A Summer in Crappy Cell Phone Photography.....in Mid-Autumn!

Well, this is late. Wanted to get this done sooner, but life stressful bloggy concerns blah blah blah excuses excuses. But things, I think, are settling down and I might have time to waste again, which is always nice. So now, herein lies the pictorial story of the uninteresting parts of Jesse's summer!

Random Begrudging Book Review: Janet Evanovich, "Ten Big Ones"

First, a little backstory to explain WHY the hell I'm doing this: My step-grandfather owns a small business installing heating stoves and fireplaces throughout southwestern Montana and, increasingly, northern Wyoming. For a business that essentially just consists of nothing more than himself and his assistant, it's reasonably successful! But it would be more successful if it were more successful, so he's enlisted my mother to drive around and put up flyers on public bulletin boards, because I guess he knows nothing about advertising in the twenty-first century. And she's been making me go along to assist because, well, that's the kind of thing I have to put up with while I'm living back home. As we cross boring stretches of boring countryside on our way to the next boring small town, what does she choose to listen to? In what she claims is an attempt to share my love of mystery novels, she plops an audiobook she got from the county library into the CD player. That book? You're pretty thick if you haven't realised by this point, thanks to the subject line, that it's Janet Evanovich's "Ten Big Ones", the sort of book you could've easily found on sale in paperback alongside fresh produce and frozen dinners for years after its release. She was offended when I asked if we could shut it off, so I had to listen to the entire thing - and that takes us to where we are now. I suffered through it, and so you shall suffer vicariously!

Family Guy Review: "Foreign Affairs"

It's a tough time to be in the television biz. The kids today are spending less and less time huddled around the ol' cathode ray tube, due to this passing Internet fad. Why watch something with fun characters and production values when you can watch cats doing cat things or virus-riddled kiddie porn or whatever it is they watch today. Ratings are, generally speaking, down, and everyone's had to make cutbacks. House, for instance, is throwing away Lisa Edelstein, which actually might be the best thing to happen to it in seasons. American Idol famously saved money last season by throwing away some of their famous people, and bringing in moderately less famous people. And Family Guy, it seems, has outsourced three minutes or so of the show to Mick Jagger and David Bowie circa 1985, thus saving valuable writing/animation time and money. What's that you say? That probably made it even MORE expensive, and as such there's literally no justifying this episode's already notorious centrepiece? Oh. Well. That really is unfortunate, isn't it?

Family Guy Review: "The Big Bang Theory"

This past Sunday was Mother's Day, as all of us who were sprung forth from female loins were probably forcefully made aware if we weren't already. How did you celebrate it? I called my mother, and will regrettably be shipping off the pirated CDs of her request soon. If you were Family Guy, you celebrated Mother's Day with an episode where Mama Lois left to run errands early in the episode and was never seen again, and wherein a relatively newborn baby was shot between the eyes with a spear gun. Festive! But, ignoring the show's refusal to air an instalment with even a slight appropriateness to Overly Commercialised Maternity-Themed Holiday, I think we can at least be pleased that it is considerably less romance-themed than "Brothers and Sisters". Instead, it's about Stewie being the most important person in history and not being married to Generic Female Character #614. Also, despite its title, it's not about horrid socially awkward nerd stereotypes. "Bang" probably means something sexual, like intercoursing or something.

Dentistry and a Show!

As I've mentioned, I've been having to make several visits to the dentist lately, to fix cavities caused by, well....let's not get into what Jim's family put me through yet again. Instead, let's get into what I love about going to the dentist: the awkward banter between dentist and hygienist. Two people who generally have nothing in common, but are forced to fill the silence while their patient of the moment is incapacitated with fingers and various dental instruments inside his or her mouth. To me, this is amateur theatre to ease the pain of the procedure at hand. I love it.

*an ad for NBC's The Voice plays on the radio*

Hygienist: Have you seen that show yet?

Dentist: Nnnnnno.

Hygienist: It's really good.

Dentist: Oh. I never really got into American Idol.

Hygienist: But this is better!

Dentist: Mmmm-hmmmm.

Hygienist: It's not like American Idol. Everyone is hand-selected because they're actually good. So, every performance is epic.

Dentist: Mmmm-hmmmm.

Hygienist: So you don't have to spend weeks watching all the bad auditions to get to the ones that are good. You should watch it.

Dentist: Is that the one with Steven Tyler on it?

Hygienist: No, that's American Idol.

Dentist: Oh. Paula Abdul then?

Hygienist: Also American Idol.

