002: The Sound of Shuffle

Please do pardon me as I talk in circles about music.

I finally got the latest My Chemical Romance album for Christmas -- Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys -- and have been listening to it on repeat since I ripped the tracks (from CD, how archaic!) to iTunes last week. It's been a while since I got an actual, physical copy of an album, and having the disc in my hands reminded me of high school, when I would get a new CD and listen to it and nothing else for about a week. I still like getting a hard copy of new music when I can afford it, because album art is one of my favorite things, and looking at the digital stuff that comes with iTunes albums just isn't the same as squinting at the lyrics printed in three-point font in the booklet. On a side note, I feel like I'm too young to be complaining about the kids these days with their iTunes and their Facebooks and how they have no appreciation for the way it used to be, dagnabbit. However, I do think it's just a much less engaging experience to shop for music in the iTunes store than going to a brick-and-mortar store and flipping through CDs or LPs. It's almost too easy.

Since I got my iPod as a college freshman, I haven't often listened to an album straight through. I'm addicted to shuffle. My iTunes library has over 6000 songs and is permanently set to shuffle. (As a result, there are probably songs I haven't heard in about three years.) Even when I listen to a single album, chances are the tracks are being shuffled. I don't know where I developed such an aversion to linear listening, but even things like Green Day's American Idiot and Muse's The Resistance, which are meant to be listened to in a particular order, get shuffled. I don't know why, but after a couple of listens, mixing the tracks up makes it more fun. I suppose it's like listening to a whole new album with songs that you already know; or maybe I just like being taken by surprise.

Oddly enough, when I make playlists, I slave over the tracklist to make sure they're in the perfect order. Go figure.

On a different note, allow me to recommend some of my favorite albums of 2010:

Jeremy Messersmith, The Reluctant Graveyard
Fantastic, moody, amazing.






Sara Bareilles, Kaleidoscope Heart
Sassy and mellow by turns.






Motion City Soundtrack, My Dinosaur Life
Energetic and slightly crazed, in the best possible way.




Enough blathering. Back to work.

001: The Resolution Declaration

I've tried New Year's resolutions in the past. Things like "lose those last five pounds" (2006-2010) or "finish that spec script for the fellowship application" (2008-2010) or "eat less chocolate" (2000-2010). Oddly enough, they never take. If anything, I've started eating more chocolate, and have no intention of stopping.

This year, I'm trying something different. This year, my goal is to post something on this blog every day. Whether it's something well-crafted and carefully considered or just a YouTube video (like, say, Sesame Street's Old Spice commercial parody), I'm going to get back into the habit of blogging.

Of course, I'm also doing the 50 Book Challenge, as I have since 2007, and interested parties may follow my progress on Goodreads. Be forewarned: my literary tastes alternate between the highbrow and the highly questionable.

So this is day one. Happy New Year, Internet! Wish me luck.


photo by R I V A on flickr

Jeopardy!, or How to Win $2,000 Without Embarrassing Yourself

I made my national television debut yesterday on Jeopardy!, which is syndicated, meaning I got text messages, Facebook notifications, and e-mails in waves from friends and relatives in different TV markets. Everyone was very nice and excited to see me on television, which was great – so thanks, everybody! – especially since I still haven't managed to watch it in full myself. I don't like the way my voice sounds on recordings, and I remember thinking I hadn't done the brief interview with Alex Trebek very gracefully, so I haven't watched it. My mother, however, has watched it at least twice. (I'm sure I'll steel myself and watch the whole thing through eventually.)

So how did I end up a runner-up on America's Favorite Quiz Show®? The short answer is this: I took the online test. Three times. The third time, incidentally, was the charm, and I did well enough to be invited to the in-person auditions in Chicago last May. I should note that many of the people I met in Chicago (and, later, in Los Angeles) had taken the test many, many more times than I did, so I'm all the more amazed by how quickly I ended up on the show. At the audition, there was yet another 50-question test and some mock games. This test was the easiest one yet, and the “signaling device” – A.K.A. the button you press to ring in – didn’t take too much getting used to. Plus, they gave us free pens. Following that audition, we were put into the contestant pool for 18 months, meaning that we could be called up anytime during that year-and-a-half and invited to be on the show. I wasn’t holding my breath, since most of the people at the Chicago event had auditioned at least once before and had their 18 months expire without a phone call.

Much to my surprise, I got a voicemail not less than two months later from the fantastic Maggie Speak, who is one of the most entertaining and likable people I’ve ever met. When I returned her call, she ran through a list of questions (have you been convicted of a felony/appeared on any reality show in the last six months, do you know anyone who works for Jeopardy!/Sony/Alex Trebek) and then invited me to come to Los Angeles for their first week of taping for Jeopardy!’s 27th season. How cool is that? A contestant packet came in the mail the following week and I signed, initialed, and dated a lengthy legal document and provided some “fun” facts about myself.

All that was left was to actually get to Los Angeles. We flew in on Saturday night and spent the next two days sightseeing. Taping was on Tuesday and Wednesday at Sony Television, just up the street from our motel.

