ESPN's "Outside The Lines" recently did a study of the food service at stadiums in all the major professional sports in the country ... and the results were, to put it mildly discomforting.
On the other hand, I live in California which had some of the best results country-wide. If you attend sporting events in Florida, on the other hand ... well, watch it.
The following image is displaying the stadiums where 75-100% of the vendors -- vendors, not stadiums - were in violation of some food safety regulation:
Do NOT eat in Florida.
The Tampa Bay Rays - home of one of the best offenses in baseball - have a stadium that is, in essence, a petri dish:
At Tropicana Field -- home of the Tampa Bay Rays -- every one of the
stadium's 47 food and drink outlets inspected incurred a critical
violation during inspections within the past year, according to Florida
inspection reports. Violations include food residue in a cooler, toxic
chemicals stored too close to food preparation areas, "slime" in the ice
machines and thermometers not readily visible to measure the
temperature of hot foods
Tried to kill some time with the kid today and found myself at the toy store. The kid (2 years old) grabbed almost everything in sight.
Key moment: Finding a brand new plush penguin that is the same one as her most precious doll ("Boom"). Her expression -- utter shock -- was pretty priceless.
In any event, left with two balls and a dump truck (made from all recycled products for about a 25% premium).
Now, at home, she is playing with ...
The bag everything came in; The receipt from the bag; My car keys.
And just for fun, if you are so interested, watch this TV anchor absolutely lose his train of thought after Hendricks mentions being in the bath when she found out about her Emmy nomination:
Hey everybody ... it's yet another edition of the TV Roundup, a review of my 21 favorite shows of all-time. What have we got so far? Let's take a look:
Before I started actually putting this list into various blog entries, I made a draft - and then revised it a few times (and, if I'm being honest, I should note that I've revised the remaining shows ranks a few times already since starting this little project). That's just the nature of these kinds of things, and my mildly compulsive tendencies.
And in that very first draft? This show was ranked, I believe, #6. Then, I thought it should be a bit lower and it slid down to #8, a number that resonated because, after all, this is a show that has six special numbers, and eight is one of them.
I'm talking, of course, about Lost, my 11th favorite show of all-time
It's time to rejoin the TV Roundup. The last installment - that is, a few days ago - I listed 24 as my 13th favorite show of all time. For what it's worth, that already seems too high to me, but I do stand by my reasoning -- the first few seasons were SO great that it was on pace to be a top five show. It's important - for me, anyhow - to adhere to the set of rules I established at the beginning.
What landed 24 lower than it originally was slotted for befalls the next selection as well. In fact, the #12 choice is a show that at least two of my rules were established for...
My 12th favorite show of all time is ... The Office.
Now, many of you are saying -- which one, dude? The two-year, 13 episode masterpiece from the UK? Or the US version, currently gearing up for its seventh season? The answer is ... both.
There are two reasons for this -- one, again, it's my list. But primarily it was this - the BBC version wouldn't normally qualify with just two seasons, and it was going to be really awkward to use two of my top-20 shows of all time being the same damn show. So, we're going for a combo meal.
This is getting passed around quite a bit today, so you may have already seen it, but in case you haven't, it's pretty flipping awesome: Ornamental Turtle! (I'm also partial to the part where the Dad watches the Disney movies with his daughter...)
Here are the excellent lyrics, too - this gets funnier the older my daughter gets:
Ha ha
This is dad life
It’s how we live
24/7, 365
Check me
Gas station glasses
Don’t care what the masses
Think about me wit my sweet goatee
I’m rockin’ my Dockers
With a cuff and a crease
I got that St. John’s Bay
And a clip for my piece
I look nice
I got dozens of dollars
And that’s right
It goes straight to my daughters and my wife
I’m a miracle dad
Makin’ magic with the checkbook is a talent I have
I roll hard in the yard
With a 60-inch cut
Zero turn radius
My neighbors say what?
They be drivin’ by
Peepin’ my landscape
Yo, these greens got nothin’ on my man-scape
Hydrangeas (what), Begonias (naw)
Crape Myrtle (tight), ornamental turtle!
Hold up
Is that a weed in my fescue?
Aw naw, Round Up to the rescue
It’s the dad life, it’s the dad life “Take my daughty to the potty”, it’s the dad life
(bringin’ home the bacon)
It’s the dad life, it’s the dad life
Shootin’ vids of the kids, it’s the dad life
Roll up to the splash pad, 10 AM
My whole entourage
Hops out the minivan
We splishy splashy for an hour or two
Then it’s back to the house
Preppin’ for the barbecue
Brats, dogs, rack of ribs, whateva (tight)
Get me on the Weber
Man, nobody does it betta
Call me lord of the grill
I’m king of the coals
Nana’s secret recipe, you know how I roll
1080p, 16×9
I’m rockin’ man cave status
With a screen like mine
Keep your peanut butter hands
Off my 50-inch Vizio
Pop up the corn, roll the Disney video
{ “A whole new world…” }
We got Aladdin, Jasmine
Abu, the genie (hey)
With kids like mine, everybody wants to be me
Sing a nigh-night song and then it’s off to bed
This is the dad life, no more to be said
It’s the dad life, it’s the dad life
Hit the mall, coaching ball, it’s the dad life
(bringin’ home the bacon)
It’s the dad life, it’s the dad life
Playing rough, fixing stuff, it’s the dad life
(bringin’ home the bacon)
It’s the dad life, it’s the dad life
Yeah, you know how we do it
It’s the dad life
Catalog Living is the name of the latest site I find hilariously compelling. It's not quite Lamebook, but it might be funnier. It's a collection of photos from catalogs with captions written to point out the ridiculousness we all barely notice anymore. Presumably, they're all photos of rooms shared by the fictional couple Gary and Elaine.
