Linkstew

The TV ad that put Bush over the top

I actually believe that this ad (which I didn't see out here in CA) is what could have made the difference in the election.

Buffy Postmortem: Is Spike Dead?

This is a good interview with Joss about the end of Buffy, and it shed some light on some things for me. Yay Spike on Angel.

It's actually been an embarrassingly Buffy week, to the point that when I saw Lauren use line "Where do we go from here the words are coming out all weird..." my first though was "Wait, that's not how "Where Do We Go From Here?" goes." Of course, it is how The Bends goes, but it took me longer than it should have to figure that out.

What made this week any more Buffy than normal, besides the obvious? Let's see:

• Monday: Rewatched the last two episodes of Buffy, in preparation for the finale on Tuesday.
• Tuesday: Participated in a public display of Buffy geekdom: Went to the Parkway and watched the finale while drinking beer and eating pizza. And they showed Once More With Feeling afterwards, which was awesome.
• Wednesday: Buffy free. Well, except for all of the conversations about the Buffy finale.
• Thursday: Saw Ghost of the Robot (James Marsters' (aka Spike) band) at the Great American Music Hall. It was fairly fun, and the music was fine, though nothing fantastic. Unsurprisingly, it was approximately five girls to every one guy, and the collective squeal that went up when James came on stage was just as predictable. It was kind of surreal seeing him in person like that. He was actually shy on stage, in a strangely endearing way that even I thought was kind of cute. All things considered, he handled a crowd full of people who obviously had huge crushes on him relatively gracefully.
• Friday: Spent awhile at Amoeba deciding not to buy the Once More With Feeling soundtrack before going home and watching two episodes of 4th season that my TiVo picked up.

So, yeah. Buffy overdose.

So I don't like watching previews, and I especially don't like spoilers when it comes to things like the Buffy series finale. So I didn't watch the preview for tonight's episode last week, but then they showed a little teaser right before the episode, letting me know that Angel was going to be in the episode.

Now, people know that that the Buffy series finale is coming, so they're going to be watching anyway, so why spoil Angel's appearance for those who have been avoiding spoilers, two minutes before the episode starts!?

It's like sitting down to see Episode I, and right after the previews there's a short teaser for the movie showing Qui Gonn getting killed.

Okay, I admit that that analogy is a little flawed, because TV is trying to retain viewers while the theater already has the customer trapped. But that's what commercials during the preceding show are for. And they should put the last teaser for the next show (at the latest) before the credits role. If the preceding show were Friends, for example, the teaser should be before the last joke that Friends has during the credits.

Any which way, it should not have been attached to the episode, right before the recap.

So of course it gets on to be the last fight of the episode, and of course Angel hasn't shown up yet, so now not only do we know Angel going to be in the episode, but we now of course also know that Angel is going to step in and upset the balance of the fight, spoiling the end of the episode.

Imagine how much cooler that would have been if I hadn't fucking known he was going to be in the episode.

And I won't comment on anything else, because though you probably already knew that Angel was in the episode, the preview thankfully didn't say anything else.

I'm still irritated, though. Stupid UPN.

The Disappearance of Saturday Morning

Hey, I object to the quote in this article that says "'Saturday morning cartoons? is a phrase that emotionally means nothing to anyone under the age of twenty-five"! I'm only 23, and Saturday morning cartoons were a big deal for me! Then again, I associate with Nick pretty strongly, too. Apparently I'm ... bigenerational?

Ugh, I'm too tired to finish writing up my notes from tonight's TMBG concert right now, so I'm going to have to finish that tomorrow. In the meantime, check out the videos of TMBG's performance on Screen Savers from April 29th.

In the first video, they play Wicked Little Critta and have a conversation with the host, where they actually talk about Apple's Music Store some, and Flansburgh shares his opinions on that. They talk about other things, too, but the online music distribution was by far the most interesting piece of that.

In the second video, they play Another First Kiss and Au Contraire.

