Remember - there's a special new episode of "Arrested Development" tonight at 9:30 on FOX! Make sure you catch this show as it is absolutely hilarious. Jason Bateman is a wildly underrated comic actor and the show is suberbly written. I don't have enough space here to properly describe how funny this show is, but suffice to say, you can hear me laughing from the parking lot of my apartment complex. I'm not generally a loud laugher, but this show makes me cry - on par with Curb Your Enthusiasm, South Park, and Andy Richter Controls the Universe(no longer on the air) and a step above The Simpsons, Scrubs, Beavis and Butthead(now on MTV 2), and Malcolm in the Middle. Don't believe me? Then read this review in the Newark Star-Ledger.
Need further proof? Michael, the main character, has become the president of his father's company after his father was imprisoned for various embezzling schemes. In order to fix the company, he had to sell off all of his family's perks, including their cars and private jet. However, he was able to keep the pickup truck with extendable stairs on the back that led people up to the private jet. Thus, he and the family are now required to use the stair car as their primary means of transportation. Every time he has to drive somewhere, we see him get in the stair car and I lose it. What type of show has the balls to come up with a joke that stupid and keep it going the entire series? A great one (see Everybody Loves Raymond and Robert's insistence on touching food to his chin before eating it.)
In related TV news, also remember to check out Wonderfalls, this Thursday and Friday on FOX. Deirdre tipped me off to this, and the quirky show has a lot of potential. It premeired on Friday, but they are reairing the premiere episode Thusday with a follow up Friday of episode 2. The main character is a wise ass college graduate who lives in Niagara Falls. For some reason, inanimate objects have begun to talk to her, and now she is compelled to do what they ask, usually something nice for a stranger. It's a bit hokey, but it also has the feel of one of those better X-Files episodes, where they would drop the alien ridiculousness and fool around at a carnival or something.
Even if you did see Friday's episode, you can watch it again with commentary this Thursday. Apparently, FOX will be running audio commentary with the episode by the show's creators. It's an interesting concept and I hope it doesn't get bogged down by too many people hitting the server at once. Even without commentary the show is watchable simply for the main character, Jaye, played by Caroline Dhavernas. She does a great job of making what could be a lame concept edgy and interesting. I swear I have seen her in something before, but all I could find was Lost and Delirious, a little, unknown movie that I caught while unemployed last year and enjoyed much more than I expected.
Well, I clearly cannot give the proper amount of space to the Amber story now, so it waits for another day. Until then, take solace in the fact that I just threw 3 hours of good TV your way (Wonderfalls - Thursday and Friday, Arrested Development - Wednesday and Sunday).
For your troubles, here's another nugget: Significant Others on Bravo was funny after two episodes. Caught them during the can-Amber-stop-vomitting? marathon. It normally airs on Tuesdays, but its cable so it'll be on another 80 times.
P.S. Double your pleasure: South Park and Chapelle's Show are both new and worth watching tonight. So, it's ---
9:30 -- Arrested Development - FOX
10:00 to midnight -- Comedy Central
South Park
Chapelle's Show
The Daily Show
Tough Crowd (anybody catch Greg Giraldo flipping out Monday? Awesome.)
I think that by this point, we're all aware that my girlfriend, Amber, is completely crazy. She suffers from some kind of modified OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) whereby everything that possibly involves me has to be clean, but anything involving just her - not so much. (See similar stories of crazy over at Ron's site, hosted on this server.)
For instance, if I make the bathroom/bedroom/kitchen messy, then I get yelled at and have to clean it up. (She doesn't get as angry at this as she did before, as I presume my constant barrage of mess has dulled her senses) However, her car is allowed to be a total filthbag at all times. There have often been times that I have been unable to put my feet on the floormat on the passenger side because there was too much accumulated rubbish blocking my way. Instead, I was forced to rest my feet on the floating pile of empty water bottles, mail and gum and food wrappers, hoping that they wouldn't be swallowed under.
C'est la Amber.
This is only a minor annoyance however, as I do my best to avoid her car. Her craziness becomes unavoidable whenever I attempt to go to sleep.
As I am a night owl (I know that this fits in spectactularly with my chosen profession) (I'm a fish-monger, if you must know) (No, "monger does not mean that, it means "seller"), I get to bed well after Amber has turned in for the night. Every time I attempt to actually get under the sheets, I have to spend the first two minutes untangling the the sheet and blanket from her wrapped cocoon. Not so much a "clean" crazy here as it is an inconsiderate crazy. She steadfastly refuses to tuck the sheets in, and even untucks them when I try to make the bed.
Knowing full well that in a few hours I will be coming to bed - and needing sheets - she hoardes them all for herself. If I attempt to tuck them in to keep at least 1/4th of a sheet on my half of the bed, she immediately kicks them out, declaring, "My feet have to be free!" Yup, crazy.
Back to the clean unavoidable crazy. First, she cannot use a towel or facecloth more than once, which results in huge amounts of laundry. Personally, I use a towel until I find the smell overwhelming, but I'm a heathen.
Second, she only uses pillowcases for four days. Why four? Because after one night, she flips it over. Next night, she flips it back and finally - back again to the second side. Two alternating nights for each side of the pillow. Then it must be changed. Crazy, but whatever.