Elaine had never felt more alone than when the tumbleweed interrupted
her afternoon of reading and plowing through some bottled water.
Gary! If these oars even come close to knocking over a single one of my starfish, I’ll shove one inside you. And if you leave your tote bag by the chair one more time…
Our preposterously named experiment, The TV Roundup, has come to Lucky 13. (Which, by the way, is an excellent bar in San Francisco should you be in the neighborhood. Great jukebox.) Before we get into this specific choice, let's review how we got here:
The next show on this list is a victim of itself -- after its fifth season, if I had made this list, it would have easily been in my top ten. This was event television, pure and simple, and it earned its stripes with fantastic episodes week after week.
Unfortunately, it then followed up with three more seasons, and each one of them knocked it further down this list.
I'm talking, of course, about 24, which despite over a third of the show being mediocre (and often boringly so), is still my 13th favorite show of all time.
Howdy, sailor. It's yet another installment of my TV Roundup, the review of my favorite TV shows of all time.
Can I say something here? Why did I call this the TV Roundup? Am I wrong, or does it suddenly sound like I'm a 1960's newsreel? Are there marionettes? Good lord. Thank goodness I'm not in marketing -- oh, crud. Anyway, let's proceed.
The exercise here is to not just list, but examine (often in mind-numbing, painstakingly banal ways - keep reading) each of these 21 shows, and why they're so darn great.
Not a bad list, huh? Well, we're just getting started. And the next show is one that apparently you may not have heard about. Even though virtually everyone I know seems to not only know this show, but love it ... ratings would suggest that almost nobody watched it.
Did you see my 14th favorite show, Arrested Development? I hope so, because it's absolutely great.
It's the story of the Bluth family. The patriarch, George Bluth, Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) has run what turns out to be a fraudulent, barely competent family business, and is arrested (get it?) in the pilot episode. His son Michael (Jason Bateman) has to step in to keep the company afloat, mostly to help keep his utterly dysfunctional family from completely collapsing.
Michael:
I really think the reason you and I always fight is that, since we were little, Dad's always played us off each other.
Gob:
Dad always said that was your fault.
ME: Okay, fine, you're in my office. Why? And again, who are you? WOMAN:
You know why I'm in your office, Josh. You've been here with me for the
last three or four hours. ME: Lady, I don't know who you've been
with in my office, but I haven't been there for two weeks. I mean that's
a problem itself, my lack of motivation, but lets get back to what
you're doing there? WOMAN: Well...I met someone claiming to be you on
the internet and he paid me to come to your office and have sex with
him. Only he didn't pay me. He left. And now I've wasted my whole
fucking night.
At which point I write the word "hooker" on the
bottom of the envelope I'm using to take notes and hold it up for the
wife. Now, it is perhaps a testimony or a condemnation to the way that
I've lived my life that at no point during my conversation with this
hooker calling me from my office and asking for payment does my wife for
EVEN AN INSTANT think that perhaps, yes, she should be concerned that a
hooker is calling her husband at home asking for payment.
Now I
don't know about the rest of you, but this is a first for me, and my
mind is racing. What to do? What information do I need? How do I go
about getting it? I'm proud of myself for writing "hooker" on the
envelope but I know I've got to do better than that. What pops into my
head is: WHAT WOULD THE MENTALIST DO?
...
Here's another diddy, this from YouTube, it's a seemingly tripping man seeing a "Double Rainbow" while camping in Yosemite...this is mostly audio (I'm fond of the part where he breaks down crying and saying, "It's so beautiful...WHAT DOES IT MEAN?" myself):
...
Bay Area sports fans may know this, but Ray Ratto (and now, @rattoCSN on Twitter) has moved to Comcast Sports Net, after years of being one of the true "newspaper men" in the area. It's a trend - where guys like Matt Maiocco and Matt Steinmetzhave already taken the similar leap. (CSN, not just for Matt's anymore!) It is yet another bad sign for newspapers but good to keep local talent here. I mention this only because, as listeners to KNBR know, CSN has been promoting this move lately with an ad that consistently trips me up.
Here's what I hear:
Ray Ratto, who has always had the best stash in the business, is moving to Comcast Sports Net.
