What I’m watching Right Now – because I know you’re all dying to know.

Community
I generally hate sitcoms – Scrubs aside, and even then, I find the half-hour format irritating and like being given half a cookie – but I can’t hate this one. It co-stars Chevy Chase, and I can’t hate it. It’s spent it’s first five episodes setting up a random and unnecessary URST situation, and I still can’t hate it. Why? Because it’s cute and funny and and completely random. Also – Abed is most awesome.

Modern Family
On the internets, there’s a lot of Community v Modern Family discussion, which is actually kind of stupid because they’re nothing alike. They’re also not airing at the same time, so I don’t really get it. That said – Community is better because it’s heart-warming moments are always a little weird and still funny, whereas this is, at it’s heart, a family comedy, so it makes me want to throw up at least once an episode. It’s still funny though, so it’s on the dance card for now.

White Collar
So, you know how you watch Chuck (you do watch Chuck, don’t you? Because if you don’t, I don’t think we can be interwebs friends any more, so go watch it now and report back) and every now and then you think ‘Wow, that Bryce Larkin, he’s really pretty!’ and then you feel bad for thinking that because he’s always getting in the way of Chuck and Sarah and Chuck would be really hurt if you thought his love rival was pretty if he ever found out? Well, feel bad no longer, because Bryce Larkin is on his very own show! And he’s so very pretty, and he’s all Rat Pack style and the pretty just oozes out of those pretty pretty blue eyes … Ahem. Anyway, only the pilot is out but this show is awesome. It’s a bit cheesy and you have to suspend disbelief a wee bit, but it’s so much fun. And did I mention Matt Bomer is pretty?

Survivor: Samoa
I usually catch a mid-season episode of Survivor by accident and have to follow the rest of the season because I’m a sucker like that. There has only been one season I’ve tried to watch from the beginning and I failed miserably because for some reason I only care if I stumble upon it halfway through, and not if I know what’s going on from the start. Also – Reality TV and I were through the second that Penny made it through to the top ten on last years SYTYCD, so I had no plans to be watching this. Except that MrE and I went to Samoa earlier this year and everyone was asking if we were there for Survivor and we accidentally found one of the camps they were setting up but didn’t get there because the road ended and then our car got stuck in the mud and we had to walk up the hill and a tree fell down in the mountains above us and a dude with a huge earthmover had to get the car out for us and it was a bit of an adventure, so I kind of felt obligated. And it’s fun, in the usual way that Survivor is: you either like it or you don’t.

Gossip Girl
Oh, Josh Schwartz – my big hope is that you’re throwing all your energy into Season Three of Chuck and that’s why this show feels so … flat this year. My big fear is that you can’t do third seasons, and that Chuck will also suck, but I’m praying that’s not the case because after all we went through to get it renewed and the fact that it’s likely not going to be back on the air until March, Chuck absolutely has to be awesome this season …Aaaaand we were talking about Gossip Girl. It’s still good. And Nate is still very very pretty, except for when he reverts to Pilot hair and I weep for the loss of the manbangs (look – I’m not proud of it, but this is one guy who looks so much prettier with an emo fringe), and apparently there’s going to be a threesome soon so things are looking up.

Dollhouse
Dear Fox, please cancel this show already so I can stop watching it? I want to like it so so so much but it’s just so not-that-good that I actually don’t know why I’m still bothering to sit through it.

Law & Order
So you might think that Law & Order is boring and predictable and totally uncool – and that’s fine. It just means we can no longer be friends, because you’re so clearly wrong. And sure, it did get a little crappy there for a few years, what with that guy who tried to run for president and Serena ‘Is it because I’m a lesbian?’ Southerlyn stinking up the place, but they’re gone now and it’s back to being awesome. And – Jeremy Sisto: The guy was in Clueless. Even if he wasn’t taking scruffy to a whole new level of gorgeous – which he so totally is – the Clueless thing should be enough.