On Tuesday morning, I was up at 5:30 and cursing the time difference. Contestant call time at Sony Pictures Studios was 8AM sharp, so I had plenty of time to get dressed (and agonize – do I tuck the shirt in or not? hair up or down?) and my mom dropped me off at the security check-in. Most of the other contestants were already milling around and chatting. At this point, I noticed that everyone else had suitcases or those big garment bags for suits, while I had stuffed two extra shirts in my purse and called it a day. Well, I figured, chances are I’ll only need the clothes on my back, so who cares? Still, though, I felt a little underprepared.

We were collected and sent through security by Corina Nusu and Glenn Kagan, who had been at the Chicago auditions, and ushered into the greenroom by Robert James, with whom we would spend most of the rest of the day.

The next couple hours were spent signing forms confirming we were still who we said we were, still hadn’t appeared on any reality shows, so on and so forth; we were also sent into makeup, where I was painted up by a twice-Emmy-nominated makeup artist. The returning champion, Meg Miller, offered a few words of advice and talked about appearing on the show (“For me, the whole world shrank down to the gameboard, and there were two disembodied voices to my left [the other contestants] and another disembodied voice to my right [Alex Trebek]”) and told us she had won $29,299 in her two wins so far. Wow. She had been reigning champion since March, when they taped the 26th-season finale, which aired July 30. Robert went around the room and ran through everyone’s top three stories, the factoids they give Alex Trebek to ask the contestants about. We were able to pick which story we wanted to talk about, but were warned that Trebek would just pick whatever he wanted.

It was the first day of shooting for the new season, so it was the first time Maggie – who barreled into the room and sort of woke everyone up – had done her spiel since March. She kept turning to the guy on her left, Roger Craig, to remind her where she’d left off before her most recent tangent. That was the only reason I remembered his name for the next hour or so, because he was very unassuming and fairly quiet. As for the rest of the contestants, the whole group was surprisingly young. There was also another contestant from Minnesota, Katie Ganfield, hailing from St. Cloud. Everyone was really nice and I had a good time even just sitting in the greenroom with the other contestants.

We all spent about an hour in the studio, goggling at the set and squinting at the gameboard (man am I glad I had my glasses prescription updated before we left MN) and getting used to the signaling devices and the pens for writing our names and Final Jeopardy responses. I went through three or four versions of my handwriting before I found a way to write my name that didn’t look like I had let a child do it for me. We played mock games, where they would rotate us out throughout the games so everyone got used to being on stage, ringing in, and calling categories and clues. At one point during the musical-chairs games, I was sitting between Returning-Champ Meg and Roger, chatting about how cold the studio was and how small the clues are on the gameboard. Roger asked me if I was having trouble with the timing on the signaling device and we talked about trying to find the best way to time your ringing in. Obviously, he figured it out. I had less luck.

The rest of the day was spent watching Roger win and going from hoping I wouldn’t be picked next (in the morning) to being raring to take him on (after lunch). J! tapes five shows per day, two days a week, so everyone I met on Tuesday was on the show last week (September 13-17), except for Jelisa Castrodale, who played the giant-killer on today’s show (Sept. 21). Jelisa and I had to come back the next day for our chance to prove our smarts.

I drew the first game on Wednesday, going up against Roger, now a five-time champ, and Mary Keating, a lawyer from Baltimore and the first contestant from the new Wednesday group. I did my Hometown Howdy, which is sufficiently embarrassing:


The game itself is kind of a blur now. I do remember that we had to stop twice during taping due to technical difficulties, and each time they had us turn away from the game board, presumably so we wouldn’t see any clues accidentally revealed while the board was fixed. The card for the “Blarney” category in the first round was particularly troublesome. I scrolled through a transcript and had apparently gotten a clue about constellations and Capricorn, but I have no memory of that, nor do I have any idea how I knew it at all. I don’t know that now, I certainly don’t know how I knew it then. I wasn’t particularly bothered by my mispronunciation of “Ziegfeld” (until I went to the Will Rogers house the next day and mentions of the damn Ziegfeld Follies were EVERYWHERE, TAUNTING ME). I was pleased to see a category about female writers in Double Jeopardy, having done my senior thesis on Jane Austen and Ann Radcliffe…and then I didn’t know any of the clues except for the one I answered (Sylvia Plath, whose work I have never read). Going into Final Jeopardy, I knew there was no way I would win, but looking at the scores, I did some quick strategizing. I knew that I wanted at least $1,000 left if I was wrong (the equivalent of the third place prize money). I knew that Mary was likely to bet the house to have a pretty good chance of overtaking Roger, especially if she was right and he was wrong. So my $5,000 wager was an almost arbitrary number that was meant to leave me, hopefully, with more money than Mary at the end of the day. With a category like “The Western Hemisphere,” all bets were off, especially since geography isn’t one of my strong suits. When the clue was revealed and it was about islands? Please. I just wrote down the first wrong answer that popped into my head and sat back to wait for the music to end.

And you know what? My meager attempt at strategy worked. Roger continued his string of victories to the tune of $230,200, and I walked out of there $2,000 richer. Or, rather, with the promise of a $2,000 check before taxes, to be received no less than 120 days after the airdate of my game. So…only 119 more days to wait, I guess!