First off, I want to know how they judge who has the best stash of weed and who doesn't. Does the audience get to vote? Is this aired on TV? I need details.
But in reality, here's what they are actually saying:
Ray Ratto, who has always had the best 'stache in the business, is moving to Comcast Sports Net.
And here's a picture of Ratto for those who don't know. I think this is me, right? I'm the idiot here. But ... I can't be the only one who misheard this. And the ad has been running for more than a week now.
By the way, nice sweater, Ray. Got a tennis match coming up anytime soon?
(Ratto is almost definitively the sports writer who inspires no in between - you either love him or you hate him. I like his work, but I definitely don't mind when he publicly falls on his face. An NFL Films about the 49ers dynasty recently showed after the 1981 NFL Draft, when the 49ers picked Ronnie Lott, a brief clip of a trimmer Ratto talking about how it was a bad pick, that Lott wasn't talented enough to play in the NFL. I'm sure Ratto is thrilled to death that this got preserved on film.)
...
Making the rounds yesterday was news that former Dallas Cowboys head coach and NFL commentator Jimmy Johnson is going to be on the next season of Survivor, taking place in Nicaragua. I have so many problems with this it's hard to know where to start:
Johnson is rich. Really, really, rich. And folks will know who he is - hell, someone recognized Gary Hogeboom on his season and that's still hard to believe. Johnson is a true celebrity. People kick folks off the island for being a doctor, or otherwise having money and not "needing" the cash. Jimmy better have a good excuse - charity, I'm guessing - otherwise, he's gone.
He's 67 years old, and not in what would appear to be great physical shape. In fact, reputedly he was supposed to be on last year but failed his physical (he claims he's since lost weight).
He's known for having unmessed up hair, to the point that when he won a Super Bowl, his players tousled his hair with glee. I'm guessing he's going to look pretty damn bad on the beach.
He's a dick.
He reminds me of the Dallas Cowboys, and that's always bad news.
Really, my main problem is that the show shouldn't be about celebrities, or people who the viewers have a prior impression of. I'm sure they'll make it work - they almost always do - but this was news I wasn't psyched to hear about.
...
Here's a chilling note from Rob Neyer that I completely agree with:
At this moment -- and I mean literally right now -- the [Giants] front office should completely forget about October and focus instead on exactly why [Tim] Lincecum's not throwing consistently in the low 90s.
I try not to worry about The Freak, but there's something off with him this year. The Giants say he's not hurt, and I'll assume that they have no reason to lie with the franchise, but ... he ain't right.
Sticking with the Giants, readers will know that I never shy away from an opportunity to slam GM Brian Sabean, and I think Murray Chass is absolutely right here when he says that the Giants almost clearly withheld promoting Buster Posey for two months as a way of limiting his service time (thus delaying when he'll be eligible for free agency). Sabean denies it - he has to - but Chass then loses part of the argument by essentially arguing that if a rookie comes up mid-season and does well, that means he should have been called up earlier.
“I know people think there were economic reasons,” [Commissioner Bud] Selig said of the Giants’ delay with Posey. “I don’t think so.”
And it also wasn’t economic with the Marlins and Mike Stanton (June
9), the Pirates and Jose Tabata (June 9), the Orioles and Jake Arrieta
(June 10), the Indians and Carlos Santana (June 11), the Pirates and
Pedro Alvarez (June 16), the Astros and Juan Castro (June 22), the
Giants and Madison Bumgarner (June 26).
There's a lot of good rookies this year, and yes, folks like Reds pitcher Mike Leake never spent anytime in the minors and have thrived in the bigs. But surely Chass doesn't believe that any talented rookie should always start the season with in the majors. Bumgarner is 20 years old - at the beginning of this season he had lost velocity, wasn't in great shape and seemingly needed to get his head re-focused on baseball. Also, Bochy and Sabean are idiots - but leaving Bumgarner in AAA for a few starts wasn't the wrong decision.
I hate it when I have to defend Brian Sabean, I really do. Chass' overall point is correct, that this is a game that the GMs play because it's within the rules - and when that's truly the only reason for these decisions, it hurts the fans, the team and the player in question. But there's no way I can think of to regulate it and frankly, if the MLBPA -- the strongest players union in sports -- doesn't control this one part of the game, I'm okay with it.
And finally, if you want to know what a crotchety old man like Murray Chass really thinks, read the disclaimer on his website - IT'S NOT A BLOG - written by Chass' website minion:
This is a site for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The
proprietor of the site is not a fan of blogs. He made that abundantly
clear on a radio show with Charley Steiner when Steiner asked him what
he thought of blogs and he replied, “I hate blogs.” He later heartily
applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers
on a Bob Costas HBO show.
Bloggers, however, are welcome to visit this site; so are stats
freaks, fantasy leaguers and Red Sox fans. How else will they know what
is being said about them by a columnist they love to hate?