Dudes, I know what you’re thinking: that’s only six hours of TV a week. And I’m thinking it too, don’t worry. I’m really concerned about what’s going to happen once a couple of these shows fall off the schedule, as they are bound to do soon *cough*Dollhouse*cough*. I don’t think I’ve watched this little TV in my entire life, and it’s kind of scary.

What do people do when they’re not watching TV?

Pandaemonium
Christopher Brookmyre

Let me begin by saying that I love Christopher Brookmyre. He’s like the writer that Ben Elton could have been if he was Scottish and had bigger balls. And was also funny. Brookmyre is Elton on crack and then some, but unlike Elton I don’t get the feeling he’s trying really really hard to be edgy. He is edgy, sometimes. And I probably wouldn’t want to met him in a dark alley, because he seems a little mad, but none of it seems put on – he’s just an insane Scottish guy with fifteen opinions on everything and a gift for ranting. He’s also amazingly adept at creating very believable female and adolescent characters and inserting them into these crazy situations without letting them turn into voiceboxes for his ideas.

Pandaemonium is a strange one though. It’s really more horror than crime – which to those of us who were reading Stephen King at 11 isn’t really a bad thing – and for most of the book you have to wonder where Brookmyre, who comes across in everything else he’s ever written as a World Champion Athiest, is actually going with his story of crusty-skinned, pointy-horned demons who manage to escape they super-secret joint-government-church research facility and wreak havoc on a bunch of schoolkids away on camp. Having read Brookmyre’s take on religion and the supernatural in his other books – it’s a favourite topic – it’s hard not to spend the entirety of the book waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Which, of course, it does. Without giving too much away, I don’t know that the ‘rational explanation’ we get is all that convincing, but I guess part of his argument is that if we can believe so readily in God and the Devil and Heaven and Hell, why not _____, which actually has some semblance of scientific backing.

This book is slow to get going, and a little bit too derivative of some of his earlier novels – it feels at times like a cross between Be My Enemy and A Tale Etched In Blood and Hard Balck Pencil, but with priests and demons – to be considered among his best, but I read the (extremely gory) second half of it in one go while I was supposed to be sleeping, and then had some extremely gory dreams, so it definitely sucked me in. A delightful romp.

* Not really. Or was it?

Ok, writers of FlashForward, listen up! Your show is not really as good as it should be – which is, in part, to say that it’s not as good as people keep telling you it is; you have great concept and that is buying you lots and lots of points, and people are ignoring the sloppy execution in order to see the concept play out, but a great concept is not enough. So as a viewer of way more television than is healthy, I have written up some pointers on how you can make your show actually good (yes, yes, you can pay me later …) – behold:

- Quit it with the flashbacks. Ok, maybe it’s just that The Wire spoiled me by making it so that I actually had to pay attention in order to follow the story, but not even the dumbest of all dopey, one-eyed, not-really-paying-attention viewers needs to see that same flashback to something that we saw in the last episode FIVE TIMES. We get it, and you know what, even if we missed the last episode, that’s what the Previouslies are for. And no, it’s still not acceptable if you tell me that you’re not doing it to remind us because you think we’re stupid, but rather it’s a device to show that your characters keep thinking back to these particular moments. You can do that without the flashbacks. In fact, you can be a bit more subtle about it and we’ll still get it. Especially when they SAY ‘I just keep thinking about blah!’ And yes, I get that ’show, don’t tell’ is what we fans keep asking you to do, but showing the same thing over and over and over again? Just as bad as telling. Really.

- Back off on the marital problems of Shakespeare (who is uniformly awful, by the way) and his wife. This is a global catastrophe with massive consequences for everyone on the fricking planet, and five minutes in my main concern is supposed to be for the marriage of a terrible actor and his wife who doesn’t seem to do any work despite the fact that she is an ER doctor in the aftermath of a global catastrophe? No. Again, I hear you: you can’t just show everything that’s going on in the whole world. You need to create personal stories to illustrate the havoc this event has caused – that’s the way TV works. But these people are boring and I’ve not yet been given any reason to care about them, so maybe give half their screentime to some of your other characters (I could personally stand for a bigger dose of Courtney B. Vance – but I have a soft spot for his voice) and ease us into their story a little more slowly.