Now I’m cataloged for posterity on J! Archive, where you can see exactly how many questions I answered right and wrong and see every clue we played on the show.

All in all, a fantastic experience, thanks to the fine folks who work at Jeopardy!. The other contestants were great, and it was fun even when we were just sitting in the audience cheering the others on. I’ve had texts from friends and relatives unhappy that I had to play against Five-Day-Champ Roger, but that $231,200 couldn’t have gone to a nicer guy. So, congrats to Roger for his six-day reign as Jeopardy champion, and congrats and good luck to Jelisa Castrodale as she defends her title tomorrow.

Will I be watching? You betcha.



If you want to know more, just leave a comment. I skipped over plenty, and I'm more than happy to detail my game show exploits in greater detail, because, really, it's my blog and it's all about me here.

What you can get for a Hamilton on Etsy

I guess it's Ten Dollar Tuesday here on the long-neglected blog.

I fell back into my terrible Etsy habit of late, browsing around after dinner and losing whole evenings to pages and pages of vintage shoes. So, instead of having all that idle time go to waste, I figured, why not blog about it? And why not make it into a game (sort of)?

Here's what happened: in the vein of the front-page mini-collections that Etsy does, I picked a theme, searched, and filtered the results for prices $10.00 and under. Then I picked five handmade and five vintage items from the resulting pool.

Since red is (apparently) the new black, in addition to being my favorite color, my theme was "red shoes." Let's see what I found:


(click to embiggen)

1. Dorothy 4x6 fine art Print by Elle Moss Photography, $5.00
(also $10 or under: some nice postcard and notecard sets and some prints)

2. Red Shoes Enameled Jewelry Charms from Gathering Splendor, $4.50
(also $10 or under: lots of crafting supplies throughout the store)

3. Pocket Mirror Follow the Yellow Brick Road by Darkling Woods Studio, $6.00
(also $10 or under: some prints, notecards, and more pocket mirrors)

4. THE SHOES MY MOM NEVER HAD by Ron Conry, $10.00
(also $10 or under: 8x10 prints throughout the store)

5. mute pen, 6x8 inch print by Caitlin Shearer, $9.00
(also $10 or under: individual prints in the 6x8 section)

Just a little bit more...
High heeled shoe card (top right in the above image), by Paper Airplane Design, coming in just over the limit at $12.00
(also just over $10: everything in the store! Adorable greeting cards, all for $12, except Hanukkah cards at $18.)



(click to embiggen)

1. Vintage Art Deco postcard girl umbrella and lamb 1920s unused from boomerville, $4.00
(also $10 or under: plenty of vintage and handmade items throughout the store)

2. Vintage Large Red Shoe Horn with Painted Flapper Lady from TeaAtHomeWithOlivia, $7.95
(also $10 or under: uh, the free gift with every purchase...dude.)

3. Vintage Red Metal Shoe for holding Matches or Brushes from The Artsy Fartsy Farm, $6.00
(also $10 or under: almost everything in the shop; neat little kitschy things)

4. scarlet ReD pumps from ipanema, on sale for $9.00 (regularly $17)
(also $10 or under: not much, although a lot of their stock is under $20)

5. 1980's Red Suede Art Deco Heels- Size 7.5 from Ginchy Baby Vintage, 10.00
(also $10 or under: some other VERY 80s stuff -- think orange suede shoes -- and a not-half-bad coat)

Just a little bit more...
Red 60s Shoe Tote - Carry All (center bottom) from MinjisShop, just over the limit at $12.00
(also just over $10: lots of housewares for $15 and under, if you're looking to stock your kitchen with vintage)


I don't know if that was fun for anyone else, but I enjoyed myself. I might make a habit of it, we'll see.

NaNoWhyMo

I apparently decided to do NaNoWriMo this year, though WHY, I have no idea. It's already a disaster. In order to reach 50,000 words by the end of November, I'd have to write around 1,666 words per day, and I've been averaging about -18. I'm ill-prepared, doing more researching than writing because I am ill-prepared, and I tried writing in past tense after writing nothing but present-tense narratives for over a year and IT WAS AWFUL, and I think I hate my protagonist already? SUCH A CATASTROPHE. I don't know what kind of state I'll be in by the end of the month, or if I'll have anything more than a series of vignettes and a long list of bullet points filling in the blanks.

On the bright side, I did complete the 50 Book Challenge this year, so there's that. Also, I'm finally getting time to read The Painter from Shanghai, which I won in a Goodreads contest earlier this year, and it's wonderful. Three-quarters of the way through, I absolutely love it. But more on that some other time.

Undercover paramedic

For the record, my favorite part of any Law & Order episode, be it the original series, SVU, or Criminal Intent, is when the detectives go undercover.

Detectives Lupo & Bernard:



Undercover Paramedic and Dr. Policeman:




This made me almost as happy as that time Goren & Eames went shoe shopping (undercover, of course).

