A New Season Begins

Well, Cavemen wasn't the absolute worst sit-com ever to pollute the airwaves. That distinction still belongs to According to Jim. Cavemen had its funny concepts and moments. Having one of the cavemen working in a pseudo-IKEA and playing squash was funny. There definitely was room for improvement. I guess it remains to be seen how many Flintstones references we're going to be subjected to. One the whole, I would say it gets 2 stars but has some potential. Given the dearth of interesting new shows on the slate, it may be given some slack to find itself and an audience.

House was at his misanthropic best this week in episode 2. Undoubtedly, Kal Penn will land a spot on the show. He doesn't seem to have a long life-span on t.v. shows, though (see Angel, 24). It will be interesting to see how they have the old team co-exist with the new. I predict an all-out catfight at some point between the newly blonde Cameron and Machiavellian bad-girl, Amber.

Now to see what 24 is going to do. Maybe an episode where Jack gets pulled over for DUI, looks in the rearview mirror at the flashing police lights and mutters, "Dammit!"

Jack Bauer Goes Green

So now the makers of 24 are looking to reduce the carbon footprint the production of the show creates. Blah, blah, blah. Instead of worrying about that, how about trying to reduce the methane released into the environment from a stinkeroo of a season like last year's. Maybe Jack's jumped the shark.

I'm also a little sick of the so-called "inconvenient truth" of global warming in general. It's hip and trendy to be green despite Kermit's protestations otherwise. But this pseudo-science has been declared uncontrovertable even though there was another global calamity about to befall us even within my lifetime. As George Will pointed out in his April 2, 2006 article:

"Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of 'extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.' Science Digest (February 1973) reported that 'the world's climatologists are agreed' that we must 'prepare for the next ice age.' The Christian Science Monitor ('Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect,' Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers 'have begun to advance,' 'growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter' and 'the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.' Newsweek agreed ('The Cooling World,' April 28, 1975) that meteorologists 'are almost unanimous' that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said 'may mark the return to another ice age.' The Times (May 21, 1975) also said 'a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable' now that it is 'well established' that the Northern Hemisphere's climate 'has been getting cooler since about 1950.'"

I remember back in the early 70s worrying that humans would go the way of the dinosaurs. Well, they milked all the research funding they could out of global cooling and then did a 180 to claim that the sky was now falling because of global warming. Sure. And then we'll need money to divert an Astroid from a collision course with earth. Of course, then we can just send Jack Bauer or Bruce Willis up to take care of things.

Losing Lost

Well, the two hour season finale of Lost was last night. I stayed up for a whole 35 minutes of it. Not that it was bad. I was just beat after getting up too dang early yesterday morning. Plus chasing around court all day and doing depositions took quite a bit out of me.

So, I just kicked online and "googled" a Lost synopsis site and caught up just fine. I don't know what it says when I can feel just as satisfied reading a synposis as I can having actually watched a show. Maybe it means that I still care enough about the show and characters to want to know what's happening but not so much that I feel empty inside when I miss seeing it. That never would have happened with Buffy. She was truly "must see T.V."

I think while I like Lost (and 24 for that matter), appointment T.V. was better when the appointment could be made with the wifey who has been on the road doing the consulting thing. Hopefully, reading this won't get her all verklempt since it's just a temporary state of affairs.

24

Season six of 24 is almost over. One more episode next week. Two hours long. Hopefully, it will have a satisfying resolution to an otherwise uneven season and story arc(s).

What will be resolved? The whole Chinese Connection plot? Who cares? What I want to know is how the heck the super-competent CTUites manage to get infiltrated and/or invaded every single season. It could be the "redshirts" they keep hiring. But with Star Trek and its progeny off the air, disposable cannon-fodder needs an outlet.

All the other story lines are meaningless. For crying out loud, L.A. was nuked. Where do you go from there? More and bigger nukes? Everything else is kind of a step back. Something definitely needs to be punched up. The whole Chloe/Morris/Milo/Nadia quadrangle has been broken up. At least Kim hasn't been around to whine her way through the show. I would say that they could focus more on the personal relationships of the characters but . . . BORING. The only time relationships should come into play should by when someone dies. Period.

Maybe CTU security can be breached by vampires next and then Jack Bauer would have to inflitrate the vampire coven to retrieve the remnants of the Gem of Amara before the KKK utilize it to create an invulnerable army to repeal civil rights at which time Jack becomes addicted to human blood and Audrey needs to uplink the Shanshu Prophesy to the CTU database but Chloe and Morris are bumping uglies in Bill Buchanan's empty office and don't notice that the KKK has a mole in CTU who has transferred all of American's anti-vampire data to a neo-Nazi sect operating out of Idaho who is trying to frame the Republican Party (who are not reactionary enough for their tastes) by assassinating President Wayne Palmer's brain which has been kept in office in a jar in the White House despite the Vice President's repeated attempts to manipulate Tom Lennox into replacing the brain with the brain of Richard Nixon which has been cryogenically frozen in a bunker at Camp David but the Vice President's operatives inadvertently drop Nixon's brain and replace it with Abbie Normal Hoffman's brain who once in power intends to taint the American food supply with psychotropic mushrooms in an attempt to come up with an interesting plot line for future seasons of 24.

OK, breathe.