Otherwise, this site will most likely appeal primarily to older fans
whose interest in good old baseball is largely ignored in this day of
young bloggers who know it all, and new- fangled statistics (VORP, for
one excuse-me example), which are drowning the game in numbers and
making people forget that human beings, not numbers, play the games.
As comedian Greg Proops sent in a direct message to me once (still a personal Twitter highlight), Excuse the fuck out of me.
The TV Roundup continues here at the Reign of Error. It's a self-serving, narcissistic exercise to talk about my favorite 21 television shows of all-time. I'm not sure I totally knew what I was getting myself into with this, but let's keep it going.
At 15, we're getting into serious business now. These are shows that either didn't last quite long enough (or haven't yet, anyhow) to crack the top ten, but were otherwise great. And frankly, I'm a little suprised by the fact that the #15th show on this list made it so high.
That show, as the title of this post indicates, is Mad Men.
Hey, it's not that I don't love the show - this is my list, nobody is forcing me to rank shows in a particular order. It's more that, while I know I love Mad Men, I didn't realize how much I did until I made this list. I am pretty sure that this show, much like Dexter, this could change in either direction before the show has run its course. The fourth season doesn't even begin until this Sunday, so there's plenty of time for them to screw this up. Still, those three seasons thus far have been really, really great.
It's worth noting that as I write this, I'm watching the 49ers battle the Bengals in the 1988 Super Bowl on Super Bowl Classics on the NFL Network. Let me tell you something, if my own rules didn't prohibit putting something like this on the list, it would be under serious consideration. Nothing like seeing Ronnie Lott, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and Roger Craig, among many, many others, play in their primes.
But though I'm not going to veer off-course as much as I would with a pick like Super Bowl Classics, my next choice is a stripe of a different color. I thought about including some shows like SportsCenter, The David Letterman Show and other talk and news based shows -- it seemed both too easy and insane, and I had to put some constraints.
A constraint which I gladly make exception for my 16th favorite show, The Daily Show.
Note that based on the rules I've set up, this includes the entire series - which goes back to original host Craig Kilborn. (Whether or not he left to front the band Queens of the Stone Age is another mystery entirely. Seriously, the dude looks Josh Homme. Google it.) The Kilborn era, however, isn't horrible - it was pretty funny at the time, and some of the funnier bits from his subsequent talk show (which I actually never saw, but I read things) like "5 Questions" were originally on The Daily Show.
When Jon Stewart took over, the change was both immediate and gradual. For one, both Stewart and the folks around him simply got funnier. Remember, both Steve Carrell and Stephen Colbert got their starts here (and their Even Stevphen bits were priceless). But it was the show's move to true satire that made it what it is today.
2. Someone supremely un-self-aware or lacking any relative sense of what he/she does or doesn't know.
HR sent me another Palin for the marketing manager job.
7. comes from Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin meaning completely unprepared and nonsensical.
Q: Yo did you see what that girl was wearing last night at the club?
A: You mean that topless one with footie pajamas? That shit was too Palin for my tastes.
And, in the interest of being fair and balanced here ...
55. Only the hottest VP candidate ever. If you didnt know this you need to be punched in the suck hole.
Palin is so hot, what I wouldn't pay to give her a bloody sock.
It's TV Roundup time, folks...and because there's been a bit of confusion, let's go over what this pointless exercise is again:
It's just me, listing my top TV shows of all-time. Because the first three happened to be comedies, several people thought that this was a list of top comedies. I'm just going to go out on a limb here and think that those people were pretty confused by my choice of Dexter at #18.
And, of course, I made a series of rules -- and while you can go look at the whole set in my original post here, one of the main elements is that if at anytime, I lost interest in the series, it is going to suffer in the ratings as a result.
That's probably the main reason that The Simpsons is my choice way down at #17. I can hear some of my friends heads exploding from here, and clearly, the first eight to ten seasons of this show were phenomenal, and I probably hear a quote from one of them almost every day. But, while the show is now the longest running prime-time entertainment show ever, at this point there are more seasons that I haven't watched than those that I have. I know that it's returned to form., and I've enjoyed the rare episode I've caught ... but, I stopped watching it not because I couldn't find it on my TV, but because the episodes I was watching really started to bore me.
So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. 'Give me five bees for a quarter,' you'd say. -- Abe Simpson
Sorry, but a lot of shows on this list suffer from that fate. It's a rare show that holds me captive throughout its entire lifespan, and I suppose one of the downsides to being so successful and long-lasting is that you have more seasons set up to disappoint. (See: Saturday Night Live.)
Obviously, I don't have to describe the travails of the Simpsons family -- I can't imagine there are too many people who don't know about the Simpsons, whether they've watched an episode or not. When the show first launch, the breakout star seemed to be Bart, and though it was awhile ago, there was a time where you couldn't walk into a supermarket without seeing an "Ay Carumba!" t-shirt on a fellow shopper. However, the true hero of the show is, of course, Homer Simpson. To say he's an "Everyman" is to insult Everymen, badly. But he probably has the best collection of lines of any major character, while lesser but important other characters make this show the fully rounded comedy that it is.