TV Rave: Trauma

I realize that I’m probably the only person watching NBC’s Trauma, but I don’t care. I love it. I love the way it doesn’t bore me to death (House), make me want to vomit (Grey’s Anatomy), or fail in its attempts to captivate me with the ready-made angst-o-rama of its protagonist (Mercy). The previews actually made me want to watch (unlike, say, Three Rivers) and the helicopter crash in their pilot episode actually served a purpose (I’m looking at you here, ER).

More...

The show follows three pairs of paramedics in San Francisco: Nancy and Glenn, Boone and Tyler, and Marisa and Rabbit. Four ride in ambulances, while Marisa and Rabbit fly in “Angel Two,” a medevac helicopter. The characters aren’t particularly innovative, but the clichés aren’t too bad: Glenn Morrison is the new guy, so green he fainted at the sight of a severed arm in the last episode, while partner Nancy Carnahan is a jaded M.D. who prefers paramedic work to the hospital (though the reasons why aren’t exactly clear). Cameron Boone is a recovering womanizer struggling to avoid a divorce; Tyler Briggs is some sort of gypsy medic, having worked in cities across the country, including New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Marisa Benez was a combat helicopter pilot in Baghdad who’s good with machines but not so much with people, and Reuben “Rabbit” Palchuck is the cocky, slightly unhinged medic she flies. Rabbit and Nancy have good reason to be a little standoffish or prickly: the pilot begins a year before the rest of the series, when a devastating two-helicopter crash killed Nancy’s partner and boyfriend, Terry, and left Rabbit, apparently the crash’s sole survivor, in a coma.

Our heroes deal with several small incidents and a medium or large call before the end of each episode—I think that’s why I like it so much: they don’t try to squeeze 60 minutes of drama (with commercials!) out of one or two cases. House became so formulaic that I abandoned it halfway through last season. Here, when you hit the twenty minute mark, you’re not just waiting for the new, bizarre symptom to show up. In a given episode, the EMTs might be dealing with a spinal injury or a fake heart attack, or Boone might be in marriage counseling with his wife (yawn). It’s different every week. Score one for Trauma.

Also? I LOVE EXPLOSIONS. I loved when [spoiler] the hotel went boom at the end of Quantum of Solace[/spoiler] and that HUGE ambulance explosion on the fourth season premiere of Criminal Minds where for all of ten seconds I thought they’d actually killed off Shemar Moore. The Trauma premiere has a fiery helicopter crash and an oil tanker explosion. Michael Bay is probably a fan of Trauma, too.

There’s much less soap-opera personal life angst than you’d think—it’s not overwhelming, since they tend to condense all the characters’ issues into about five minutes of show, after you’ve come down from the adrenaline rush of all the fireballs and rescues and LIFE OR DEATH DECISIONS OMG. Whoever writes this show does a decent job of keeping the melodrama to a minimum—on the personal front. Plus, they’ve got Jamey Sheridan. Who doesn’t like (and still miss!) Captain Deakins and his eyepatch on Law & Order: Criminal Intent? Sheridan is eminently likeable as Dr. Joe Saviano, the ER doctor who coordinates with the medics in the field.

Here’s the downside: I’ve heard the ratings are dismal (it’s on against the amazing The Big Bang Theory and the underwhelming Gary Unmarried on CBS, the second hour of Dancing with the Stars on ABC, and a personal favorite, Lie to Me, on Fox), and they’ve taken to rerunning it on Saturdays in an attempt to get more viewers. Hulu’s even stopped promoting new streaming episodes on the front page. My point? I’m surprised NBC, with its history of doing such things, hasn’t pulled the rest of the new episodes from the air and made them online-only à la The Black Donnellys.

Besides the poor ratings, there’s apparently been some sort of kerfuffle about how the show inaccurately and/or negatively portrays emergency medical personnel. My response—both as a writer and as a TV viewer—is that this isn’t a documentary. It’s a television drama. There are some things that don’t translate from reality to the small screen (why do you think reality shows are scripted?) and a show like Trauma is going to amp up the action as much as possible. Why? Entertainment. I don’t watch television because I want a perfectly accurate depiction of real life (news programming and PBS excepted). I watch because I want to be entertained, so I can stop thinking about what will happen if I never find a job, or if I shouldn’t drink quite so much Coke, or how I haven’t called that one friend in about five months and we’re probably not even friends anymore and it’s kind of my fault, or WHATEVER. It’s escapism at its finest, and if I choose mediocre TV, then that’s my decision. Now, if someone did a television show about employees at an archival library and didn’t show them using acid-free materials and taking special measures while handling archival materials to ensure the preservation of the items in the collections, I might be a little chagrined, but I wouldn’t get all up in arms about it. Basically, what I’m saying to the upset medical workers is this: RELAX, IT’S JUST TELEVISION. The folks who work on TV shows like Trauma are going to use their creative license to punch up reality into something resembling reality, but with prettier people with terrible love lives. And bigger explosions.

So here’s hoping the rest of the season’s episodes make it onto the air. Or, rather, onto Hulu, where I watch it, since my family’s watching Dancing with the Stars.

C’est la vie.

Fall TV: First Impressions

I've tried out a few new shows in the fall lineup in addition to my standbys, and my impressions are below. (Click to expand each section)


New Series...