Dentist: Oh. Mmmm-hmmmm.

Mandatory Commentary on Some Sort of Newsworthy Happenstance

A Word From The Future: I am not exactly proud of this piece. I'm a better nerd/humourist than I am a political commentator. Not that I'm good at being either of those two particular things either. By which I mean, I certainly didn't need to be so callous about, well, any of this.

Remember Osama bin Laden? A truly evil man, but also, Baby Bushie's excuse for launching wars that, for the longest time, actually had pretty much nothing to actually do with him? The fella whose first name sounds similar to our incumbent President's surname, a fact pointed out by right-wingers as if it has relevance to anything at all? Remember how it used to be notable every time he released one of his little student films about how America is bad? Remember how he kinda faded out of the news? Well, he's in the news again. By being dead.

Family Guy Review: "Brothers and Sisters"

(Should I be specifying the spoiler-alert-ness of these reviews? I'd hardly think it would matter, because Family Guy is less a show than it is random selections from a filthy pop culture-themed jokebook, but, well, erm, just in case....consider yourself warned?)

Ah, weddings. According to the television industry, there's nothing more magical. If your characters get married, that means their relationship has succeeded because, I mean, marriages never go wrong, right? Even if you've been married, say, nine times before, the tenth time's the charm so long as it's on camera, right? What do you mean that isn't right? Are you implying that it's one of the hoariest clichés at work in modern entertainment media? Well, then, surely you'll love the exciting climax of the latest Family Guy episode, I say, with the sarcasm! In all seriousness, though, "Brothers & Sisters" already started off on the wrong foot with me, being about what I tend to think is one of the least interesting things a show can really be about: wedding drama. Despite being major life changes, weddings just don't make for interesting viewing. They just don't. Now, the question is, can a show that has already been lousy viewing with increasingly high frequency already possible mine anything decent out of the topic?

Family Guy Review: "Tiegs for Two"

Ah, the tasteless joke - ever increasingly a staple of the world of humour. Nothing seems to get these kids today off quite like jokes that the previous generation would find horribly distasteful, for better or worse. Now, I consider myself to be someone who, if not quite a fan of the art of the tasteless joke, at least has a thick skin and generally won't bat an eye at this sort of thing. That being said, last Sunday's otherwise fairly good Family Guy found a way to make me bat the hell out of my eye. It made me bat my eye out of the fucking park like it was some sort of generic baseball player, presumably on steroids, as they always are, according to Comedy.

Family Guy Review: "Trading Places"

In a season whose running theme seems to be hoary old clichés (and whorey old clichés, this show loves its sex jokes, but that's beside the point for the moment), it should come as no surprise that last Sunday Family Guy produced an episode centred on one of the hoariest old clichés of all: having the kids trade places with the adults because, oh my god, it's always so much easier to be part of the opposite group you're in now, isn't it? Now, as super-clichés go, this is one that remains more potentially amusing than most, so I suppose there was some small sliver of hope to be had going into this, I say, in an attempt at fake optimism, so as to appear unbiased.

Family Guy Review: "The Hand That Rocks the Wheelchair"

A Word From The Future: To those people reading my blog from back-to-front - and while I enjoy having new readers, it's embarrassing to have this older material here - allow me to explain the circumstances here. I lived with a roommate at the time, in Michigan, because I thought he would be a good friend, though in the end he turned out to be a truly evil devil, hint hint. But, anyway, he really dug Family Guy, and held it in unreasonably high esteem, so of course we ended up having to watch each new episode. As a general animation fan, I didn't outright mind, but I....didn't share his feelings on the show. (Or politics, or cheese, or perpetual virginity.) Just as something to do during a period of boredom, I decided I might as well write reviews every current episode the show while I was there. For some reason. I'd like to think I have better things to do now. Or, at least, I have more fun with the things I do now.

For some reason, it seems like this season has been receiving a relative amount of praise, for cutting back on the so-called "manatee jokes". (I use this term to call out a side note: South Park devoted a fucking TWO-PARTER to trashing ONE cartoon and, though Trey Parker and Matt Stone are certainly smart and clever people who make amusing things in other venues, it makes their show look pathetic, too) But, here's the thing - is a simple, bland, and non-engaging storyline without random jokes really any better than a simple, bland, and non-engaging storyline that's at least willing to break up its monotony? The effect is of writers who cannot write an interesting story attempting to do so, and it's a thoroughly awkward experience. Case in point: the last new episode, from a week and a half ago, "The Hand That Walks the Wheelchair".