Sometimes things I write have weird consequences.
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Some Like It Hot
I have weird feelings about this movie. I first watched it at GSP, almost ten years ago, when HOLY SHIT TEN YEARS I’M OLD
Let’s try that again. I watched it and I thought it was hilarious, which was remarkable in itself, given my stupid prejudice against anything made before 1981. In 1998 that was the kind of thing you thought about it. On vacation in summer 2000, we watched it get named the funniest American film ever and I pretty much agreed (given AFI’s own stupid but inevitable prejudices). Since then I’ve only trotted it out to prove that yes, I do like something made before I was born.
I watched it again last night with Holly and Kevan, neither of whom had seen it before. Now I’m all jumbled.
There are a lot of one-liners, but does that make a funny movie? I think improv training, the Daily Show and Arrested Development have done something to my humor palate such that those didn’t satisfy me. So I didn’t laugh much at it. But I did find it stunningly subversive.
Now, was it subversive when it was released? Certainly–it helped end the Production Code–but not in the way I’m thinking. A lot of the jokes now can be read as sly commentary on gay marriage, “cures” for homosexuality, and, er, Marilyn Monroe’s death. I don’t know if I’m reaching too far to do that. An English major would say no, but I got my degree in theatre.
When Leigh sent me my copies of The Little Book [etc], she addressed me as “Catfish,” with reason, and which I liked. That probably contributed to my writing Kentucky over a year ago. I was looking for a penny to pick up today, and read that again, and was glad that it had come true after all.
I never remember that when I need to apply a style to a server-side generated element, I don’t have to dig ten stupid lib files deep into the PHP or whatever and add a class attribute, I can just put it in a span (or div) and style all the elements of type x within that. So in case you forget the easy way to style server-side generated elements: put them in a span or div and style all the elements of type x within that!
Okay, hi. Working a lot.
Maria visited last week, and alleviated any potential self-absorbed silliness just by being here. But we also went to Brighton and the Tower of London (pictures soon), and played lots of games, including some with Leonard and Sumana. London had changed its mind and decided to be cold, but at least it didn’t start snowing until she was on her way home. I am still not doing my fair share of the cooking.
I’ve been here for a week! This morning Holly made baby pancakes (which she called something much nicer that I can’t remember) and we ate them on the back porch, and the rest of the house failed to vote me out. I’m glad. This is a pretty great house!
I’ve been to Battersea Park repeatedly, and to the Science and Natural History Museums, and on a Tube Walk (pictures), and today I tried to go to a scheduled pickup Frisbee game at Hyde Park but it turned out not to exist. But still! I navigated to Hyde Park and back all by myself! I also managed to get to Victoria Station and back, twice, to pick up and drop off Caitlan when she visited.
Keen-eyed readers of this blog will note that normally I don’t go outside that much in a month, and will probably guess further that I am deliberately overcompensating to fight culture shock / homesickness / loneliness et cetera. Good guess, keen readers. But it’s working! And given my only other experience outside the country, I think overcompensation is entirely in order.
London is awfully big, but awfully neat too.
Update 03.07.2007 1243 hrs: Pikelets! They were called pikelets.
I was going to make this whole thing a tortured metaphor, but I went running this morning and I’m too tired. Apparently moving to England makes you fat and wheezy. I will accept no other rationalization.
A couple weeks ago I had a dream where Sarah Chalke was playing guitar, so I’ve been watching the first season of Scrubs again. I originally started watching in the third, when Maria brought it to my attention, but she also went to great pre-DVD lengths to obtain old episodes and get me up to speed, so I count myself as a fan from way back.
Man, that was a good show. The Pizza Clock episode might be my favorite half-hour of television ever. I don’t think you can even count it as a sitcom at the beginning: it was a character drama with daydream sequences and goofy sound effects. Maria has asserted that it was, for a time, the most accurate medical show on TV.
The show’s treatment at NBC’s hands is legendary, where by “legendary” I mean “you know about it if you have the unfortunate habit of following TV-production news.” The show is aired by NBC, but owned by ABC Studios, so the network cares even less about its welfare than usual–they have to split the ad revenues with a rival. This led to the standard schedule-shuffling and sweeps-bumping for a couple years, until it became obvious that they had a devoted DVD-buying audience, at which point they actually started promoting it and aired it steadily for almost a year and a half.