New series

1) The Vampire Diaries (Thurs, CW): I kind of get the feeling that The Vampire Diaries is Twilight for people who thought there wasn't enough obsessive stalking in Stephenie Meyer's work. You've got the mysterious, brooding, self-hating vampire, Edward Stefan, and the brunette-for-TV (but blonde in the books, Wiki tells me) heroine, Bella Elena, in a small town. There's a Bad Vamp running around (HI BOONE IAN SOMERHALDER!) and the vamps can go out during the day without a) burning to a crisp a la True Blood or b) hilariously roasting a la Buffy (I distinctly remember Spike coming into the Summers' kitchen with a cloud of smoke surrounding him...and laughing hysterically). Only here, the whole reason Stefan's back in Mystic Falls (MYSTIC FALLS? REALLY?) is that Elena looks like his old flame, Katherine, from back in the Civil War era. Bella just waltzed into Edward's life, no fault of his (and he tried to run away, as I recall), but Elena is the entire reason Stefan came back, apparently at great risk to himself and his nephew/"uncle" with whom he lives. It's on the CW, so the mediocre writing and acting is par for the course, but I do genuinely enjoy Ian Somerhalder as Damon the Bad Vamp, who's clearly having a fabulous time being the oldest member of the cast and the villain to boot. It's like Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but on a much, much, much smaller scale. There are some fun moments, like heavy mist creeping over the ground and crows smashing into windshields whenever Damon rolls in (or, as TV Guide puts it, "[the show] also features a special guest appearance by massive amounts of fog"), and Stefan just awkwardly hangin' at the doorjamb because Elena didn't specifically invite him in, but on the whole, I'll restrict my vampire TV to True Blood. I like my undead with a dash of humor, which VD is lacking. (And besides, my Thursday nights are kind of packed already.)

2) Community (Thurs, NBC): I'm a new member in the Joel McHale fanclub, having only seen The Soup a couple times, but he's really the main reason I decided to give Community a try. Yes, the commercial they ran all summer was funny (you can find a version is here), and I laughed every time Joel/Jeff rattled off his real/fake Spanish, but really? I tuned in because he's a tall, slim, good-looking man. So sue me. Joel plays Jeff Winger, a lawyer whose law license has been suspended because he has a less-than-legitimate undergrad degree from Colombia. That's Colombia, not Columbia. So now, enrolled at Greendale Community College, Jeff is completely uninterested in anything but getting his bachelor's degree with as little effor as possible, and as a result, is a total jerk in the way that most protagonists are. He invites Britta, the attractive blonde from his Spanish class, to a "study group" AKA one-on-one time in the library. Except Britta invites Abed, the awkward kid with Asperger syndrome. And then Shirley, Annie, Troy, and Pierce show up and all of a sudden, it's a real study group. Their antics and Jeff's determined efforts to get into Britta's pants are amusing enough that I'm planning to add it to my TV schedule, in the spot vacated by The Office. Plus, it's got Ken Jeong (AKA the Asian doctor from Knocked Up and the king from the LARP in Role Models) as Señor Chang, the Spanish teacher. There are some painfully awkward moments, but nothing as bad as what we've seen on The Office. I'd recommend watching the pilot, which you can find on CommunityHulu.

3) Eastwick (Wed, ABC): Hoo, boy. So, I saw that Eastwick was available on Hulu, and figured, "Why not?" The series is (I suspect very loosely) based on the John Updike novel The Witches of Eastwick, later adapted into a film starring Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Rebecca Romijn, Lindsay Price, and some other woman I've never seen before are the sekrit underground witches (who aren't aware they're witches, by the by) in this updated version. Romijn is Roxie, the boho artist sleeping with a younger man (who, incidentally, does have a belly button); Price is Johanna, the uptight journalist (glasses, hair in a bun, etc.) pining after the hot photographer coworker; whats-her-face is Kat, the nurse/mother of five with a loser husband. SO they all wish for big changes in their lives and then some super-rich dude rolls in and basically makes everything they wish for come true. Roxie dreams the future, Johanna can make men do whatever she wants, and Kat is Natural Disaster Girl (earthquakes, lightning strikes, etc.). Now that I think about it, not much happened in the pilot...huh. Anyway, the acting's not as horrible as I expected and they seem to be aware of how ridiculous the show is -- and they're having fun with it. Plus, the super-rich, possibly evil dude, Daryl (the Mountie from Due South, if anybody else watched that), is hilarious. I might watch it again if I've got more knitting to do -- it's a good halfway-paying-attention kind of show.