- Fire yourselves and get in some people who can write dialogue that isn’t so trite. Real people don’t talk that way. Even TV people don’t talk that way. And while you’re at it – the score is overwrought and painful, except when it’s the ‘this bit is funny and light so laugh now’ music – and then it’s just painful. Fire the music people too.

- Sit down for a little while and figure out your time-travel mechanics. Because you’ve had all these people get a glimpse of a very specific date and time in their future, and NONE of them are sitting there with a list of the lotto numbers for the past six months? Not one? I feel like you can’t seem to decide if the future-people are aware of the flashforward happening (and Shakespeare studying the event seems to indicate that they are) or not (I’m not sure that anyone who knew the event was going to happen would chose to spend it on the toilet). And you kind of have to pick one and stick to it – and you have to decide what the consequences of picking that one are. Is this flashforward event going to alter the future, or did it create it? Maybe watch a bit of Back To The Future – for a cheesy 80’s film series, they did fairly well with the paradoxes of time travel.

- Drop the odd-for-odds-sake stuff. A kangaroo hopping down the street may well have escaped from the local zoo, or it may well just be there so we all go ‘ooh! A kangaroo! In the streets of LA! What could THAT possibly mean!’ but unless you plan on actually explaining it – in the show, not online – don’t do stuff like that. It’s annoying and makes you look like you’re trying too hard.

That is all. I doubt you can fix all these problems in the one more episode I plan on giving you before I drop you from my TV dance card, but who knows? Good luck!

So I joined a gym. And I do have to say, that it’s been an eye-opening experience: not so much the actual gym-going part of it, but the way that other people react to you when you start getting fitter and – yes – thinner, and you mention why.

When I first did this thing that apparently makes my body everyone’s business but mine, I told a couple of close friends about it. And since then, I’ve continued to chat to them about my progress and how I’m doing. Some of them are also gym-goers, so we compare Body Pump horror stories. Others not so much, but it’s important to me and I like to share the important stuff with some people. I don’t have any issue talking to these friends about how it’s going – I actually actively chose to do so, in fact, because they are my friends. Funnily enough, these people don’t find it necessary to poke and pry and question my motives – and as friends, they could, if they so chose, and I would talk to them honestly and openly. It’s the people who I haven’t chose to share with – work colleagues, aquaintances, friends-of-friends -who have suddenly decided my life is their business. And it’s to them that I dedicate this post.

First off, I’m not doing it ‘for the wedding’. I started going to the gym months before I got engaged and I have no plans to make any additional effort in the lead-up to my ‘big day’ (date not set, by the way, so y’all can stop asking). And I’m not even doing it to lose weight – I have lost weight as a result of doing it, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about that, but it was never the aim – so I can’t say how much more I plan to lose, or how much I have lost, because I actually hadn’t weighed myself in years until a little while ago so I don’t know where I started. And if you would stop grabbing my arm any time I wear something sleeveless and commenting on how ’skinny’ it is – that would also be great. In fact, here’s the thing: it’s not actually your business WHY I started going to the gym. It’s also none of your business how much weight I’ve lost. And I don’t actually understand why people who don’t know anything about my life other than what I do between 9 and 5.30 see it as their god-given right to get the scoop on my fitness levels. It’s obnoxious. It’s especially obnoxious when you accost me in front of a group of people and demand to know what’s ‘going on’ with me.

Further to that, if, as a result of losing some weight and being fitter, I have the confidence to wear, say, tight jeans, or a minidress, then that is not a sign that my relationship is in trouble. It is not actually a sign of anything – except that I lost some weight and had to go buy some clothes that weren’t falling off me all baggy-like and I liked these jeans. And again – bringing that up in front of a group – nay, yelling at me across the office to explain myself – is really uncalled for.