Suspiciously, this was where the quality of the show started to decline. The problem with writing something you think is going to be cancelled every five seconds is that you want to get through your good material fast, and after sixty episodes of standing on the gas pedal, there wasn’t much conflict left to wring out of the same characters.
That left daydream sequences and sound effects.
I’m going to put the death rattle at My Butterfly, featuring an awful CGI rendition of the titular bug and a plot that makes it explicit that you don’t know how or whether the events involved affect the characters’ relationships. It comes just after the dramatic high point of My Screw Up, and it precedes the slide into self-parody that accompanied Elliot and JD’s third go-round. I would have been heartbroken if the series had ended after that season–but honestly, it would have been a good place to stop.
See, when you rely on a devoted DVD-buying audience for revenue, both the studio and the network can get lazy. Why come up with bittersweet twists when you can take new templates–first year of marriage, first child, awkward living situation–and apply the same running gags? Why give the workhorse a slot when you know its audience will never change? Try out a flashy new pilot and take ol’ Scrubs off the bench when it fails!
Zach Braff has said repeatedly that he’s done with the show after this season, and Bill Lawrence has said the show is done without him, and that would be fine. Except this year (the worst yet) it became a mainstay in the Thursday night comedy block, and it’s suddenly worth it to NBC not to lose its lead-through. That’s why Zach Braff is getting a raise and Scrubs will probably be back.
I won’t be watching. NBC, give the slot to 30 Rock (the funniest show on television) and put your Andy Richter crap at the end. Bill, you’ve got better things to do. Take the workhorse out behind the barn and shoot it.
American Airlines has thoughtfully applied so much pressure to my suitcase that not only did the Listerine, face wash, et cetera stored in the outer pocket burst from their bottles, they also burst the sealed plastic bag in which all said bottles were stowed. Thankfully, the third level of containment (the plastic pocket lining) held, and my clothing and board games did not get a thorough shampooing.
The reason I found this out today is because I have only just received the bag, which was lost when I arrived at the airport two and a half days ago. I put this down to good plane karma. I will elaborate.
Before I left, I spent hours researching the layout of my plane online, finding which seats had an extra inch of leg room, which had DC power outlets under the seats, etc. For the seven-hour flight over the pond, I selected 26B, an aisle seat with only one person who would have to crawl out past me and an Empower outlet right underneath.
Five minutes after settling into this seat and ramming my carry-on into the overhead compartment that was supposed to carry the lifejackets, the nice old lady next to me asked if I could do her a favor. Her friend had been supposed to sit next to her, you see, and they somehow got moved, and would I possibly consider switching with her?
Was her friend’s seat on an aisle? Oh yes, the lady assured me. Oh well, I thought.
It wasn’t. But it was only one seat in and there was an outlet under it. The gentleman next to me quirked an eyebrow. Had they asked me to switch seats, he inquired? Why yes, sir, they had. Would I believe that he, too, had a friend who was supposed to sit next to him? (Said friend, overjoyed, gave me a high five.)
This is how I ended up in the most central seat of the plane, sans outlet, unable to find anywhere to put my knees. Good thing I don’t have mild claustrophobia when I can’t move my legs! Oh wait!
I lived, anyway, and staggered off the plane with numb legs after only taking twenty minutes to find the carry-on the flight crew had spirited away to first class. My luggage had a better seat than me.
And yes, I consider my losing the small checked bag a mild repayment for the ordeal, because the large and much more important bag made it through just fine. I doubt I will care so much about my luggage on the way home, though. I have reserved a seat with one extra inch of leg room, and any nice ladies next to me can just fuck off and die.
Holy. If you’re on the Interweb, you’ve heard about the Wikipedia guy who said he was a professor and deleted everybody’s stuff and nobody could argue with him because he was an editor? But then, no, he was a liar and a college dropout and a tool? Right.
I went to school with that guy.
I wonder why that wasn’t in the alumni magazine. KENTUCKY.
Also: WIKIPEDIA.