4) FlashForward (Thurs, ABC): Oh, man. Provided it survives its first season, I think FlashForward has the potential to become my new Lost. That might be jinxing it, but I really liked the first episode. There are more British actors than you can shake a stick at (Joseph Fiennes, Sonia Walger [AKA Penny Widmore/Hume of Lost], Alex Kingston [AKA Professor River Song of Doctor Who, and Jack Davenport [Commodore Norrington!], plus I hear Dominic Monaghan is supposed to show up, too), but the American talent is what pulled me in: John Cho, who I loved in a completely un-platonic way as Sulu in Star Trek this summer, and Courtney B. Vance, who I still miss as ADA Ron Carver on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, were the familiar faces in the commercial that made me seek out the premiere. What I was completely unprepared to see was Seth MacFarlane (yes, Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy), in a totally un-comedic role as one of the FBI agents (I may have had an outburst on Twitter when he showed up on screen). I also recognized Gabrielle Cortese, late of Supernatural, but she was so awful in an already mediocre show that I'm glad her character is supposedly dead at the beginning of the show. Whether or not she's actually dead is of little consequence when you're faced with FBI AGENT JOHN CHO, GUYS. Seriously, he spends most of the episode in a flak jacket and bloody with his gun drawn, menacing a suspected (female) terrorist. Dear ABC: You know what you're doing, don't you? The premise of the show is this: everyone on the planet blacked out for the same two minutes and fourteen seconds, simultaneously, and for those two minutes and change, their consciousnesses jumped forward six months to April 2010 and they had a flash of their lives in the future. Well, everyone but poor Agent Demetri Noh (John Cho), who didn't see anything, and is afraid it's because he'll be dead in six months. FBI Agent Mark Benford (Fiennes), a recovering alcoholic, sees himself investigating the flashforward and drinking again. His wife, Olivia (Walger), an ER doctor, sees herself with another man (Jack Davenport), who is apparently the father of a little boy she saves during the first episode. My favorite of the flashes was Stan Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance), the FBI boss who tells Benford and Noh that he saw himself "in a meeting," which is apparently code for "taking a dump while reading the newspaper." The cause of the blackouts is a mystery, as is the lone OMGWTFPOLARBEAR kangaroo hopping down the streets of Los Angeles immediately after the blackouts, but the FBI, while looking through security camera footage from around the world, finds one man in a baseball stadium who was awake for those two minutes -- apparently the only person in the world who didn't lose consciousness. I'm super-intrigued by the whole premise of the show; it reminds me a lot of the first season of Lost, when we were still discovering the mysteries and mythology, and the questions were still relatively simple. I have a good feeling about this show, in part because the creators are David S. Goyer (who co-wrote the story for The Dark Knight) and Brannon Braga (of Star Trek: The Next Generation), but also because they've got a good cast and the strength of the story itself (based on a 1999 novel by Robert J. Sawyer) driving it. The script was good, the acting was good, and the action was well-executed and pushed from beginning to end. They even managed to introduce what I suspect will become the central theme of the show: are these flashforwards glimpses of the inevitable, or can these characters change the futures they saw? It should be interesting to see how the story unfolds and how the show's 13 episodes will be structured in terms of reaching the April 2010 date seen in the flashes. I'm putting it in the rotation of my regular shows.

Other series I'll probably give a chance are The Good Wife (Tues, CBS), Trauma (Mon 9/28, NBC) and V (Tues 11/3, ABC) -- the latter mostly because of Elizabeth Mitchell, who will always be HBIC Juliet Burke to me, but also for Morena Baccarin, AKA Firefly's Inara.

Returning series...

Returning series premieres

1) Castle (Mon, ABC): I loved the first season (and I'm waiting for my DVD set to arrive in the mail). I followed Richard Castle's exploits on TWitter over the summer (over here). I was super-excited to see how they'd handle Castle returning to the cop team after ignoring Beckett's very clear no-digging-into-my-mom's-homicide-or-you-and-I-are-done rule. Basically, Castle is now promoting Heat Wave, the Nikki Heat novel (you can read the first six chapters at abc.com, by the way), and Capt. Montgomery and the mayor believe that having Castle ride along while he's got a reporter from Cosmo tailing him will be good press for the NYPD. Meanwhile, Beckett's all but giving him the silent treatment (and so is coroner Lanie Parish, who's backing up her BFF Beckett) and we're basically back to day one, when Beckett was most annoyed by having Castle around. The story was perhaps a little convoluted, and they had Stana Katic use her awful Russian accent last heard during the 30 seconds she was on Heroes (but at least it wasn't her even worse French accent from The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice) and strip down to a cardigan, belt, and heels -- no pants, of course -- to save Castle from the murderer. Apart from the gimmicks, the dialogue is just as snappy and smart as last season, I was amused by the incorporation of details from the summer Twitter mystery on the show proper, and I'm glad to see that Beckett and Castle's friendship is on the mend after he, you know, APOLOGIZED for violating her trust. Looking forward to the rest of the season!

