eric135

America's Got Talent: I really liked Howard Stern!

 My room mate literally forced me to watch the season premiere of America's Got Talent. I had stopped watching the show, especially during last season. I just found the show to become very offensive. I remember Piers Morgan hitting the buzzer "just to see if you'd mess up." He did this during acts where performers could have gotten injured. From that point on, I had judged the show to be too negative for my taste.

Then they announced Howard Stern would be Piers' replacement. I've never been a fan of Stern, and thought the show would take an even more negative turn.

I was in for a pleasant surprise. I found Stern to be an excellent judge. Even when there were horrible acts, he remained respectful and even positive and funny. I get the feeling the producers of the show realized it had become too negative. The difference is noticeable. At any rate, the show is back on my viewing list.

One other thing I noticed with this premiere. There haven't been as many sob stories. Don't get me wrong, everybody cried, and with the tears came vivid stories. But in years past, it seemed the only way to get to the last show was to either have a crippling disease, have a parent with a crippling disease, or had a loved one that passed away due to a crippling disease. Not so much this year.

Yeah maybe I'm jaded. Just sayin'. 

I've been reading online reviews of the show. The ratings aren't as good this year, and now folks are suggesting that Stern "may be too nice." So chances are, he may (either on his own or at the instruction of the show's producers) get nastier. Once that happens, I'll stop watching.

Stargate Atlantis

I've finally found a series to watch on our Netflix that ISN'T a Star Trek series.

I've given Stargate series a chance before, since I've watched the original Stargate movie several times, but I've never been able to get into them for long. I liked Stargate Universe but of course it got cancelled.

Stargate Atlantis has an excellent ensemble cast. The story lines are, I think, more compelling with action being grounded in the city of Atlantis, rather than the "alien of the week" approach of previous Stargate series. Another plus, again IMHO, is that the acting is a lot stronger. At times, Stargate SG1 was heavily over-acted.

The interactions between the leads in Atlantis are more capably executed, with well-balanced use of humor as well as suspense, without the darkness and conflict of the SG Universe series.

The good times won't last forever, I'm on episode 27 of 99. I guess when I run out of SG Atlantis episodes, I may give SG1 another try. I could always watch the Deep Space 9 episodes again...

My Favorite TV Shows

I watch a lot of television. I'm sure I constitute a nightmare of social evolution -- sitting in a darkened room, watching stock charts on one screen, typing into email or blogging on another, with TV perpetually in the background. The TV is always on when I'm awake, if only to provide background noise. And it doesn't stop when I go to bed. I have Star Trek The Motion Picture on my netbook's Tivo Desktop, and I play it as I get into bed (cool thing about that is that when the movie is over, the laptop goes into sleep mode).

Television is an important part of my morning routine. After working a 12-hour night shift at the hospital, we eat breakfast in front of the 50" TV and crank up Tivo for an hour or so before I go to bed for the day. 

This is what we are watching:

The Rachel Maddow Show. Yes, we're pretty liberal. Some day, we'll block Fox News so it won't even play anywhere in our apartment. We get all of our political news from MSNBC and CNN. But we just love Rachel. We call her "Honey." So when something interesting happens, one of us will say to the other, "so, what does Honey have to say" or "how do you think Honey will respond to that one?" If Rachel ever finds my blog and reads this, I hope she isn't mortified. Honey means she's a part of our family -- the part that makes sense first thing in the morning and tells us the truth.

 CSI Crime Scene Investigation. I've been saying this since its first season -- the smartest hour on television and a good show to watch how the Sciendific Method actually works.

 Big Bang Theory. People tell me am just like Sheldon. That would be enough for me to look, but after three seasons, it's the great writing that keeps me coming. Like them, we eat our meals in the tv room. We don't eat out as often, but we do have favorite restaurants we go to over and over again. We do have assigned seating. I love the way the ensemble cast has grown with and into one another.

 Fringe. I think it's an homage, maybe even a re-imagining, of the X-Files franchise. Really weird and freaky story lines including the perenniel favorite, alternate dimensions and time lines. John Noble is spooky-effective as Walter.

 Hot in Cleveland. I just love Betty White. She gets the best lines but the worst wardrobe. And I've had a thing for Valerie Bertineli since One Day at a Time.

 The Good Wife. I don't like a whole lot of lawyer shows, but this isn't just about the courtroom. This is the story of the wife of a State Attorney who cheats on her with another woman. She decides to make it on her own as a lawyer, while dealing with the aftermath with her family. A lot of really powerfull talent in this show.

 Happily Divorced. They've been married for 18 years, and then one day he realized he had been gay the whole time. This is a hilarious story about how these two divorcees try to rebuild their lives in what is usually a painful situation. The magic of the show is that the two still love each other deeply. 

 2 Broke Girls. These two girls have such great chemistry. She's like Bernie Maddoff's daughter who has lost all of her money and belongings to a grand jury, and she's trying to start a cupcake business while working at a downtown NY diner. The dialogue is the best on television. 