Forbidden love.
Burns: Oh, quit cogitating, Steinmetz, and use an open-faced club. The sand wedge!
Homer: Mmm...open-faced club sandwich.
From the Wiggums (Chief and son Ralph) to Krusty the Klown, the Flanders family, Apu, Millhouse, The Comic Book Guy, Nelson Muntz, and of course Mr. Burns and his lackey Smithers, so many characters on this show have classic story lines and quotes. It should come as no surprise that there are literally millions of websites that discuss or focus on the show.
Ralph Wiggum: Me fail English? That's unpossible!
Homer in a muumuu. Priceless.
Matt Groening created this show first as some shorts on The Tracy Ullman Show. It is for this - and for this ONLY - that I like Tracy Ullman. (Aside from creating a way for the world to experience and love The Simpsons, Ullman is mostly extremely annoying and only about 11% as funny as she thinks she is.)
There's probably a "coaching tree" of sorts out there showing the talent involved with this show and what else that went on to create - an obvious example is, of course, Conan O'Brien who left his role as a writer on this show to begin hosting late night television. He wrote the "Marge vs. the Monorail" episode that I still think warrants consideration as the funniest half-hour of comedy, ever. (And is just one of the many reasons that I miss Phil Hartman, who among his many hilarious contributions was the voice of some of the very best 'guest stars' on this show.)
Bart: Nothing you say can upset us, we're the MTV generation. Lisa: We feel neither highs nor lows. Homer: Really, what's it like? Lisa: (shrugs) Meh...
Had The Simpsons stopped before I grew disinterested, I would probably rank this in my top-10 favorite shows. But to be honest, #17 feels just about perfect.
Homer: Doughnuts ... Is there anything they can't do?
With the 18th pick, I have to say I wrestled with this choice. The show is Dexter -- and I have to say this here and now: I SAY THIS WITHOUT HAVING WATCHED THE MOST RECENT (4TH) SEASON. I don't want to hear about how great John Lithgow was -- those discs will be available on Netflix soon enough.
From what I've heard, I could even rank this higher - and yet, there's a part of me that feels that 18 is absolutely high enough. There's something tonally odd about Dexter -- I think in some ways the show feels a bit cheaply made or something . But it doesn't distract from a phenomenally clever plot point - our hero, of sorts, is a serial killer.
It takes place in Miami, where Dexter Morgan works as a blood specialist for the police department - a subject he knows all too well. We learn in the pilot episode - so I don't feel as if I'm giving too much away -- that early on, his adoptive father recognizes what's inside Dexter, and teaches him to use it to rid the world of bad, evil people - instead of innocent prey like most serial killers.
Meanwhile, Dexter tries to live a life he recognizes as normal - despite being a definitive sociopath, he finds himself in a relationship with a single mom. His sister (who, somewhat creepily, is placed by Michael C. Hall's real-life wife, Jennifer Carpenter, is also on the police force - and has her own, much more mundane issues.
Dexter comes from a series of novels, and as a fan of suspense/serial killer type books, the show gets that part right. It also tells us Dexter's back story in a slow but satisfying way and mostly the supporting cast ranges from good to very great. (I'm not a huge fan of Erik King's work as Lt. James Doakes, but I may be in the minority there.) If the show falls short, it's that most of the other character's are much less well-developed, even important ones, like Dexter's sister Debra or his girlfriend Rita (Julie Benz).
Like I said, I haven't seen the most recent season, and season five will start up this fall, so there's plenty of room for this show to soar higher (and the word about the fourth season was that it was a great one). Michael C. Hall is simply phenomenal, and when you combine this with his role as David Fisher in Six Feet Under (which we'll be talking about later), it's pretty clear he's a special actor.
He's the main reason why Dexter is my 18th favorite show of all-time.
I used to be a big fan of Liz Phair - not only was she pretty sexy, and had gone to high school with some of my college friends, but her debut album Exile In Guyville was - and is - pretty fucking astoundingly great. It certainly is one of the hallmark "indie" rock albums from the 1990's, and inspired a great deal of awful 'girl bands' to follow in her footsteps. She's not made anything really that great since, and coupling that with her apparent crippling fear of performing live, she's essentially disappeared from the music scene.
Or, apparently not. Because as it turns out, she just released (quietly) her sixth album, called Funstyle. Suffice it to say, the reviews are not that kind:
Sometime over the Fourth of July weekend, Liz Phair's site announced the digital availability of her sixth album, which nobody knew was coming. The track streaming at her site, "Bollywood", is bhangra-rap about how she ended up doing TV scores out of broke desperation, featuring a bunch of "funny" pitch-altered voices imitating music-biz gladhanders ripping her off. It's one of Funstyle's four key tracks, all in a similar prefab-beats-and-wacky-voices vein; another is "U Hate It", a patchwork thing (with fake Prince harmonies) about how much everybody's going to think her record sucks, unless it's a hit, in which case they'll pretend they all loved her in the first place and her success was their doing. Its refrain goes, "I think I'm a genius/ You're being a peni-us... colada, that is."