If you want music, watch the second video. If you want discussion about online music, watch the first video. Either way, they're windows media, so if you're using Safari, you're probably going to have to dig the mms url out of the source code and load the URL in Windows Media Player separately.

And now, I'm going to bed (bed bed bed bed bed...).

You know how Comedy Central has been showing those parody commercials for reality TV shows like "Joe Mormon" or "The Vault?"

Well, if it were real, I would actually watch "Celebrity CAT Scan." And I'm not even that embarrassed to admit it.

Anyway, bed time and snowboarding this weekend.

In all that time that my sister was totally into The Monkees when I was a kid, I never really knew when The Monkees were from. I mean, I knew that the TV show wasn't current, because even my young eyes could tell that the shows were old, but it never even occurred to me to ask how old they were.

And for that matter, in all the years since, I never bothered to really find out much about them. But all of that changed tonight, when, while going through my CDs, I ended up reading the booklet in my copy of The Monkees Anthology.

And once I found out that the group started in 1966 and had a big 20th anniversary thing in 1986, a lot of things clicked for me all at once. The timing of my sister liking The Monkees made much more sense. All of the things my sister said about "Michael not being part of the group" (That's how I remember what she told me. It's probably not what she actually told me. Hell if I remember. I was six.) as though it were current news now makes sense, because michael not touring with the others for 20th anniversary was current news.

Of course, that news currency question was another question that I didn't ask then, but which only occurred to me years later. In fact, one evening while letting my mind wander about the Internet and the impact it's had on how quickly information is disseminated these days (and in particular, I was thinking about news about the music business and how easy it is for me to check up on TMBG at any given moment), I got to wondering how my sister got current information about her favorite bands when she was a kid. And my mom before her, for that matter. I jokingly wondered to myself (not knowing then about The Monkees' 20th anniversary shindig) if my sister had been reading my mom's magazines from when she had been a teenager and passing the content off to the unsuspecting six year old as news.

(And now that I've typed that, I somewhat sheepishly realize that my sister had early MTV to feed her news, while my mom before that had the radio. For some reason neither of those options really occurred to me in my thinking about the internet that night, and I instead only thought about the internet of today versus magazines back then. Probably because they're both text based mediums with a rich dose of color for good measure. Meh, I stand by the joke as written.)

I watched MTV's new reality show FM Nation last night.

Now of course there's a good answer to the implicit question of "Why on earth did you watch that!?", because otherwise why would I admit to having watched such a horrible show?

I watched FM Nation because the first episode was set in Bakersfield of all places, and featured such local highlights as street racing and a wet t-shirt contest. There'll be a few more reruns of the first episode, so if you really want to see an embarrassing portrayal of about ten residents of Bakersfield, check it out. Otherwise, I highly recommend you stay as far away as possible from the show. It's pretty bad.

Gah, I put this entry off back when I should have written it, because I was really busy with a combination of work and school and fun and games. And then I put it off longer and longer, and now I've forgotten a lot of the summer, and at this point all I can do is respond to my stated goals in the Summer 2002 Future post. So here it is:

• Whew, I read a lot in the first half of this summer, but I haven't actually read anything since July 10th. It added up to something like 5000 pages in a little more than a month, but I forgot the exact number. Anyway, in no order, here are the books I read before July 10th: Microserfs, House of Leaves, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, The Dark Side of the Sun, Smoke and Mirrors, Coraline, and, I'm very embarrassed to admit, five Star Wars novels that I got cheap used.
• As much as I read, though, I didn't actually get around to reading Ender's Game or Moral Politics: How Conservatives and Liberals Think like I wanted to.
• Game-wise, I only actually finished Jedi Outcast and ICO as planned, though I also played Pikmin. Everything else in my queue, including (most notably) Golden Sun and Eternal Darkness remain unplayed.
• In the second half of the summer, I ended up watching more TV in the evenings than I would have liked. In particular, I watched all of Babylon 5 on reruns, and seasons 1-4, 6 of Buffy. I also saw a few assorted episodes of season 5 Buffy, leaving the other 2/3 of season 5 for me to patiently watch on the painfully slow weekly rerun cycle. Stupid syndication.
• I don't really know how to measure how successful I was at saying "hate" less, so I'm not not going to comment on it either way.
• I fixed what was broken with Linkstew.
• Uh, I didn't study for the GRE, because I haven't registered for it yet. And by that I mean I still haven't done either. I should get on that.
• And overall, I think I was fairly less successful at work than I was hoping to be. In particular, LDAP kicked my ass.