2) CSI: NY (Wed, CBS): I've had my issues with my darling, beloved CSI: NY. We've had a couple of spats, a big ol' falling out over the Danny/Lindsay marriage and baby, and I've threatened the writers with bodily harm on more than one occasion. I loathe the punny one-liners they force Gary Sinise to deliver to take them to the credits. I actually cried a little when they killed off the very capable Detective Jessica Angell at the end of last season (which, BTW, is the second female regular they've killed off, and I don't believe we've lost any of the men). There are some actual talented actors on that cast who are given jack shit to work with in the scripts, and are forced to try to sell romantic pairings that have little or no chemistry (e.g. Danny/Lindsay, Mac/any woman except Lindsay, although I may be biased). So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they'd done a couple relatively brave things with the season premiere: first, Stella and Adam hooked up, which no one saw coming except everyone who knew Adam has had a huge crush on Stella FOREVER. Second, and more importantly, they put Danny in a wheelchair, having lost the use of his legs in the drive-by machine-gun attack that ended last season in a very pale imitation of The West Wing's "Who's been hit? Who's been hit?" cliffhanger. However temporary Danny's paralysis may be (remember what show this is), I'm glad they took the chance on dramatically changing his life and giving him room to really grow as a character for the first time in a long time. Of course, they've added a new blonde character, Haylen Becall, played by quite possibly my least favorite actress to make the rounds of CBS dramas, Sarah Carter (she's been on Numb3rs and the thankfully canceled Shark already) and her little-girl voice. Haylen is a crime scene cleanup tech who wants Adam's job. Bitch, please. It's like Riley Adams over on the CSI mothership: I hate her already. Apart from the high points I've mentioned, the premiere was more of the same. I still don't like Lindsay. Hawkes still doesn't get enough screen time. AND WHERE IS DOCTOR SNAPPY GLASSES? Disappointing overall.

3) CSI (Thurs, CBS): Now, unlike its Wednesday night spinoff, the original crime lab did not disappoint. I mean, sure, there was a lot of gimmicky bullet-time, but the effect was...kind of mind-blowing, actually. Anyway, Riley Adams is gone (HUZZAH!), having left a snippy exit interview criticizing Catherine's leadership and claiming there's no team unity. News flash, Riley: did you ever think maybe it wasn't that there was no team unity, it was just that nobody liked you? So Riley's out, recently departed Sara Sidle is back to help round out the understaffed team's roster for a few episodes this season, Ray Langston (Laurence Fishburne) has earned his CSI Level 2 credentials, and the long-suffering Nick Stokes got promoted to assistant shift supervisor. Meanwhile, Liz Vassey (DNA tech Wendy Simms) and David Berman (Assistant ME David Phillips) are regulars this season, meaning they get to be featured in the opening credits. Selfishly, I hope this means we get a lot more Wendy/Hodges will-they-won't-they this season. They're my CSI OTP, for real. The end of the premiere episode seems to set up a serial killer storyline, according to clips from next week -- I hope this is just a one-episode thing. The last time they did a serial killer, it was the Miniature Killer and it consumed the season in a thick cloud of melodrama that I could really have lived without. Nevertheless, looks like a promising landmark season ten.

4) How I Met Your Mother (Mon, CBS): Now that all the pregnancies are out of the way, I can stop getting distracted by Lily and Robin's huge, billowy shirts and suspiciously large purses and get back to just watching the show. I wasn't bowled over by the premiere, mostly because I hate super-awkward situations as comedy (I get too embarrassed for other people to actually appreciate how funny it is), so Ted's classroom mixup on his first day as a professor -- well, technically he'd be just an instructor, I think, but whatever -- was more painful than anything else, and I'm not sure how I felt about Lily's whole Barney-and-Robin-MUST-define-the-relationship thing. I mean, normal people might have to have that kind of conversation, but Barney and Robin aren't exactly normal people. I mean this in a good way, of course. There wasn't quite enough Marshall for me, but I'm just so pleased that Jason Segel's cut his hair that I'm fine with what we got.

5) Criminal Minds (Wed, CBS): My heart beats only for SSA Spencer Reid, Ph.D., which is why I was pleased to see him be heroic in the CM premiere (even if it was only so he could get shot to explain Matthew Gray Gubler being on crutches due to his dislocated kneecap...ouch). They had a bit of a split narrative, working a case on just four hours of sleep after their horrific season finale case in Canada while wondering where team leader Hotch is. Turns out Hotch was stabbed a bunch by a serial killer that got away before, then dropped off at the hospital in an Elaborate Mind Game that will surely consume the season. Wonderful. Still won't stop me from watching, if only because I hope to see more of JJ with her Louisiana babydaddy and see what Paget Brewster does with her hair this season (are the bangs gone for good?!). I mean, those are the reasons people watch, right?

Other returning shows I'm keeping an eye on include Bones, Law & Order SVU, Law & Order, Numb3rs, and Lie to Me. I did watch The Mentalist's premiere, but I just can't get over my impression of Simon Baker as untrustworthy, and apparently everyone hates Robin Tunney's character? But I liked her (because she kicked Baker out of her car for being rude and childish, mostly). So...we'll see.

Shows I've given up since last season? House (too much melodrama, I can't stand House/Cuddy, not enough Cameron and too much Thirteen) and The Office (sorry, Jim and Pam, but I'm so sick of Michael, Dwight, and Andy that I can't give a crap about your wedding and baby and whatever else happened after episode...two? of last season). Also, fond as I am of Sylar, I haven't watched the Heroes premiere yet, and I'll probably wait a while before I do. Just don't feel like it.