Here's where it gets weird. If you're obsessed with cleanliness, one would think that after a pillowcase becomes "unclean" (see Leviticus 15:26), that it would have to be discarded to the laundry pile and replaced by a new one? Right? And she does get a new pillowcase. However, she slips it over the existing pillowcase! This makes no sense! If you're a clean freak, why would you want an unclean pillowcase only an 1/8th of an inch of flimsy 80 count material away from your face?
The only reason I could possibly come up with justifying this behavior is that she feels its a time saver to not remove the old pillowcase. But a timesaver? Congratulations, Amber. By not removing this pillowcase now, you've saved ten seconds! If you die before you have to take both pilowcases off, losing your ten second gain, you'll be ten seconds up on the universe! It's forward thinking like that that will create the productivity necessary to revive this economy and maybe get me a job again.
Again, nuts.
P.S. The NCAA Basketball orgy has been in full swing. The CBS digital channel, which I receive over my HD box, is simulcasting all of the first and second round games, allowing me to flip between all live games for free. You can buy this package for about $60 from DirecTV, or get it over your antenna for free. Well, by free I mean after you spend $250 on the box necessary to receive it.
P.P.S. It looks like I'll be getting my HD TiVo by the beginning of May, at which point I will no longer have to ever leave the house. Good times.
Being largely unemployed can lead to long sections of nothing important happening in your life. So it has been for a few weeks. When you throw in a little March Madness, specifically the orgy of games from the first round this past weekend giving you no reason to leave the house, you can end up with seven days passing and not one definable thing actually happening. This appears to be the case with me. About all that I can think of actually occuring is me trashing yet another TiVo hard drive, much to Amber's chagrin. Then, I spent the last two days repairing what I did and getting the video off the 5 hard drives I have messed up in the past few months. Currently, I am burning those old and thought lost-forever shows to DVD for viewing pleasure over the next few days.
After this, I really have nothing else going on. Not that I necessarily lack options, I just don't like them. I realize that this is whining - "Poor me, I have too much free time, " but at least when you're working you're too distracted to realize that you're wasting your life away. Even worse, I have things to look forward to in the next few weeks.
Tue - Death Cab for Cutie concert
Sun - The Darkness in Concert ROCK ON!
End April/Early May - Hopefully a two week drive across the country. I'm heading to California for Coachella, a big music festival in SoCal - and if I'm still unemployed (highly likely) and I can convince Amber it's a good idea I want to drive from Michigan, thru St. Louis, dip thru Texas, stop at the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas before continuing to Indio, CA for Coachella. Then, on the way back, visit LA, head north on the PCH to San Fran, turn west thru Utah and Colorado, stop at Denver, maybe Yellowstone and then drive through the uselessness that is Nebraska and Iowa before getting home. Having never seen much of this country, I figure if I don't do it now I never will.
Plus, I'm becoming more knowledgable in web design and more importantly, web programming. Throw in learning to invest in stocks and options, and I guess I'm not really wasting my life after all.
Thanks, me. You've made me feel much better. And thanks to all for following along for my mini-crisis.
P.S. The Box office returns for the weekend have come in, and Dawn of the Dead has overtaken The Passion of the Christ for first place. Christ has only fallen the one spot to second. The lesson learned here by Hollywood? Clearly, people want more more movies about life after death. Also, when presented with possible option of after death whether you go to Heaven or you eat other people... more people are going with the whole "biting the living" thing. I so have to see that movie.
I just think that it is such a fair fight (Undead vs. The Living). Sure the Undead may outnumber you, but they're not smart and they're really slow-moving. You can fight them off with guns, but they have to catch up to you and then bite you. So, really - if they get you it was simply poor planning on your part. I mean, if you can survive the onslaught of the undead by building a false wall and blocking off one wing of a mall, then its really not like it's an unfair match. That's all I ask for - weird handicaps resulting in a fair fight. Like in Robocop. He's only one guy, and he's really slow... but he's covered in armor, has a great gun and aim, and has all the time in the world to get you. (This all presumes that Robocop 3, the flying Robocop movie, never happened. It's for the best if we all just pretend it never even existed.)
Just when I think I've got a handle on this TiVo thing, it goes and bites me in the ass. I've been attempting to extract two shows for a few days now, to no avail. The worst part about this is that the information on how to do this is readily available. For all those who are interested, the site to check out for TiVo hacking is Dealdatabase Forums. Unfortunately for me you and every other person who hasn't been reading these forums religiously for the past three years, information on how to do things is spread all over the place and delivered in drips and drabs when it is around.
Now, I don't want to say that the regulars who contribute to these forums are not helpful, because they are. However, instead of providing straightforward how-tos and documentation, they instead have 1500 post long threads that they yell at people for not reading. So, I've been wading through the thousands of posts necessary to get this extraction thing right, and finally this morning... a revelation. I won't even bother to explain it, because it's so boring. In fact, I'm not even sure why I posted this. Especially when I'm going to see The Darkness in concert tomorrow. Your loss. But it works now for almost real until I break it again. Then, I'll be taking another four days off from updating the site and spending it trying to fix my TiVo.
P.S. While looking through Amber's purse to find a piece of gum, I removed about 50 (I'm not kidding) wrappers and pieces of old gum in wrappers from her purse. Apparently, she does not believe in garbage cans. Probably a religious thing.