Two things are immediately evident about those four songs. One is that they're horrible on just about every conceivable level, and there's no way Phair can't know it (psst: "U Hate It"!). The other is that they are not the particular flavors of horrible anybody would ever have guessed Phair would perpetrate. The sub-Jewel alt-country move? Sure. The pro forma kid-music album? It's plausible. Suppressing her unique songwriting gifts to sound like a lesser Sheryl Crow clone? She's kind of done that already. But this? This is Phair razing her image to the ground: spitting at anyone who thinks they know who "Liz Phair" is, or expects her to make Guyville VI: The Return of the Exile. The only comparable album that comes to mind is Bob Dylan's 1970 double-middle-finger double-LP Self Portrait, on which he successfully alienated the audience that had been paying too much attention to him.
I got to say, that's pretty severe, but also well written enough that it makes me know, with an incredibly high degree of certainty, that I want no part of this album.
On the other hand, I think I just might pull up Guyville shortly and reminisce about what once was, and what could have been.
And ... here is where, already, we are in squishy territory. I know, I can't quite believe it myself. But it's not that I doubt how much I like this show -- it's that I tend to sometimes overstate, even to myself, how much I like something right when I'm watching or listening to it.
Want proof? Fortunately, I haven't seen evidence that anyone kept this, but I used to e-mail out my top music of the year (this was, largely speaking, in the pre-blog world). And yes, a long time ago, I included Hootie and the Blowfish in my top-20 music of the year.
I'm not proud of this. I am already doubting my decision to leave that here in perpetuity. But moving on, I have a lot more confidence in choice 19. My 19th favorite show of all time is How I Met Your Mother.
If you don't watch the show, you probably just scoffed, and maybe some folks actually clicked away. It's their loss. I did the same thing, and quite frankly, I only started watching this because my then girlfriend, now wife, was a fan.
Of course, she likes almost everything, so even this wasn't necessarily a clue that the show was any good. But almost immediately, I was hooked.
And that's somewhat of a point - the show was already in its second season, when it really got going. Lifetime has been airing the reruns, and watching the first season from the start, it is clear it didn't quite have its sea legs yet. But it's now headed into its sixth season, and even its weakest moments have been pretty darn strong.
Presumably the story of how Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) met the mother of the two children he's telling a story to. It's a device the show uses - with some lack of consistency - and you have to get past the fact, quickly, that no father would actually be telling their kids these kinds of stories.
What stories are those? Many focus on the lecherous womanizer Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris, stealing almost every scene he's in), and the bad situations that Marshall and Lily Erickson (Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan) and Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) get themselves into. The cast has terrific chemistry, and the writing is generally speaking spot-on funny and referential in a way that most usually gets it right without going overboard.
One good example would be, as part of one of the best episodes ever ("Slap Bet"), the gang discovers a dark secret about Robin -- that she used to be a Canadian pop singer called Robin Sparkles:
While this is much, much funnier when you know the characters, anyone who lived through the 1980's recognizes how well they've nailed it here. (And yes, the characters aren't old enough to have been doing this in the 80's ... which they 'solve' nicely by saying that in Canada, they just get everything late.)
Barney is, of course, the breakout star. Here is a collection of some of his better moments, compiled by someone on YouTube with a lot of time.
If there's one complaint I have, it's that the show still seems to believe its viewers actually care about who the actual mother will be. Critic Alan Sepinwall, among others, have said that they'd be pleased if the show introduced some random woman on the last episode and said, "Yep, that's how I met your mother," and leave it at that. Because the small stories they create are so well done, so genuinely funny, that the larger story is pretty much noise. Plus, Ted has turned into a bit more of a douchey character (though not quite to "Ross in Friends levels yet") and it's harder to care about that aspect of the story.
Another good question ... why, exactly, is Cobie Smulders not much more famous? She's especially easy on the eyes, has exceptional comic timing and a catchy if silly name. That should be enough, right?
Point of trivia: Her actual real name is Jacoba Francisca Maria Smulders, with "Cobie" being a nickname for Jacoba. That's a hell of a long name, friends. In any case, people should give her more work.
Layered into the show is a real sweetness, and something that captures the essence of a group of friends in their late 20's or early 30's, making (or resisting, violently) the transition into the next, more adult portions of their lives. Whether it's career struggles (and everyone save Barney has had one on the show), relationship troubles (and even Barney isn't spared here) or other things every viewer can relate to, it often manages to feel quite real in the midst of a preposterous plotline. I may simply be in the right place at the right time, but so what?
So there you have it. How I Met Your Mother, or HIMYM as you may see sometimes on The Twitter, is my 19th favorite show of all time.
Greetings from the geek club, where we've just kicked off a self-serving, potentially pointless exercise in making a list of my top #20 TV shows of all-time, which already turned into #21.
