My annual TV roundup is a little late this year – I’d intended to do this as a Preview, but Premiere week has come and gone and I got slammed with work, so it’s here now. The good news is, that allowed me to see a good number of the shows that I didn’t have screeners for.
Screeners? Yes, this year I was actually able to get hold of a few early versions of pilots for NBC and CBS, so I’ll indicate which pilots I saw that way. I’ll also note when I saw them, since the earlier I saw them, the greater the chances that there have been significant changes made since I saw them. I’ll also note which shows I’ve been watching since they premiered.
Anything with an asterisk is something I would recommend based on whatever version of the pilot I saw. I’ll probably be watching a couple more shows than that, but those are the ones that really stood out. Anything not listed here, I haven’t actually watched and thus do not feel qualified to give an opinion on other than “that looked stupid enough that even I wouldn’t watch it.”
I’ve become quite bad at keeping this updated lately. A few things I have done since my last post:
- Officially finished my last class at UCLA Extension. I got my certificate at the end of last quarter, but I took a “just-in-case” class since they weren’t being terribly clear on whether I’d officially get the certificate until it showed up in the mail.
- Wrote most of my first iPhone application, which I’m hoping to submit for approval by the end of the week. Will hopefully have a self-pimpin’ post on this when it goes up on the App Store.
- Turned 30, felt old for a bit, then felt like this could be the start of a better decade than my 20s, which all in all, were a little nuts.
- Applied for individual health insurance and gone off on multiple rants about the atrocious state of the American medical system to several annoyed insurance brokers, who can’t really do anything about it.
- Tried to figure out what the hell I’m going to be doing, employment-wise. Still working on this.
- Deciding to move in August when my roommate shacks up with her boyfriend. Where am I moving? That’s an excellent question, which will largely depend on my employment situation. Signs are currently pointing heavily to San Francisco, based simply on the amount of opportunity there, but still officially TBD.
You know those tone-deaf ads for Leno returning to 11:35 set to the Beatles’ “Get Back”? Someone put together a version with a much more apt song choice:
Having lost a fairly large amount of weight, I now have a lot of stuff that doesn’t fit. I gave the vast majority of it to Goodwill, which is probably appropriate since that’s where I’m now buying most of the clothing to replace what no longer fits.
However, I’m a bit torn about what to do with a number of t-shirts I have which hold some sentimental value. Mostly rock shirts from when I was in high school and college, as well as a few shirts from previous shows I’ve worked on.
I have a couple options I can think of, and I’d like to solicit some advice as to what else you guys would recommend. So far I have thought of:
a) Keeping all the shirts in case I get fat again (an idea I’ve largely rejected simply because I feel like that would simply encourage me to get fat again, which is why I’m getting rid of all my old clothes in the first place)
b) Cutting them up and keeping the parts of actual sentimental value and turning them into some sort of art – framing them or making a quilt (or more accurately, having a friend who can actually sew help me make a quilt) or something.
In case any of you were wondering, I am not the Ellen Shapiro mentioned in this story.
Hint #1 is that the story mentions she was married in 1968, whereas I was born in 1981. Also, I am not married. Also, I cannot legally get married (thanks, Prop 8!).
Hint #2 is that my father was a communications lawyer, not the owner of a Boston department store whose family foundation has recently been defrauded of over $450 million.
But it is ever so fun to know that our shared name is now going to get dragged through the mud thanks to Bernie Madoff and his Gigantic Fucking Ponzi Scheme That Apparently Defrauded Every Jew In The Country. Fun!
FedEx’s SmartPost service does not live up to its name.
The idea is that they leverage the FedEx system to get a package most of the way, and then the US Postal Service to get it the “last mile” to the customer. So you get the best of both worlds, with FedEx’s expertise in covering large distances and the USPS’s specialized local knowledge….
…in theory. In practice, here’s what FedEx did with my shirt.woot that was ordered on Halloween (click to enlarge, and note that the timeline is in reverse order, with the most recent scans first):
Note in particular the fact that it somehow managed to get sent from Chino, CA to Denver, Colorado, to Sacramento, then BACK to Chino before it finally meandered its way to Santa Monica.
And this doesn’t even cover the two days it spent getting from the Post Office less than a mile from my house to my actual mailbox. It took two weeks to get the damn shirt here from a place just outside of Dallas.
A truly brutal early week (seriously, I’m bribing my boss with whatever change I can scrape off the floor of my car to never have to be at work at 6am again) left posting a bit light this week…
…and it ain’t going to get much better, since I’m hopping a plane to Chicago for a fun little party known as Reuniafest. Lots of fun, lots of drinking, lots of football.
I’m hoping ye stupide foote holds up a little better this year than it did last year, but we’ll see. I’m looking forward to seeing the Chicago kids, so I can catch you up on what I’ve been doing.
For those of you not in Chicago who still want to catch up, I’ll put a spoiler in white font: Working. A whole fucking lot.
As I go through and update the dates and times that got fucked up in the Blogger-to-Wordpress transition, I’m glancing through my old posts and occasionally coming across things that seem really funny in retrospect.