And here’s a little secret: I know I look good. I also know I’ve lost weight. I have a mirror. But thank you for telling me, again. I’m not actually ‘half the woman I used to be’. And you’ll admit, when I give you a look after you say that, that I was ‘never that big’, as though that isn’t patronising in the slightest. If, perhaps you could refrain from telling me how ‘lovely and thin and healthy’ I look when I come into work with the flu, flush-faced and barely able to stand up, that would also demonstrate an understanding of common decency. Just trying to make me feel better? Well make me some damn chicken soup instead of spouting on about how healthy a 40-degree fever makes me look.

But that’s just one side of it.

I would also like to take this opportunity to announce to all the weight-obsessed women out there that I am not, in fact, one of you. I will still eat chips whenever I want to, and I refuse to beat myself up if I have a cookie. I have no idea how many calories I consume in a day, or how many grams of fat were in that donut, and you know what? I don’t care. If and when I eat salad, it’s because I actually like salad, especially when it has cheese in it. And maybe bacon. Just because I worship the treadmill and crave the runners high, does not mean I am suddenly going to stop eating ice-cream. In fact, I may even eat more ice-cream. Because I can.

On the flipside, I would like to reassure the blue stockings among us that my decision to get fit and healthy is not a betrayal of the sisterhood. I am not suddenly buying into any beauty myths and I still don’t think that Kate Moss is the height of attractiveness just because she’s a size zero. I’m not doing this because my fiance wants me to (and, quite frankly, I’m shocked at the number of you who freely admit that your boyfriends or husbands have told you you should lose weight if you want to keep them happy, and that you have listened to them, and that they have said this despite being nowhere near peak physical condition themselves … but it’s your body and your choice and your life, and I don’t know what’s really going on there, so I won’t say any more), or because society wants me to, or because I believe I can only be beautiful if I am thin. I believe, if anything, that being strong and healthy is empowering – and if that offends your feminist sensibilities, then maybe we’re not the same kinds of feminists.

And finally, if I’m talking to you about your plans for the weekend, and you tell me you’re going camping, I don’t wrinkle up my face and say ‘ew! I HATE camping!’ because that would be rude. I may have expressed my hatred for camping to my close friends, when the topic has come up, but as someone who has never been I’m hardly an authority on what actually goes on out in those woods, and it may well be flowers and sunshine and not just deliberate discomfort, so I leave it at that and tell you to have fun. So when I tell you that I have been to the gym, why exactly do you deem it perfectly acceptable to state that you HATE the gym, and give me a run-down on what, exactly, it is you hate about the gym, before admitting, five minutes in, that you’ve only been once. Or you’ve only ever walked past one. Or that you only know what you’ve seen on TV. Are you afraid I’m going to try and recruit you? Because I’m not. I’m happy to share what I’m getting out of it and if that encourages you to check it out, then great, but I don’t actually work for Fitness First, so I don’t care whether people join up or not. In fact, I like it better when there are less people at the gym, so if anything I’m all about encouraging people to stay away. But I’d also ask that you keep your opinions to yourself, especially when they weren’t asked for.

Now, I get that for the most part people are just trying to be nice, or make conversation, or find common ground. But isn’t there a way of doing that that doesn’t involve getting all up in my business? Can’t we just keep talking about television? Or bitching about that odd guy from sales? It’s almost enough to make me resume spending 15 hours a day on the couch and using this site to plan my meals.

Mmmm … cheese.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers

Quite frankly, I wanted to hate this book. I meet very few Dave’s that don’t end up pissing me off in one way or another, and, let’s face it: the title. I don’t care if it’s tongue-in-cheek. I bought this book in order to read it and then throw it against a wall in exasperation, swearing at yet-another Dave with a massively over-inflated sense of his own awesomeness.

(Er. Sorry to any Dave’s who are reading this. I take you on a case-by-case basis. I have, in fact, met a few Dave’s lately who have been quite pleasant, and I don’t hold the sins of Other Dave’s I Have Known against them.)