 New Girl. I loved the first episode, but was disappointed in the second episode, and then they went on hiatus for a month. The producers of the show need to think about that more. Anyway, I'm willing to give it another chance but the last episode was the ubiquitous "saw you naked" episode which, in the genre of co-ed room mate shows, is just too overdone. I think they should keep Jess, Schmidt and Cece but change the other two room mates to more interesting characters. Still giving it a chance. 

 Terra Nova. An interesting Sci-fi show. Folks from 22nd century Earth have messed up the environment so bad they had to get off the planet, and the way they did it was to figure out a way to go back millions of years into Earth's past. If you're a Star Trek fan, you'd freak out right here as they messed up their own time line, but somehow that catastrophe has been averted, they are screwing up with a parallel dimension's time line. Well, I'm not as much into that as the story of how they survive in a pre-historic environment while yet enjoying the benefits of 22nd century earth. Jason Omera is great and believable, as is Stephen Lang (who I had just grown to hate after his character on Avatar, but here he's very heroic and likable.) My only problem with the show is that it can lapse from great Sci-fi to, well, basically, a trivial episode of Dawson's Creek. I mean, teen-aged angst is going to be a problem when there are velociraptors out there trying to eat ya? I don't think so. But again I'm giving it a chance.

 American Horror Story. Man, this is one messed up show, and I Totally Love It. It's a haunted house recently bought by a painfully dysfunctional family. A sex dom dressed all in leather, ipecac-laced cupcakes, nurses getting stabbed to death (oooh... I do love that one... don't ask me why...) and the appalling lack of lockable doors all set my nerves on fire. 

 Grimm. He's the descendant of a long line of monster killers. The Matriarch, his aunt, has died, and has left him everything, including a trailer full of axes and swords. I like the show so far, especially the chemistry between David Guintoli and his two parters (one is a cop, the other is a vegan wolf man with a sense of honor and justice and does pilades. )

Grimm is on at the same time line as Fringe, and I hear the ratings are down for Fringe as Grimm goes up in ratings. I'm hoping with the DVR/Tivo technology out there, that we've come up with a way to count our household under both shows, as our dual-channel Tivo records both at the same time. No idea how that works out.

X-Men First Class; The Killing

•    We saw X-Men: First Class last week. For some reason,  I was expecting Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in it, at least for a little bit, CGI altered to appear younger. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender did an excellent job portraying Dr. Xavier and Magneto as young men. Their acting and the dramatic building of their relationship couldn't have been done any better had Captain Picard and Gandalf done the parts themselves. I normally would have been turned off by all of the character development, but I was entertained. And Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw served as a believable bad guy to balance out the heroes.
•    We sometimes are a bit leary about watching new shows. We sometimes like them, and then they get cancelled. But we're taking a chance with AMC's The Killing. It's a murder mystery that takes place in Seattle. The lead characters, for whatever reason, remind me of Mulder and Scully from X-Files. Particularly the redheaded female detective (our nickname for her is SourPuss because she's always walking around with a scowl on her face). The show makes Seattle look dark and rainey, I think they're doing it on purpose through a blue filter; the sun hardly shines and it's rained in most of the episodes. Thankfully, it's been picked up for another season.
  
  

Pirates of the Caribbean; The Event; bag lunches

•   We went to see Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides: the story was so-so, but Johnny Depp really has Jack Sparrow totally down. Some of the lines he trades with Penelope Cruz Geoffrey Rush and Ian McShane were very funny. My favorite part of the film though was the soundtrack. The music, especially with the action scenes, was terrific. We sat through the credits for the easter-egg scene at the end, and listening to the end credits music made the wait worth it (the easter-egg scene itself was really short and not all that exciting).
•   NBC has cancelled The Event. The final episode was excellent, and I really want to see more. There were rumors that SyFy may pick it up for a miniseries, but SyFy announced they aren't interested. I'm still holding out hope that someone will pick it up.
• I don't know how I do it, but I spend $30/week at work on food. No, I don't order out. That's hospital cafeteria food I'm spending all that money on. If the food were actually worth $30 (that's about $10 each night that I work), I would just spend it and go on. But the food isn't all that good and I always feel bad after eating it. I had read online about a guy that saved tons of money each year eating the same brown-bag lunch year after year. Nothing fancy, just a peanut butter and jelly sandwiche and some fruit, or maybe a granola bar. I'm starting to brown bag my dinner -- a couple of sandwiches, a fruit cup, cookies, and iced tea. I don't know how long I'll keep up the self-discipline of making lunch before I go to bed, we'll have to see. [Update: the guy mentioned earlier that ate the same lunch every day ended up being Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin. Oh well, the idea is still sound, even if his state is totally imploding these days.]

 

 

A World I Never Made... Tweaking the Budget... Veronica Mars...

