Half-assed tv follow-up post

I'm finding it hard to keep up with real life here now that I have one. In lieu of that, here's some more comments about tv and junk:

My fears earlier this week were unfounded about The Office. Oh man was that a good episode; right back into the bittersweet funny.

My fears about Skins were very founded, though. (Spoilers if you care) Skins took a page out of Degrassi's book this week and sent its most interesting character to Africa (right after we got to know him!). There were some ok moments as stories and characters develop a little bit, though I sure wish it would stop trying to be edgy and crazy and just represent how real teenagers act. In my opinion, the inclusion of a mobster character who gets tangled up with teenagers for some reason (not to mention his comical henchmen) is like when The Flintstones added the Great Gazoo or Itchy and Scratchy added Poochy: it's just unnecessary and bizarre. If they went all the way and made him act like a human being (problems with that this season) they might get somewhere, but instead he drinks Cup o Noodles to show he's tough and challanges a 16-year-old to a fight that consists of eating raw peppers. What the fuck? What universe is this?

As for what's happening in the Bow household, I'm surrounded by things that need homes. Since my mom and I are both moving, everything we own needs to be packed, given away or sold. A mountain of old t-shirts and baseball caps is going out the door to make room for weird inheritances like a machete and creepy masks. They're not interchangable when it comes to usefulness, but some things are more important than others.

All Things Geek

• Today I finished posting all of my dad's old board games on eBay. The geek money's piling up! Nobody wants Assassin, though, which shocks me. Going by the box lid alone, it's easily the coolest game.
  
  
  From what I can tell, the game is like Taxi Driver except instead of a mohawk Travis Bickle has a mullet and his target is John McCain.
  
  Assassin's only competition on the cool-o-meter is the dashing fellow on the cover of Rail Baron, the "game of building railroad empires" (which I'm keeping for myself). He's There Will Be Blood but drunk.
  
  



• In other media news, my literature burnout has moved me to comic books. I read Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life, Debbie Dreschler's heartbreaking Daddy's Girl, a bunch of R. Crumb and now I'm halfway into Watchmen. I sure like them words when the come with lots of purdy pickshures. Reading the much hyped Watchmen, I totally understand why it's considered a classic. I didn't know how into it I was until I saw a preview for the movie the other day and had a nerdgasm. I hope it doesn't suck.
  



• As for music, I can't stop listening to Love's Forever Changes. Sometimes it sounds like someone going crazy, sometimes it teeters into hippie-dippy bullshit, but most of the time it's just an amazing beautiful album. I bought it for my dad but I don't think he ever really liked it. I'm not sure why. I can't embed anything from it, but check it out anyway.
  
• Today on TV there was a British movie from 1999 called Virtual Sexuality on. I remember passing it at Hollywood Video and always thinking that it was raunchy Cinemax-style porn. Little did I know that it was basically Just One Of The Guys but with shitty CGI. The amazing thing is how late-'90s everything about it is. There's bleached tips and Macy Gray everywhere. When my kids want to know what 1999 was like I'll hand them VHS copies of this, Can't Hardly Wait and Spice World.


• I'm afraid that all of my favorite TV shows are dying. I thought the last two episodes of The Office were pretty weak in comparison to what had been going on. What, so the Angela/Andy/Dwight triangle reaches a head and then the issue's dropped and everything's normal? No! I have a stake in these imaginary people's lives and I want resolution!
  
  Degrassi's long been put out to pasture, but that doesn't make its decline from pre-teen, Canadian guilty pleasure to pre-teen, Canadian guilty pain any more acceptable. Who are these new people that I'm supposed to care about? You can't just send characters to Africa and expect me to forget about them, Degrassi writers; not when you've left me with this:
  
  
  
  But what's really broken my heart is Skins. Oh Skins, I loved you so much! For those of you who aren't British and/or retrograding back to middle school, Skins' first two seasons were hella good. What started as a guilty pleasure (Matt warned me it was "Degrassi meets Rules of Attraction") turned into one of my favorite shows ever. But now? Let me list some of the offenses: extensive plots involving gangsters; penis-tattoos; drawn-out fart jokes; live goldfish-eating; characters nobody could give a shit about.
  
  These characters who seem to be drawn from imaginary TV-types rather than actual people - sensitive sk8r boi, walking pharmaceutical receptacle (Chris without the likability), Screech-like nerd who the former two are friends with for no discernible reason, xtreme maybe-lesbian (probably not) named Naomi Campbell (wtf??), twins (one's wild the other's not and probably is a lesbian). Oh, and Tony Stonem's little sister who the show keeps reminding us is totally attitude and anything-goes, yet somehow became way less interesting now that she talks. Skins - don't make me hate you. Please come back down to earth.
  