It's probably not the best form to insult your readers much more than that, so let's press on. As the title of this post indicates, my #20th favorite show of all time is Taxi which ran from 1978 - 1983. Taking place in a New York cab station (and only rarely venturing outside the same single set), Taxi was a truly clever comedy with sharp writing and a cast that worked extremely well together.
I was a bit too young when it was aired to see much of the show, though I certainly did see the latter half of the series when it originally aired. I'm not sure that I understood that Christopher Lloyd's Jim Ignatowski character was a burnout, just that he was weird and funny. I didn't realize how annoying Judd Hirsch or his character Alex Rieger were or could be, either.
What makes Taxi such a great series is that within a small confine of the Sunshine Cab company, the viewer really did get to know a complete set of characters, who felt fleshed out enough to be more than just characters. Whether it was Tony Danza's character Tony Banta (and yes, I'm pretty convinced that his character was named that just so Danza wouldn't get confused) reminiscing about boxing (also lifted from Danza's real life), Marilu Henner's Elaine coping with being a single mother, Danny DeVito's insane Louie DePalma, Jeff Conoway's Bobby Wheeler's acting travails or even Hirsch's "straight man" of Alex Rieger, the players in this show were robust and exceptionally likeable. I'm fairly sure there are a few Jim Ignatowski and/or Latke fan clubs out there as well. (Or, at the least, a Facebook fan page.) In addition to Lloyd, perhaps the true breakout star was Andy Kaufman as Latka Gravas, a character Wikipedia describes as such:
Latka is an immigrant from a very strange (presumably Eastern European) land, often speaking in his invented foreign tongue ("ibi da", "nik nik"). He works as a mechanic, fixing the taxis. Latka was an adaptation of the "Foreign Man" character Kaufman originated in his stand-up comedy act. He eventually grew tired of the gag, so the writers gave Latka multiple personality disorder, allowing Kaufman to play other characters, the most frequent one being a repellent, smooth-talking lounge-lizard persona calling itself Vic Ferrari. In one episode however, he becomes Alex, with profound insights into "his" life. Just when he is about to reveal to the real Alex the perfect solution for all his problems, he reverts back to Latka.
If that sounds weird, it WAS. And mostly in a good way. I absolutely loved Vic Ferrari and his name, though I'm sure half the jokes went over my head. The show dealt with mature subjects in a real but amusing way.
Here is a scene of Latka as Vic Ferrari that you might enjoy:
I definitely remember my parents laughing a lot and I was about the age where I got that it was dealing with more adult topics, even if I couldn't yet relate to those topics myself. The show itself was an incredible critical and popular success, winning 18 Emmy's and being nominated for a total of 31, and launching the careers of basically everyone in the cast. Personally not coincidentally, the show was developed by James L. Brooks and written the first few seasons by Glen and Len Charles, who would all later go on to develop a show I have ranked much higher. (That folks, we call a tease. Unless you have go to IMDB.com where you can fairly quickly figure out this great mystery.)
All that being said, I find it interesting that in projects since this, with the exception of a few films with DeVito and Lloyd, I haven't much liked anything these actors have done since. I am not sure what that means, but I'm going to guess that it means this show caught lightning in a bottle, at least in terms of its personal appeal to me.
I suspect that if I were a bit older, I'd rank Taxi even higher, but I wasn't quite at the age where I could relate to the characters, and by the time I was, the show was less relevant and a bit dated. That being said, it's still quite funny and when I do see it in reruns, I enjoy the hell out of it.
If you asked me to name my favorite scene from Taxi, it would almost assuredly be this one, a memory of Ignatowski on when he first took drugs (by eating 'special' brownies), with a cameo from Tom Hanks to boot. The lava lamp bit alone is worth it. Enjoy.
This begins my countdown of my favorite TV shows of all time. I said this would be a list of the Top 20, and then, I decided I couldn't leave one show off the list.
That's a pretty good example of the futility of this exercise, but hey, what are you going to do?
Beginning our countdown is a sketch comedy show that many folks I know still haven't seen, even though they've seen many of the actors in other roles and seen other shows essentially rip off. (Or, pay homage to, one could say.)
Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you five crazy kids from our neighbors to the north: KIDS IN THE HALL.
The Kids In The Hall: Not usually in SaranWrap.
A comedy troupe composed of guys like David Foley, Mark McKinney, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCullough and Scott Thompson was pretty groundbreaking for me back in college.My brother and some of our friends had the episodes on a few VHS tapes, and we would watch them over and over again.
(There is no documentation on whether we were entirely sober during these periods.)
I can't have an onion?
At the time, if folks knew of these guys, it was that in many of their sketches, one of them was dressed up as a woman. In retrospect, that doesn't happen a whole lot, but I guess it was notable. Other sketches that got some notoriety were the "I'll Crush Your Head!," Scott Thompson's Buddy Cole character, The Chicken Lady and Gavin. (Gavin was the name of a little kid that Bruce Thompson played, shown on the left, who according to Wikipedia was "...a precocious boy whose chief personality trait is his tendency to ramble on incessantly about bizarre events that may or may not have actually occurred."
