Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Monday, April 23, 2007


Meet the Mets, Meet the Mets

To go along with the Mr. Met love fest I have going on over at Broadcasting & Cable, this is a picture from Doug, taken on Sunday with his camera phone while he was sitting in a box along the right field line at Shea, and sent to me while I was sitting at a bar along the Green line in Allston, watching the game on TBS.

Thanks for the picture, Douglas, and thanks for coming with me, Kristin!

Baseball Out of Market


http://www.broadcastingcable.com/blog/1380000138/post/150008615.html

Friday, April 20, 2007

‘30 Rock': I don't know if you remember me, but . . .


http://www.broadcastingcable.com/blog/1380000138/post/1790008579.html
Technical difficulties

The preceding two posts would have run on Broadcasting & Cable magazine's site on April 17th and April 10th, respectively, but, due to some technical difficulties, I have the exclusives. Enjoy.

Oh, and starting with today's post on B&C Beat, I have a picture and a bio. I'm a real boy, Gepetto! It's very exciting! Get pumped! I don't hear you!
It's Always Sunny on The Riches

To be completely honest it’s not very sunny for most of the characters on The Riches, but it is for me - Hartley Underwood’s back! Yes, Dahlia’s one-armed nemesis, the autocratic president of EFHA, played to outsized comedic perfection by Kaitlin Olson from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Hers is the next lawsuit that Doug has to make disappear on threat of losing his job. He does this by assuming that her seemingly perfect life is probably almost as shady as his is, and he strikes gold. Hartley Underwood used to be Mary Louise Blodgett, who had a penchant for stealing designer clothes and adult toys. Who writes the names on this show? They’re practically jokes by themselves. Hartley Underwood still has the propensity to pilfer the designer clothes, at the very least. The Malloys find out time and again that their new buffer neighbors are liars and crooks. I wonder if this was something Wayne knew all along, not having been born a traveler? If so, is it part of the reason that he ended up working for the biggest cheat in town?
Dahlia’s Dream Didn’t Involve The Riches

I’m laying it out on the table - I give The Riches’ “Dahlia is lonely after prison” story arc three more episodes before I’ll become absolutely sick of it and hope that they’ll deal with it more constructively, possibly giving her another story line to focus one. Last night’s episode, though, was intriguing because of the ways in which they tried to let her work out her demons. The fact that Dahlia could connect with her new boss so deeply, in so few words, served well to show how damaged her psyche really is. When she appeared in Wayne’s office for the first time in the episode, I felt for him, trying to muddle through with his wife turning herself into a giant distraction. When she appeared the second time, after losing even that new connection with her boss, I felt, profoundly, for her. She must have spent her time in prison hating that Wayne wasn’t there, and hating that she wished he were the one behind bars. She must have longed to be back on the road with her family. What she got instead was some version of the alleged American dream in which she spends most of her time alone in a giant house, not surrounded by her husband and kids in an RV. The house, the life, the societal restrictions – those are certainly not part of Dahlia’s dream.

I’m excited for The Riches marathon on Friday. I think this show is good enough that it would definitely be a shame if it didn’t catch on, and it’s generated enough buzz that I’d guess it will pull in new viewers if they get the chance to watch it from the beginning.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

All fall down (shit! they're on to me!)

A canonical author has passed, and one of the very first thoughts to flash across my little brain when I heard of his death was, “Wow, I’ve never gotten around to reading any of his books.”

This was swiftly followed by a crushing sense of guilt, made all the more weird because my first thought had been, “I didn’t even know he was still alive.”

Apparently, in my world, it is alright to ignore basic foundation blocks of Western literature if the author has been dead for awhile (at least since the 1980’s), because I’ll get around to reading him or her at some point; but it’s just downright rude to ignore living authors! I should have gotten right on that, apparently. Thanks, psyche, for making that clear.