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Back to that irritating nerd and Darcy's froggy, Jesus-loving sister in Degrassi, let me put a question to you, world: is the nerd stereotype even relevant in 2009? Revenge of the Nerds? Fine. Saved By The Bell? Cool. The straight-laced programming geek in Virtual Sexuality? Ok. But now that the internet has taken over our lives and people camp out all night for Apple products is there still a cultural otherness to nerds? Look at tv - shows like The Office and motherfucking Chuck; movies like Rushmore and its imitators; the rise of Michael Cera and all indie quirkiness.

The outdatedness of the nerd stereotype really hit me when I was on the airplane from Belfast and they showed an episode of The Big Bang Theory. I guess it's a popular show, but it felt to me like something from another era. Haven't the nerds finally taken over? When the biggest movie franchises of the last decade have been The Lord of the Rings, comic book movies and Star Wars, I think we need to reevaluate things. Does this really represent a reality anyone thinks of as true anymore?



Of course, this is coming from someone who reads comic books, watches childrens' programming and then goes and writes about it in his blog, so what do I know?

Grandpa Wrestling

Tonight was my Grandpa's 98th birthday, which was pretty cool. I learned that he used to herd cattle (which neither of his daughters knew), that he met Howard Hughes (whom he says was , surprise surprise, crazy) when he turned down a lucrative job to work for him and that his grandmother came over on the second wagon train to ever go to Oregon (and the first with women). In addition to these facts, he also told me emphatically that religion is stupid because there is no proof for it. I've never heard him come down on religion or politics before, but the man was a Sunday school teacher and a deacon as well as an engineer/lumberjack/cattle-hearder/naval officer.

I got to tape some of his stories. He is deaf so rather than converse, all he really does is tell stories from his past. When they're not sprinkled with engineer-speak that he assumes I know, they're really fascinating. Above is my favorite.

As I'm moving around all of this stuff that was my dad's I'm thinking about the mutability of history. It's only in and around this last century, during the time that my grandpa was alive, that we've been able to record music - before you had to listen to the musician live or nothing at all. There is no record of the sound itself from before, only instruments and documentation (at this point in the post I should warn that I've been smoking, so if I'm not already blowing your mind you might want to bail). Similarly, all the things that my dad left me are really part of my memories of him; I think about all of my things now in terms of what I want to pass on to my children (when they exist).

I spent a long time tonight letting my grandpa go through an old family album and tell me who the people are. If he doesn't do it then no one else will! My mom doesn't know who the people are any more than I do and my grandma can't see them.
The best story that came out of it:

There's a picture of my grandpa at about ten-years-old dressed in a policeman's uniform. Grandpa told me a story about visiting a sick family friend who was, at the time, also being visited by "a big Scotch-Irishman." "Oh great, just what I need, a cop," joked the sick man. "Help me officer, this man is accosting me!" At this point grandpa revealed to me that his fake uniform came with a real billy club (his college also had a shooting range under the gym, just to give an indication of how times change). He started beating on the other guy with his club. "I pert near took his head off!" laughed my grandpa.

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Elsewhere in the dinner I argued with my aunt and uncle about how good The Wrestler was. "The guy was such a loser!" my uncle kept arguing, as if that meant something. "What a meathead!" We came to common ground when he invited me to come with him to WWE Wrestlemania the week before I leave. Whhaaat? My whole family was shocked at how much I knew about WWE, except for my cousin who used to play WWF: No Mercy on N64 with me. I guess that was a phase in middle school the rest of them missed. This is understandable because I only watched Smackdown because my friends did and I didn't have cable. I'm still not sure how seriously my uncle takes it. Maybe he expected The Wrestler to follow a storyline similar to those that happen during WWE matches. Like, maybe he thought Micky Rourke would get surprised at Raw Is War and challange Mankind to a Pay-Per-View ladder-match. Probably that or the plot of Rocky.

In other entertainment news, I also saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and it was awesome. That and Gone, Baby, Gone have me excited about Casey Affleck's future career, cuz he really knocks those out of the park. At least, as excited as you can get over the career of an actor I don't know or an Affleck.
Plus, Skins is back with a whole new cast! I'm gonna watch it right now and see if the magic is still there! And by magic, I mean drugs. (Update: just watched it. OH. NO.)

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