon.) But it’s just weird to wonder what you should do next and go “Well, I could vacuum.” That’s not something I typically do during the workday though given the way things are going it may become part of my job description. In the end, I think I prefer going to the office. All I did today was sit in my apartment and spend all day on a computer without talking to a single soul. I do that enough as it is.

One quick How I Met Your Mother comment (which I’ll probably build on tomorrow). The absolute best part of the episode was Marshall telling Barney “Don’t kill the bar.” That was due to Barney’s attempt to hook up with the waitress which when it inevitably fell apart would lead to enough awkwardness that none of them could go to the bar. You don’t know just how real a thing this is. When a bar becomes your own anything that you do that might threaten that status becomes extremely frightening. This doesn’t just address dating bar staff. It also extends to dating other regulars because after the breakup you must decide who gets ownership of the bar and that is not a fun discussion. Best case, one of you just decides to never go into that bar again. While from personal experience I must state that I have cost Harry’s some business because of this I probably made it up to them just by imbibing more due to the fact that I cost them business. It all evens out in the end.

Blasts from the past

Is it ok to be incredibly thrilled over a Geico commercial? It’s just that I saw one featuring that dude from the Police Academy movies who made all the funny sound effects. The ad itself actually introduced him as “that dude from the Police Academy movies who made all the funny sound effects.” This guy’s entire career, including being name The Onion’s Man of the Year, can be summed up by simply stating “he’s the dude from the Police Academy movies who made all the funny sound effects.” That my friends is the definition of fame.

So I have to say that last night’s episode of How I Met Your Mother was probably the best of the season. The writing hasn’t been as spot on this year as it has been in past seasons, mainly because I’m not sure what the focus is this season. Season One was Ted pursuing Robin. Season Two was Lily and Marshall getting married. This year has Ted scoring skanky chicks while Marshall sells out. It really hasn’t found its rhythm yet.

But this episode did finally deal with the fact of how in the world are Ted and Robin acting as friends after breaking up. This is one of those sitcom events that HIMYM is centered enough to try to address because in real life once you break up with someone you never see them again. Especially after a year long relationship. The awkwardness and the fact that you never truly stop feeling something for the other person (at least in my experience) makes a transference to friends status extremely difficult. Not saying that it’s impossible, not saying that I haven’t done it myself, but it is not an easy state of affairs.

Oh, and Barney got slapped again. You have to like any show where a major ongoing plot line is one character slapping another. That definitely would have made Everybody Loves Raymond more interesting. Well, that and actual humor.

I’m kind of low on topics tonight so I’ll just talk about an upcoming concert that I’m probably going to attend. It’s certainly not one that I ever expected to occur a few blocks from my apartment. Well, at least not since I graduated from college. See, The Lemonheads are going to play Record Bar in a few months. Or at least Evan Dando plus a couple of guys that he is calling The Lemonheads are going to play Record Bar. To be honest, I don’t even think that Evan could name the other guys in the band.

Even though I was never a big fan I’ll go just because they were the type of band that I really wanted to see when I was in college. That’s what makes the show so weird and I’ve seen more than a few of these. You take a band that was if not on top of the world could at least see the top and revisit them a decade later and see what has happened. I’m not sure what it is like for the band to now find themselves playing for a hundred people in Kansas City. I know on some level they view it as their job and in some cases they are still playing the songs they love. Just look at the Camper Van Beethoven clip I posted this week, they’re still having fun (usually as Cracker) but playing to smaller crowds. In other instances it’s kind of sad as even the band realizes that they have reached an age where they know of nothing else to do with their lives.

True, I’m at that same point in mine. It’s just as scary for me, I just don’t have to do it in front of an audience.

All bands should wear Illini sweaters...

Wednesday Night Music Club: It dawned on me that I mentioned Sufjan Stevens yesterday and that was probably the one reference in the entire piece that people might not get. I mean, I did include a song on Battling the Current Volume 2 but there are a lot of people reading this now who weren’t around back then. So here is a stripped down, live version of Chicago, which is just on this side of amazing. I’m in awe of any song that has a chorus of “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my time.”

It might be time for a Volume 3 as well. We are nearing the third anniversary of Battling the Current after all. Wow, five nights a week for three years. That’s a lot of words.

And on what I wrote last night, I’m glad that I’ve gotten some positive comments on it. I haven’t written something like that for a while, mainly because I have a hell of a time writing something like that and keeping it from being so sappy that it is suitable for use as a breakfast topping. I think I did a good job, especially given that it really was written in half an hour. For some reason while driving to work in the morning the opening paragraph floated into my mind and I decided to go with it.

(I will say that driving home from Lawrence in a massive storm one night really was the impetus of the piece. It wasn’t really raining, just huge sheets of lightning crisscrossing the sky. Given that the area between Lawrence and KC is simply a bunch of open fields it was a pretty awesome site. It’s nice to be awed by something you’ve experienced a thousand times but never thought about.)

Anyway, it was either that or write about how The Pick Up Artist got a shout out on The Big Bang Theory this week. Not that I’m, you know, writing scripts for that show or anything. Sure, I’ve gotten some calls to help tighten a few up but I’m not technically writing for them. Yet. I do have to say that this episode was absolutely spot on from the innate geek joy of dressing in costumes to the complete incomprehensibility of how to interact at parties to Leonard deciding to think and be nice when Penny is kissing him. I think I’ve had that exact same conversation myself including the “yep, I’m a freaking genius” line. I checked and this show is actually getting better ratings than How I Met Your Mother so it might miraculously survive this first season.

HIMYM still hasn’t seem to have found its rhythm. While it is brilliant that porn can be a topic of a sitcom at 7 in the evening I’m not sure if the story went anywhere. The thing with that show is that there is always an overriding plot. In season one it was Ted trying to get Robin. In season two it was Ted and Robin as a couple and Lilly and Marshall getting married. This season doesn’t seem to be about anything yet and we still haven’t addressed why newlyweds Marshall and Lily still haven’t dealt with the fact that they are sharing an apartment with their bachelor friend from college. I know New York is a tough place to make it on your own but doesn’t that seem a little weird? Or have I just spent too much time in the Midwest?