Anyway, this book did not suck. In fact, it wasn’t even mediocre. The introduction and acknowledgements and stupid ‘guide to enjoying this book’ were a bit much – self-conscious and trying way too hard to be hip and cool and irreverent – but once I started the actual story I was hooked. The damn thing very nearly made me cry, and books never, ever, ever make me cry. I am a heartless wench of a bookreader but this book nearly made actual tears come out of my eyes – in public, no less. Halfway through I was forced to admit that it was, annoyingly, pretty damn awesome.

The good news, though, is that the second half wavered a little, and the ending felt kind of like Dave just got bored and wrapped it up, so I get to downgrade my overall score from ‘pretty damn awesome’ to just ‘really good’. Which makes me a little bit happy.

I was hoping it was the zombie apocalypse – because that would actually have been worth talking about for days and days and days. Well, for those of use whose brains didn’t get eaten, anyway, and mine is big and succulent and full of smart stuff so I obviously would have been gone by 9am.

Sadly, it was just a dust storm. It’s given me a stupid cough, because I walked home from the gym in it and I have the asthma, but other than that, and a few hilariously dirty cars (and hilarously stupid people at the carwash, getting their cars washed during the dust storm) … eh.

Incidentally, I’ve decided I’m actually against a zombie apocalypse. It sounds good in theory – and god knows there are a few people I know who really deserve to have their brains eaten (why have something if you’re never going to use it?) – but in practice, it’s just going to make the population stupider, because any zombie with half a brain (heh) will be looking for signs of intelligence before they start randomly nomming away. Why fill up on shrivelled, underworked, half-dead brain matter when there is the good, firm, succulent stuff out there?

The Sleepwalkers Introduction to Flight
Sian Scott-Wilson

I was talking to a friend at work the other day about David Mitchell’s Number9Dream – a book I started off enjoying but got really annoyed with about halfway through when it went all crazy on my arse. I liked it better when it was the sweet story of an imaginative young man searching for his father, and I didn’t get why it couldn’t stay that story.

This book is sort of the same: The story of the boy who can’t sleep and his relationship with his drug-crazed next-door neighbour could be quite interesting, but it’s as though partway through writing that story, the author watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and decided it should be a witty crime caper with gangsters and double-crosses instead. And there’s some stuff about people selling babies, too.

I usually carry whatever book I’m reading around with me everywhere, but how often I pull it out to read tends to be an indication of how much I like it. This book stayed in my bag and got read only at night, which is a sign that it wasn’t really grabbing me, but also means that I was mostly reading it half-asleep, so some of the nuances of the plot went over my head, and I was often confused about who all the secondary characters were and how they tied into the plot.

It’s not that it was bad, because it wasn’t. It just wasn’t as good as I thought it could have been, and I didn’t care enough in the end to really bother keeping up with it.

Some years ago, the government very generously offered to loan me several thousand dollars a year so I could pay them for the priviledge of getting a university degree.

It took me a while (eight years, if we’re splitting hairs) to get said degree, but that was ok, because they just kept loaning me more and more money. All I had to do was sign a form every year and my world-class education was paid for, and I could resume skyving off and failing to live up to my potential in relative financial comfort.

Never once did the treasury tap me on the shoulder and ask me to explain exactly how I planned on paying them back, with an sceptical arched eyebrow, as I would have done if I’d loaned someone a small house deposit so they could become qualified to work in a notoriously poor-paying profession with a very high unemployment rate. Never once, when I finally got a job, did they come knocking on my door asking if it wasn’t about time I started thinking about that debt … they took one look at my milk-crate furniture and realised I could barely afford to eat, nevermind repay a loan. They sent me a polite note every year, letting me know that they were ‘indexing’ my so-called-interest-free debt, and that I could start paying it back whenever I wanted, and every year I smiled sadly and showed them my group certificate with a gentle shake of the head, and every year they shrugged and wandered away with their pockets empty.