I’m tempted to put together a list of important living authors, ordered chronologically by birth. Maybe then I can cross-reference it by known diseases/psychoses/crippling enamorations with drugs and or alcohol, get myself a little reading list and try to beat the clock. Most likely, not only would that plan never be borne out, but it also just wouldn’t work. There are too many. That’s the root of it, really: that I feel like a fraud. That every day I get through without someone catching me, asking me how on earth I ever managed to graduate with an English major, how I could have ignored so many great works, how I can manage to drag myself around upright each day, well, every day like that is a miracle. The logical jump is to assume that, some day, the cards will fall.

The chances are pretty good that I’ll knock them over while drunk, let’s be honest, and get them all sticky and covered with gatorade and step on them for a couple of weeks before I bother to pick them up.

This all makes me angry. Illogically angry, that type of anger I especially hate because I know it comes from some deep-seeded neuroses and not from any basis in reality. That type of anger that forces me to acknowledge that, seriously, I can not hide the crazy, no matter how much I’d like to think I can.
I’m angry because I read what I was told to, and so much more.
I’m angry because I trusted that by doing the work I would, in the end, cover the gamut of what’s important.
I can’t even begin to imagine where I got that idea. Whoever said that you’d have learned everything you needed to know by the time you graduated college? Apparently, it was the same person who promised that rose garden; which is to say no one. I made it up, and I’ve been fighting to catch up with that idea for as long as I can remember. Uphill both ways, barefoot, and possibly pregnant in the kitchen, who knows, but hell, as a fraud I reserve the right to mix my metaphors, thank you very much.

So then, I wonder if this is what drives most people, this desire not to fail? This feeling that you’ve managed to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes thus far, so you’d better get your ass in gear and make all of your illusions true? I wonder if it’s this fear that really goads us along, and allows us to turn potential into viable possibilities? And would that mean then when my time comes if I’ve been a success at life, it was really all because I was running away from some metaphorical bees and that scary clown from It?

Can’t I just attribute any success I have to a love of puppies and ice cream? That would be so much tastier.

Endnote: Today I was saddened to read that Kurt Vonnegut had passed away at the age of 84. I didn’t name him earlier in the essay because I didn’t want it to seem as if I was writing about Kurt Vonnegut, and then segue into disturbing facts about me, and then get lost writing about me. This whole piece has been about me, I’ve been bringing the crazy this entire time. Just so we’re clear on that. This is not the worst memorial in the world. It really is just a good ’ole tangential rambling.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows, Foodmaster does.

We hit the supermarket running, leaving the dog waiting in the car. Zooming past bread and dairy, we only needed soup, meat, and Gold’s beet horseradish, which I’m still convinced he could get in Phoenix if he just got up and went looking for it, because really, it’s like Boca West out there.
We found the poultry section without a problem, and gladly availed ourselves of the conveniently located napkins after pawing through the slimy chicken packages.
Now we were down to the soup aisle – three kinds – and the dog had been alone for ten minutes.
We couldn’t find it.
How could we not find it?
It’s soup. It’s a staple.
We broke down and asked for help. Aisle 5, Dogfood and Soup.

Of course.


We were done - we didn’t like beets, anyway.


Over the river . . .

I work in the woods. It’s really amazing how nobody believes me when I say that, but I work in the real, honest-to-God, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, woods. And I work on the ground level of a building set into a hill. Now, these woods have turkeys. I don’t know how many of you have ever seen a wild turkey, but they’re tall birds, and, usually, they’re scrawny, and they’re dumb. Dumb, dumb birds.

So imagine being the new girl in the office, and looking up from your new desk and out of your new window to find a pack of wild turkeys staring in at you. It was like they’d come to visit the zoo.
“Welcome to Massachusetts, I work in the zoo.”

So the turkeys have been coming by on and off all winter, and since there hasn’t been much snow, they’ve had no problems finding food. So now they’re big, dumb birds. Watching them is like watching your Thanksgiving dinner wandering around outside your window. They’ll disappear over a hill and reappear on the crest ten feet off, and you’ll think, “Dinner! Ho!”

No one back home believes me, so I brought a camera in to work the other day. And of course, when they appeared, I ran outside after them, trying in vain to take their pictures.

Funny thing about wild animals – they run away.

Didn’t occur to me. My mom says it’s a good thing I don’t have to hunt to eat.