Speaking of House (as I was under the cut), news broke yesterday of Jennifer Morrison (Cameron) being written out/leaving, which just sealed the deal for me -- I've officially broken up with the show. I don't care how good Hugh Laurie is or if he's found new ways to make House sympathetic (per Neal Justin, the Star Trib's TV critic), I JUST DON'T CARE. Also! USA Network has essentially killed Law & Order: Criminal Intent: Vincent D'Onofrio (Det. Bobby Goren) and Kathryn Erbe (Det. Alex Eames) are leaving after the season premiere, as is Eric Bogosian (Capt. Danny Ross). Julianne Nicholson (Det. Megan Wheeler) had previously decided not to return after having her second child, leaving Jeff Goldblum as the last man standing. He's apparently supposed to carry the show on his own, with new partner Saffron Burroughs (with whom I am Not Best Pleased). Now, I love Detective Nichols. I think bringing Goldblum in as, essentially, Detective Jeff Goldblum revived a flagging show that had become Law & Order: The Bacon Years, but I think Nichols is too quirky to pull off being the focus every week. It was nice to alternate weirdo Nichols with Goren, who had become sadly sluggish since his mother's death, and it was especially fun to watch Nichols and Eames together; I think Kathryn Erbe and Goldblum were a great team, and if D'Onofrio wanted out, they should've paired Eames and Nichols if the actors were amenable. If Erbe also wanted out, fine, but this big a casting shakeup reeks of Bureaucratic Asshaberdashery to me. The fact of the matter is this: Jeff Goldblum is a showkiller. Others have tried to rest a series on his shoulders and failed, miserably (see Raines). I don't think we'll be seeing L&O:CI in 2011. That's my prediction.

And that's that, if anyone made it this far. Being unemployed makes keeping up with television very, very easy. Imagine how much fun it would be to be a TV critic and get paid to watch TV! Maybe I ought to have some new career aspirations.

Cleaning is easy when you have no mercy

The last month has been devoted to frantically cleaning my apartment (though not well enough, apparently, since my security deposit was returned with two deductions), moving back to my folks' place, and then attacking over twenty-two years' worth of junk with no mercy whatsoever.

Everyone in my family is a packrat, but I've gotten sick of living in a pit, so I went through and tossed a solid 75% of the crap that was all over my room (literally: there was a path through the junk from the door to the bed and a free space to set your foot if you needed to reach over the desk to open the curtains) so that not only can I see the awful brownish-yellow shag carpeting, but I also vacuumed for the first time in...a while. It's amazing what you find when you go through twenty years' worth of stuff.

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For example, I found several books I'd long ago written off as missing, and found a full set of bedsheets I didn't even know I had (which turned out to be too small for the bed, but still). I reclaimed the full half of my closet that had been full of other peoples' clothes for the entire duration of my life and found three identical, barely-worn men's coats that I'll donate to charity this fall. There was also a faux-silk Katharine Hepburn-style blouse that I washed and painstakingly ironed, only to discover it's too big (alas!), along with an honest-to-goodness muumuu and a romper (from its original period of popularity). The downside to clearing out my bedroom is that now our living room is completely packed to the gills with castoffs. I honestly don't know how my tiny room held all of the stuff that's out there now, because the living room (twice the size of my bedroom) is barely big enough for it all.

In an effort to make this admittedly huge undertaking (as in, I don't think anyone's cleaned since my grandparents moved into the brand-new house in the 1960s) beneficial for the rest of the family, I've started clearing out areas of our basement, too. The extra bits and pieces from my two years living in college dorms had all been sitting downstairs for two years while I lived in a furnished apartment, along with a lot of lecture notes and useless gifts from ex-boyfriends. After attacking the notebooks and binders and looseleaf textbooks the bookstore wouldn't buy back, I ended up with several half-blank notebooks and a couple sketchpads. I won't have to buy new notebooks from now until the end of time. There were 5-inch floppy disks, two old computer keyboards, a set of 23 craft books from the late 1960s, a nightshirt from France (tags still attached), a stuffed bear I'd forgotten about, a speech I wrote for AP Composition during my junior year of high school that's still funny now, and more huge spiders and centipedes than I care to think about.

Basically, I'm going to have the biggest garage sale ever.

So this blog might be all about what I find while cleaning for a while. But hey, it's my blog, right? I can write what I want! Particularly since I'm blogging in oblivion! On into the void, dear blog!

Nostalgia

Fact: I despise Facebook.

I've got the profile and everything, but there's very little on there that I actually update on a regular basis. Their ever-changing policies and the lack of privacy make me uncomfortable. I use it mostly to contact friends who, like me, are telephone-phobes. But after hanging out with one of my best friends from high school and hearing some of the gossip, I scrolled through all the folks from my graduating class, just out of curiosity.

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Holy crap.

There are babies and people are married and there are a whole bunch of guys in the military now, looking dashing in their dress uniforms in their profile pictures. I mean, I'm aware that people are growing up and going out into the world -- hell, I was a bridesmaid at my friend's wedding when we were nineteen and she has a kid now -- but it's a little shocking to see it all at once.

Also surprising? Discovering that a teenage crush I assumed would die with time and distance hasn't gone quietly into that good-night. Rather, the fellow in question is perhaps more appealing now that he's some sort of world traveler with the kind of foreign experiences that terrify me a little bit.

Curiouser and curiouser. The ten-year reunion should be interesting. I might go, provided there's booze and I have somehow become this fierce:


(But hopefully not that crazy.)