Gimpysoft

If they move next year’s Green Bay/Kansas City game overseas, I am just going to riot.

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Big Smith tomorrow night at Trouser Mouse.

See you there.

It’s sad to visit this space these days. All off-the-shelf Wordpress template with no customization. No links to six years of archives. X10 switches almost completely removed from the house, and no way for people to flicker my lights any more. No ill-informed and poorly thought out political opinions.

This space is a shadow of its former self, but my attention is elsewhere these days. How’s everybody doing out there?

Hey cool! Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has two new songs from their new album posted out on their website. Listening now.

You know you don’t do enough work with your hands when you give yourself a blister whisking egg yolks.

That is all.

Never even got around to posting my pictures from Lambeau, and I’m off on my next trip. After a frankly kind of hellish two or three weeks at work, it’s going to be nice to take one of those trips long enough to forget about work. Back on Saturday, hopefully with pictures.

In about five hours I’m off to Chicago, then up to Green Bay for this weekend’s contest of irrelevancy, the 1-6 Arizona Cardinals at the 2-4 Green Bay Packers. Well, I haven’t been to Lambeau in a few years and it’ll be nice to at least see Favre play one more time before he retires, and God willing I’ll actually get to see a win, and maybe get to see that jackass Kurt Warner sitting on the bench.

I bought the Battlestar Galactica miniseries and episode one of season one, so I’ll have something to do on the plane. Everybody says that show is good, so we’ll see. Anybody else up to anything interesting this weekend?

Well yeah, I did give up on Jericho, but there has been some good stuff on this Fall. My favorites so far have been:

The Wire - I wish I could say I’ve been on board since the beginning, but I didn’t start watching until season 2. This fall brings us the fourth season of this cop show that is so much more than a cop show. This season shifts away from the Major Crimes Unit that was the focus of the first three seasons, and instead focuses on the inner city education system in Baltimore. All the characters from previous seasons are there, but not central. This season focuses mainly on four middle school children, and what they’re dealing with in the shadow of the drug game in West Baltimore. Their lives in school, on the corners, and at home are explored. Also prominent this season is Marlo Stanfield, the drug dealer who stepped into the power vacuum left by the arrest of much of the Barksdale crew. If you read anything about TV, I’m not going to be the first to tell you that this is the best thing currently on TV. (Some say ever, and I certainly can’t come up with a counterexample.)

The best thing about this show is that everybody on it is a well rounded character, from cops, to politicians, to dock workers, to drug kingpins, to drug-dealer stick up men, to corner drug slingers. It is by far the most believable cop show I’ve ever seen, and I had been looking forward to this season for almost a year now.

My only complaint is that it’s a bit maddening to watch this show week-to-week. (Particularly when they choose to take a week off like they will be next Sunday.) This show really is best watched on DVD. Go ahead, Netflix the first season and start there. Then once you’ve gone through the first three seasons on DVD (it’ll probably take you about a week and a a half, but I guarantee you’ll get through it quickly) you can catch up on season 4 with HBO on Demand.

And then there’s the lesser shows. My second favorite this fall is definitely The Office. I like that Michael, for all his jackassery, really is kind of a sympathetic character. The Jim and Pam thing was handled well, and it’s interesting to see Jim in his new office. (I miss office video-game sessions. We used to play some Age of Empires II and Half Life at a place I worked in Arkansas.)

The new good-guy serial killer drama Dexter is pretty good too. Dexter was adopted by a police officer as a young child, but apparently suffered enough abuse before the adoption that it is inevitable that he’ll become a serial killer. His adoptive father, sensing this, molds him into a sort of serial killer for good. The now adult Dexter now works for the police department, and exacts justice on those the system doesn’t get to quick enough. If you accept the kind of silly premise, it becomes a pretty interesting little show. There was a bit more cutting than I’m comfortable with in the premiere, but it’s softened (relatively) in the next episodes as Dexter is pursuing a serial killer who seems to know Dexter’s secret.

I’m also enjoying Weeds on Showtime now that I have cable again. The plot has gotten a bit random this season, but it’s still worth tuning in every week because it stars Kevin Nealon in the role he was born to play, a pot-smoking city councilman. Did anybody know that Kevin Nealon’s going to be in town in a few weeks?

Then there are the also-rans. Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, I want to like you, but a late-night comedy show is just not as important as everybody involved in this show wants it to be. And the American public just really doesn’t care about TV executives like the show seems to think we do. But great cast, and I’ll keep watching it until it’s cancelled. 30 Rock is a lot more fun, and Alec Baldwin is just awesome in it.

Smith we were really getting into, but missed the third episode, then it got cancelled. I guess I don’t have to say anything about a cancelled show, but it was pretty good, and I’m kind of pissed it got pulled.

And once again, Jericho, fuck you.

Jericho, you can kiss my ass. If you haven’t been watching this wonderful show set in post-apocalyptic Kansas, let me save you the trouble. Each of the four episodes has consisted of about 40 minutes of some completely inane crisis-du-jour (fallout! library fire!) interspersed with about three total minutes of a mildly intriguing overall plot involving some new arrivals to town and their shadowy government work.

I just can’t take it any more, though. The silly parts far outnumber the interesting parts, and I just don’t like any of the characters. It’s kind of upsetting that this was one of the first shows this year to be picked up for a whole season. There has been better stuff so far this fall.