Until now.

Yes, that’s right.

This year they were the ones that pointed to my group certificate with a sad smile as they reached over and snatched three percent of all my hard-earned dollars, before wandering away with ever-so-slightly bulgy pockets.

I thought it would hurt much, much more than it did. In fact, it barely hurt at all. It felt … kind of … good.

I’m finally giving back. Repaying my debt to society. No longer will I get to feel guilty about how much government money I wasted on getting my near-useless degree. No longer will I feel like my degree isn’t all mine, but theirs, on loan, ready to be snatched away whenever they feel like calling it in. I’m paying it all off, and soon – soon, that degree will be all mine, and I’ll be debt free.

And by ’soon’, I mean in 90-odd years (thanks be ‘indexation’). But it’s a start, right?

I’m watching it so you don’t have to. And trust me when I say you don’t have to. Here we go …

Open: A club! A ringing phone! Snogging people! Green lights! And they said ‘blow’! If you hadn’t guessed, this show is Edgy, although some guy just said ‘bro’ which just reminds me of Original Recipe 90210, when they all talked like mild-mannered black guys so … maybe not as edgy as it wants to be.

Back at the famous Place, Sydney has done something really, really bad, she explains to Bro-Guy. Laura Leighton still looks the same but … didn’t Sydney die in the original? And why is Bro-guy’s name David? Is he alternate-reality David Silver? Pondering this, and googling whether Sydney died has caused me to miss the end of that scene. Eh. I hope it wasn’t important.

Next door, next morning is our Pop-Culture Couple. They’re here to cement the show in time and space by peppering their conversation with lots of ‘real’ things. See: Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino. Lucky Charms. Lord of the Rings. And that’s just their first 30 seconds of screentime. He’s made a video he wants to show her, of … her, in bright colours, looking happy and bouncing around and being active. Dude, you don’t cast your girlfriend in Tampon commercials without telling her! That’s just Tacky. And creepy. Oh, but it’s not a tampon commercial because it has a fricking CONNOR OBERST SOUNDTRACK. This may lose me all indie credibility, but that is one voice I cannot stand. He sounds like a tape you left on the seat of your car for so long it kinda slightly melted, only … more whiny. Pop-Culture Guy is Sensitive and Hip, and I loathe him already for subjecting my ears to that shit.

Wait. In that rant, we missed Pop-Culture Guy proposing to Pop-Cult Girl, and, in bigger, les predictable and annoying news, Sydney’s body being found in the pool. OMG! She’s dead! Ashlee Simpson-Wentz found her and I must say … that nose is plastic perfection. She looks nothing like she did when she was on Seventh Heaven. Did you know she was in Seventh Heaven? No?

And seconds later, we’re downtown. David Not-Silver is being interrogated. He didn’t kill her, and some blonde has just turned up and told them he was with her so he didn’t do it, and then she mentions tweeting, so we know that we’re in the latter half of 2009, when Twitter rules the world.

Parallel to all this is some random hospital stuff going on with a random older patient and her random but familiar-looking son (brother? lover? I don’t know?) and their random doctor who’s dad has just been laid off so she has to pay her own tuition and I don’t quite know why I’m meant to care but there’s tinkly piano music so I think I’m supposed to. I’m also supposed to care that Pop-Culture Girl (Riley) isn’t giving Pop-Cult Boy an answer to his proposal. I’m guessing this lack of answer is because Connor Oberst also makes her ears bleed, and she’s still pissed about someone making a tampon commercial of her life.

Now, back to the A-plot. David Not-Silver says he didn’t kill Sydney, and his blonde alibi (Ella) has an imagin-back about how SHE would have killed Sydney, IF she had done it, which, of course, she didn’t. But we don’t care any more, because it’s Michael Mancini. The baddest of all 90’s television bad guys. He was so bad that the actor had to carry around cards telling people he wasn’t anything like Michael Mancini in real life, because he copped so much abuse from deranged fans who don’t understand the concept of Acting and Television and How It Relates To Reality. Here, in 2009, he’s David’s father, so David is indeed Not-Silver, when you remember that on New90210, Silver’s being related to original cast members is the tenuous link binding the new show to the old. Not that anyone would know that, because no-one can watch New90210 for more than 5 minutes without falling asleep.

