A Good Christian Raisin’ and a Eighth Grade Education
I’m in wait and see mode on this one, but I’m a little surprised at what I just saw.
I’m at work and don’t have a chance to watch the coverage, but I just returned from getting a cup of coffee and got to catch a glimpse of Columbia’s President evidently ripping Ahmadinejad a new one on Iran’s violation of civil rights, free speech, etc. and challenging him to address them.
It will be interesting to see how this one pans out.
I tried it once, just a taste, a few years ago. I got just enough of it to know that it was something I should stay away from. I could feel those inner voids that had been present in the years since Seinfeld went off the air being filled just a little, and I knew I’d be in real trouble if I allowed myself to partake. There was no way I’d let myself get tangled up in its evil web.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave in to my weakness. Gave in may not be the right phrase. It’s more like I got overconfident in my ability to fight off my demons. It had been years since I’d bothered watching a sitcom. They all suck, right? And I’ve outgrown them. I’m mature. I can handle my TV now. It wouldn’t do any harm to watch just one episode. Besides, it would be a nice thing to do for the missus. She seems to enjoy it, and she’s confined to that big comfy chair made for two feeding the baby. It’s family time.
It’s just one episode, right?
Wrong. I hadn’t counted on the fact that she was mixing up a dangerous concoction of Scrubs with Tivo. Cooked up with 2.5 hours of syndication every weekday, they form the speedball of television sitcoms. It didn’t take long for my tolerance to build up. Within a few days I was there with her watching 2 episodes a night. We should have known things were getting out of hand when we accidently missed The Soup that first Friday night.
I know. It’s pathetic. We weren’t trying to be neglectful, Joel McHale. Honest. It just sort of happened. We’ll never let it happen again. One more promise we can’t keep.
Now, a few weeks later, here we are at rock bottom. I’ve even caught myself calling my male coworkers “Bambi” and thinking up places to hide saltines even though I have no competitors. At home, we’re making excuses to watch more and more, and our justifications are just lame:
“We can’t watch just one episode…they air in pairs.”
“It’s Tivo’d, so it actually takes us three episodes to watch an hour of TV.”
“We have to watch some of these or we’ll run out of recording space.”
“We should watch all of these now. We’re going to be gone for a couple of days and will be way behind.”
It’s easy to rationalize it, but deep down I know it’s wrong. The worst part is that she can’t help me. Her problem is just as bad as mine, and I’m not sure if she sees it herself. Maybe if I get it out of my system I can help her get straight too.
Maybe I can get in touch with the producers of Intervention on A&E. We used to watch that show too before all of this started. Maybe they could help us.
But it wouldn’t hurt to hear just one more snide comment from Dr. Cox would it? They come in really handy at work.
Want to watch some with me? Come one…just some clips, not a whole episode or anyhing like that. A little bit won’t hurt you.
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I meant to write about this a couple of weeks ago the first time I saw the commercial for Yaz birth control pills.
“Yaz” doesn’t sound like a reputable birth control product to me. It sounds like the street name for some highly addictive substance made from processing kerosene, roach killer, and cotton candy.
These pharmacutical ads are getting more and more ridiculous every day. The one for Yaz has a crew of good looking women at a club talking about the side effects of birth control pills. While this is probably more common than I am aware, there’s no way they could hold this conversation for more than 45 seconds without some guy overhearing and wanting in on the discussion. More than likely, he just got out of the Viva Viagra commercial and is all revved up.
Seen that one? A bunch of guys sitting around singing “Viva Viagra”. It looks to me like they are holed up in some clandestine barn, where they’ve been crushing Viagra pills, cooking it up in a spoon, and shooting it. They pass the time waiting for it to hit them by singing a parody of an Elvis song. As soon as they are “feeling it”, they walk out of the barn high-fiving each other and get into their own separate vehicles. They’ll all end up in the same part of town ten minutes later looking for hookers, or irritating the young professional women in the Yaz commercial.
But I digress. Luckily, the costs to produce these low-grade SNL skits is passed along to consumers who are not afforded the ability to buy meta-recreational pharmacuticals over the counter. Getting laid these days may require a trip to the doctor and a prescription.
Lisa Lampanelli has to be the funniest person I’ve seen in a very long time. I didn’t get to see the whole thing, but she was the only thing I really wanted to see anyway.
I did have one question though…where were Chuck D. and Terminator X? I’m assuming they were in attendance and I just didn’t see them. I sort of expected them to be up on the main stage.
I got to see Public Enemy play at the Bijou Theater (I think it was 1992). It’s funny, but looking back, PE actually represents everything that could possibly be right with rap. They were pretty controversial back then because of some of the things they said, but at least they were saying something.
Good luck finding that today. You’re lucky if you can find a guy (Mike Jones) who is talented enough to say his name over and over.
Flavor Flav said it best…”don’t believe the hype.”
So I’m sitting here surfing/writing/reading/napping and there are all of these crazy shows about having babies on TLC that document parents’ first few days at home with their babies.
Either our kid is really easy, we are really laid back and easy going, or both. These people stress over the slightest little things, get rattled by everything else, and are constantly whining about their precious sleep. Haha! You crybabies don’t deserve to sleep from what I can tell!
Anyway, while I’m having fun not being at work, I don’t see how some people (I assume mostly women based on the commercials) could stand to sit and watch stuff like that day in and day out. Luckily I have plenty of other things to keep me busy.
Saw this posted at Reason and had to put it up here too, it’s just too funny.
Ron Paul is so young in this clip (1988). I’d love to see him this energetic and rowdy in the Republican debates. However, legalization of drugs would not go well with that crowd. They are probably happy this has surfaced on the web to use it as what they think will be ammo against him. It may actually garner him more support.
By the way, “d” had a great comment on the Reason post
Quick! Post the marines at that kid’s mouth to keep the cheeseburgers out!
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Last night I recorded this program on PBS. It is a nice warm-up to the debates tonight.
I’ve often wondered what Thomas Jefferson would think about our current situation, but this program makes me wonder what Hamilton would think. Hamilton pushed hard for a strong central government, but I wonder if he would have wanted it this strong. Would he agree with the current “aristocracy” that is running our governement?
“It’s not tyranny we desire; it’s a just, limited, federal government.”
Is that what we have now?
I was looking for some other posts about eyesores in Knoxville and and found the Tennessee Trash Blog. Byron has posted this commercial on the entire site. It is a remake of the “Tennessee Trash” commercial that ran when I was a kid in the 70s.
The funniest thing about the orginal is how I was affected by it. I was only 4 or 5 years old, and didn’t really get the message of the PSA, but I really loved the commercial. I remember getting on my big wheel and loading myself down with garbage. Then I’d ride up and down the driveway throwing trash all over the place and singing the “Tennessee Trash” theme song.
It’s cool they have Ed Bruce singing this though. Check out this PSA!
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Carl Bialik blogs on numbers for the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a fun post about the recent 3-way tie on Jeopardy. It mostly talks about the accuracy of the calculation that the odds of a three way tie on Jeopardy is 25 million to 1. Very interesting.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me before reading this article to wager on Jeopardy. I used to watch it with friends faithfully, and it seems like a natural thing to gamble one…way better than horse racing or football.
The best thing about this interview is that as, ahem, “smart” and clever Maher is, he had very little in way of retort to Paul. Maybe this is the first time Maher has heard the argument that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery?
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Continue reading “Ron Paul on Bill Maher”