Here are entries that I was going to write in the last week, but were aborted for one reason or another:

• Mention that any of Chimay's beers have surpassed my previous favorite beer, but in particular, the Chimay Blue (aka Chimay Grande Réserve) is my new favorite. It's a nice dark Belgian Ale with a smooth texture and complex flavor, and it's easy to drink despite its 9% ABV. Of course, it's a little too expensive to drink very regularly, but what do you expect from something brewed by Belgian Monks? It's still damn good, though.
• A discussion of Berkeley's proposed law on requiring local businesses to brew only Fair Trade coffee, and attempting to draw out a corollary on how this could potentially apply to beer. Aborted because I couldn't make said corollary into a joke that made sense.
• I was going to comment that with Star Trek X apparently being "A Generation's Final Journey," that means we won't be getting a Star Trek movie with Q. Then I was going to make a joke that if it meant we had to wait until Star Trek Q for Q's movie, then maybe it was alright, because the thought of that many Star Trek movies makes me ill. The joke died, however, when I rememembered that there is no Roman Numeral Q. D'oh.
• Discussion of the disturbing discovery that They Might Be Giants songs are 18.71% percent of my music 3875 song music library (though only 12.73% of the duration of my library). NIN was a distant 2nd, making up a mere 3.4% of my songs. Perhaps more disturbingly, though, is that different versions of a mere 4 TMBG songs (Istanbul, Particle Man, They Might Be Giants, and Birdhouse In Your Soul) make up 1% of my entire music collection! What's even worse about this is that there's only one version of Istanbul, Particle Man, and They Might Be Giants I really like, but I keep the rest around because I don't want to delete a song out of the middle of a bootleg or other collection. At least I listen to at least half the variants of Birdhouse that I have. Anyway, the point is that if you had any doubt that I'm a TMBG fanatic, you now have incontrovertible evidence.
• Yesterday's iPod software update made me a very happy camper, because now my iPod will update my iTunes library with updated Play Counts and Last Played times, so my iPod listening habits can be taken into consideration when creating smart playlists.
• TMBG is going to be on Conan O'Brien again on Wednesday, August 14th. By which I mean the will actually air on the 14th, as in the one that starts 30 minutes after the 13th ends. Hopefully they don't play Robot Parade like they did last time. Four of Two would be a much more reasonable choice, I think.
• While reading alt.music.tmbg last night, I came across a link to this interview, wherein John Flansburgh and John Linnell interview each other. It's very amusing and very revealing, I think. They talk about everything from other's perceptions of their music to their high school science teacher to emotion killing bacteria.
• The guy who cuts my hair (which happened today) looks totally like Tom Cavanagh (Who plays Ed on the TV show Ed).
• And finally, if I weren't completely busy with work, I'd totally be at TMBG's 20th anniversay concert next week in Central Park. ::sigh::

So now that you know what I would have written about, aren't you glad I didn't write about it at length?

So I finally got a chance to watch TMBG's Conan performance on my TiVo, and ohmygod, I can't believe they played Robot Parade on national television. When Flansy sang "John, I think we're losing the crowd," he was not joking. If any viewers who weren't fans made it past "Children will work together," I'd be shocked. I found myself feeling painfully embarrassed for them. It was a real shame.

Even some fans expressed disbelief at the performance, and that's just not a good sign.

The only real redeeming quality was their follow-up performance of Shoehorn with Teeth, but even that didn't really feel appropriate.

Man, sigh.