In other news, Pop-Culture Guy is actually a filmmaker. Of course. I should have guessed from the second-rate Seth Cohen thing he has going, but the tampon-commercial-proposal threw me off.

Back at the so-far-unrelated hospital, Familiar-Looking Relative interrupts Random Doctor printing out a bill with a big red ‘Final notice’ on it – because we all print all our bills out in colour while we’re working, I guess. Either that or it’s a fax. In colour – and asks her out … Aw. Sweet. But sad. Still not sure why I care. Oh, now Random Doctor is in Riley’s apartment … so I guess she … lives there too? That’s why I should care? And she’s Ella’s roommate? And her name might be Lauren? Or Lori? And she made out with Audrey? I’m confused. Who is Audrey, and given this is the bottom-feeding CW, why are we not seeing the Lauren-Audrey hookupage? There’s so much random exposition here that it’s makin my head spin. But the upshot is that Lauren/i and Riley are the same shoe size so Lauren/i can go on her date with Familiar-Looking Relative.

Anyway, Pop-Culture Guy (Jonah! So … hip!) is shooting a random pool-party and chatting to a blonde who might be Ella or might be another blonde I might be supposed to care about. As an aisde, yesterday Mr E and I had a converation in which he mentioned that he finds that girls with long white-blonde hair tend to all look alike, because the hair is SUCH a dominant feature that when you’re not really looking, you don’t tend to notice much else. This is especially true on television, and is why I’m not sure if Jonah’s blonde is Ella or another blonde. I don’t know if it makes much difference to the plot, but this blonde seems less Amanda Woodward than Ella, so if it is the same blonde – split personality?

David tells some chef-guy that we met earlier trying to chat up Ashlee Simpson-Wentz that he is sure he didn’t kill Sydney, but he blacked out so maybe he did. Dum dum duuuuuum! Dumb. Apparently we (or chef-guy, anyway) know how he gets. Yes, now we do. Blackouty.

Meanwhile, at the pool party, Jonah accidentally films something he shouldn’t have. He’s in trouble now …

And then it’s Michael Mancini’s turn to have a flash/imaginback. Who knows? I for one think it would be much easier if they were tinted with different coloured filters, so I could tell them apart. In his ?flashback? Sydney came to visit him at the hospital and told him it was over with David and she still loved him and didn’t want to see him in a bad marriage. I don’t remember who he was married to at the end of Original Recipe Melrose, and I can’t say I can’t say I care. If you do, maybe google it?

Lauren/i is having dinner with Familiar-Looking Relative. That night. Because this is TV and no-one ever makes dates for any time more than 24-hours in the future. And while he seems nice and caring, he’s not really, because he’s just offered to contribute $5,000 to her tuition if she’ll sleep with him. She’s OUTRAGED and STORMS OFF … but not for long, I’m guessing.

Good news! Jonah is NOT in trouble. He’s been offered $100,000 to write a feature for the random film producer who he caught on tape. Now, to my understanding this is how most movies in Hollywood get made, but everything I know about Jonah thus far tells me that, ugh, he has morals and wants to succeed on talent, not blackmail.

Ashlee Simpson-Wentz bumps into Lauren/i coming home from her date, and she comments that this is the first time she’s seen her in anything but her ‘doctor clothes’ which is a stupid and painful phrase, and talks about her mom giving her pepper spray, and makes out that she’s all wide-eyed and midwestern and shit, then innocently encourages Lauren/i to sleep with Familiar-Looking Relative for the money. Like, why not, right? I mean he’s cute, and he makes you want to lala and you’d sleep with him anyway, so what’s wrong with him giving you some money for it?