•  I've been reading many freebies from Amazon.com for my Kindle. Most of them I'll read the first few chapters and, if it hasn't captured my interest by then, I delete them. But this one (presently free as I write this) is a well-written mystery. It reminds me of the Stiegg Larsson books. Looking back at my download history, I'm batting about 1 book out of 7 that I actually read all the way through. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to matter whether I got the book for free, got it at a steep discount, or paid full price. Most of them suffer the delete button.
• The past few months, I've been unrelentingly focused on fine-tuning our household budget. It all started when I changed my role at work for a bit of a cut in pay, and then pretty much cut out all of the overtime I usually work. If I had to guess, the combination of the two has made about at 12% cut in my gross pay, and it got me to wonder how much of that is being burned up for absolutely nothing. We're actually not doing too bad, but I've gotten us accustomed to a more disciplined saving plan, and we've found a lot of crap items we've been paying for and not getting much use of, and cutting those out.
           One thing I've started to do is to itemize as much as I can on a per-paycheck basis. I get paid every other Thursday, and I plotted these out on a spreadsheet, one column for each paycheck, for the rest of the year. And then I looked at the activity on our checking account and plotted out when every bill is paid (just about everything is either an automatic draft or a bill pay from the same account) and entered that item for each paycheck. I tried to capture just about everything that we pay/purchase on a regular basis (right down to the cat food we buy every two weeks). The spreadsheet figures out how much cash is left after everything is paid for. It's been very eye-opening, but has helped get us back on track for saving a higher amount now than we did prior to my cut in pay. We've even started thinking about taking more out-of-town vacations, which we never do (not because we couldn't afford them but because we are such stay-at-home folks).
•  We've been watching Veronica Mars on Netflix. I just love her.
  
  
  

Ice Road Truckers

 

I honestly don't know why, but we love this show.

Neither of us knows how to drive a truck (or even stick shift)...

We both hate snow and cold...

Neither of us has any particular love of or for trucks, truckers, or the profession of truck driving.

But we love the show nonetheless.

Most of the show, we look at the screen and say something like, "Tsk tsk that is one crazy dude" (although this year, they have a female driver). We also like to critique the cgi truck crashes.

Weird.

America's Got Talent

 I generally hate TV talent shows. I've been drawn to America's Got Talent on NBC. I don't like the acts that end up getting boo'ed off the stage. I'm sure some of those acts just know beforehand that they are going to get the three X's, but I hate it when the performer seems really shocked that the judges didn't like their act.

The judges, to me, are much better than the judges from American Idol. It still has the really mean british guy, that takes supreme pleasure in humiliating people. But he's balanced by a very sensitive and affirming Sharon Osborne, and fun-loving nice-guy David Hasselhoff. Working backstage is Jerry Springer, who has done a lot in my eyes by seeming to care about all of the performers, and not just the ones having sex with their cows.

Last week's show really got me, with the insurance salesman's performance of the Nessun Dorma that brought tears to my eyes.

Oh, and the Riverdance acts. I seem to REALLY love any verson of Riverdance. God Bless Riverdance.

Oh and the tearful tributes to mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts. That just seems to be a prerequisite to doing well on this show.

Did I mention I really like Riverdance?

Monsters on BBC

The other day, I was taking a nap on the couch with the TV on. About an hour later, I woke up to this scene on my television screen. The show looked just like one of those nature documentaries (I just love those). If you follow the link to the video, you can see how realistic the sea scorpions looked, and would never have guessed that they are a complex synthesis of CGI and models. Nigel Marvin does some very believable acting when faced with not only these viscious critters as well as a wide variety of sea monsters.

I was fixed to the screen, wondering where on Hell on Earth this place was, where these sea scorpions actually lived. Nigel later takes a swim with what looks like an ancestor of modern day octopus, and the special effects are breathtakingly realistic.

I didn't realize I had been had until the scene where he does a time warp and walks a few billion years into the past. I figured by then that the documentary was more drama. But it was still excellent.

The Seven Deadliest Seas of all Time

Big Bang Theory (CBS September 24 830pm)

We're on the prowl for new TV shows to put on our TIVO. One thing we've noticed this year is... Nerd is definitly IN. It seems we owe it all to the series Heroes. All of a sudden, EVERYONE is pulling out Star Trek and Star Wars references.

So brings us a new series, "The Big Bang Theory," which premieres Saturday September 24 on CBS. Tivo downloaded the pilot episode and it was hilarious. Again, the main criterion for anything I decide to sit down and watch is that it has to be intelligent, have realistic actors (in other words, NOT all underwear models) and can't put anyone down.   

The Big Bang Theory is the story of two room mates "with a combined IQ of 360." In the first episode, they meet their new neighbor (admittedly, an underwear model but it suits the plot). We meet their two best friends (both also nerdy and smart, one stuck in an episode of The Monkeys with a Davy Jones haircut, the other a stereotypical Hindi-accented guy that was noticeably underdeveloped in the pilot). The dialogue is fast, clipped, and parts of it might have been written (albeit slowly) by Stephen Hawking. The two room mates head off to confront the pretty new neighbor's boyfriend.

They didn't win. They didn't get the girl. They got pantsed. But it was still absolutely hilarious.