Meanwhile, in Casa Pop-Culture, Jonah tells Riley he was going to accept the $100,000 to prove to Riley that he was Serious About Filmmaking, but that at the end he couldn’t, and that makes Riley accept his proposal. How sweet. Kids: say no to bribes.

And then it’s time for the gang to come together to make a toast to dead (again, although apparetly the first time she was faking it) Sydney. Jonah is wearing a Stupid Poser Hat and takes the opportunity so perfectly presented by the toasting of a recently-deceased neighbour to announce his engagement, but nobody minds the wild inappropriateness of it because I guess they didn’t like Sydney anyway. And then David tries and fails to make a move on Ella, who is mopey about Jonah, which I guess means she WAS the other blonde and she was nicer then because she has the hots for him, and Ashlee Simpson-Wentz tries and fails to make a move on chef guy, which makes it montage time: someone is looking at a picture of a painting in an auction calatogue, while someone rides a motorcycle and someone breaks into somewhere, and Lauren goes to Familiar-Looking Relative’s hotel, and David is stealing a painting – the one from the catalogue, I think, but it’s dark during this whole bit so it’s all a bit confusing, and Ashlee Simpson-Wentz is stealing a photo of Sydney, and Ella is making out with some random girl (there we go, that’s the CW I love) in a car because she’s hurt by the whole Johan-engagement announcement (or just the really tacky timing of it) and chef-guy is burning some bloody clothes and we’re fading to black because it’s over. Thank GOD.

And in case you were wondering, no, this isn’t turning into a TV blog. I have non-TV posts in the pipeline, they’re just not getting finished because I keep getting distracted by the box and all the shit thereupon.

It all started off fine for Jason Lee and me – he was funny in Mallrats (the most underrated of all Kevin Smith movies), and the goodwill he earned by just being in that movie got me to watching My Name Is Earl, which then itself proved to me an enjoyable romp. I wouldn’t name him in any of my top-ten lists, but on the spectrum of fandom bookended by ‘absolutely adore’ (the cast of Chuck) and ‘loathe with a fiery passion’ (Tom Cruise), he sat somewhere around ‘quite like if there’s no-one better around’. It worked. All was well.

Then I found out that he was a scientologist, which knocked him down to ‘eh … a bit too … yeah … *changes channel*’. But I could deal – and then I discovered that he’d named his son Pilot Inspektor, and it was all over. No longer could I enjoy – nay, even tolerate or be in the same room as – My Name Is Earl, and my Mallrats DVD, as fondly as I think of the movie, sits gathering dust somewhere in my lounge room. I don’t even have the energy to file it properly. I even hear that nutters whiny, grating, annoying voice, and I’m cringing and wanting to poke skewers in my hearing holes.

Let’s face it; Yes, Frank Zappa names his children Moon Unit and Dweezel, but at least he spelled them correctly (Moon Unit, anyway … I don’t know what a Dweezel is). If you pick a strange and silly name, you don’t need to make it MORE strange and silly by misspelling it.*

So how is it that his wife – who is also a scientlogist and presumably had SOME input into naming their child – is the girlcurshy icing on the fluffy chocolate cake that is Leverage?

In her defence, it’s quite possible that in the aftermath of the birth, she was a bit wiped out and her husband just filled out the birth certificate without telling her. She would have gone with ‘Michael’. In fact, she secretly thinks of little PI as Michael and is bitter and twisted about the stupid name her stupid husband gave him, and is thinking of leaving him and the wacky sci-fi church because of it (and of course, all the wacky sci-fi stuff … which she never really bought in the first place), but she’s keeping up a happy face in public because he’s currently out of a job and the last thing he needs is a messy divorce.

Or maybe it’s just that somehow, she makes all that crazy seem … kind of adorable.

* In fact, I’d go as far as to say no name needs to be made more strange or silly through mispelling. To misspelled names, Australia and the whole world and everyone with a brain says NO.