Being honest, this show was produced in the mid-to-late 1980s, and can show its age. It also ramped back up after several years off the air, and has since had a few reunion tours that I've heard mixed things about. (It also produced Brain Candy, which I've heard nothing but bad things about.)
30 Helens Agree: Kids In The Hall is #21.
I'd guess that collectively, given the amount of times I re-watched episodes, that I've laughed more at this showthan any other sketch comedy show, including Mr. Show and even Saturday Night Live. (Yes, I just said that. I've watched some of these episodes 20, 25 times and laughed at each viewing. There's not a single episode of SNL that I've seen more than three times. It's just simple math, people.
Dave Foley went on to NewsRadio, and other of the main actors have had some success in acting roles elsewhere (and more, I believe, in writing), but it remains sort of shocking that this never made the bigtime. In todays world, where DVD rentals, thousands of cable channels and the internet, there's no way more people wouldn't have discovered and loved Kids In The Hall. If you were fortunate enough to find it in its prime, or even shortly thereafter (as I did), I think you'll agree ... this one is one for the ages.
Here's a clip of Gavin and the Evangelists:
And here is Dave Foley, giving Glenn Beck his schtick about 20 years in advance. Scary, funny and pathetic:
A few weeks ago, I was talking with some friends about the new Bravo reality show, Work of Art. If you haven't seen it, it's fairly entertaining and leaves the art world just as confusing and hard to interpret as it was before I started watching, much like Project Runway does with fashion. But still, I like it.
I like reality TV - Survivor, The Amazing Race, Big Brother as well as the Top Chef, Project Runwayand others. But I was asked (by my mother, actually) if I liked any serialized TV these days.
The answer is, of course, though with Lost going off the air, there's one less out there. But shows like Mad Men, Damages, Justified, Modern Family, Glee, Dexter, Community and perhaps my favorite of all these, Friday Night Lights are all putting out quality TV. (And I haven't ever checked out others like Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy or Rescue Me.)
But, the discussion reminded me that I was, long ago, going to put together a list of my all-time favorite TV shows. I just opened up my list and immediately started re-ranking, because ... well, I'm a terrifically large nerd. I guess I'll just have to accept the fact that shortly, I'll look at my rankings and be disgusted with myself. I can live with that.
And, because of the aforementioned nerd 'issue,' there are some ground rules:
The show has to have completed at least three full seasons. There are a lot of shows that had two great seasons, and then the great fall began. (Alias immediately comes to mind, for instance.) This is just a rule to try and corral my self-control, so that I don't go and state that Modern Family is a top ten show of all time, when in fact I have no idea whether the show will stay anywhere near the fun of its first season.
Unless, that is, the show didn't last three years. I call this The "Sports Night" Corollary, one of my favorite shows that only lasted two seasons, because Aaron Sorkin decided to focus more on The West Wing, another favorite. (Also, the show itself never did squat in the ratings.) This also applies to the BBC version of The Office, though that show has it's own special treatment here. (Spoiler alert!)
I haven't watched everything. To be sure, that applies to the shows I mentioned above like Breaking Bad, a show everyone I know who watches absolutely reveres. But this also really goes back to older shows that I know are fantastic; I just can't prove it. While I saw plenty of M*A*S*H., I don't really remember it as much as I should. Same goes with shows like The Bob Newhart Show, etc.
All Your Seasons Are Belong To Us. Here's the deal - the show stands as a complete entity. If there were seasons that I didn't like - or, in at least one case, where I simply stopped watching, that obviously affects my ranking. I could go the other way, and rank "The first four seasons of The West Wing" or "The first five seasons of 24," but I can't really handle it and besides, that's stupid. So, those shows suffer their own fate.
It's My List. Enough said. It's going to be a top-20, because that number seems right and it's also how it sort of worked out.
I know you don't much care about all that. Bear with me.
This post is going to be the longest, because it's a list of all the shows that just missed. Accordingly, I'll try to be brief:
The Amazing Race and Big Brother. I really like both of these shows, but I can't say I've really LOVED as many seasons of either of them as I need to in order to make the list. I'm not going to try to convince you to watch these, but they're both great shows that have had lots of great moments.
Mr. Show with Bob and Ted
Mr. ShowHonestly, this one hurts - this comedy show on HBO with David Cross and Bob Odenkirk was both hilarious and groundbreaking, but it is sadly uneven, and while I like watching old episodes, there are a lot more misses than I'd ever remembered. It's best sketches are among some of the funniest things I've ever seen, but I can't ignore the bad ones.
The White Shadow I remember this show as one of the highlights of my youth. Back before DVR's, ESPN started re-airing episodes of the show at 7:00 AM, and I would (when I remembered) allocate enough time in my morning to watch before I left for work. It still held up - in fact, in many ways it is the natural predecessor of Friday Night Lights, which I'll talk about much later. But ... I was just a bit too young when it came out, and in all honesty, my memories of it are better than actually rewatching the show.
Hottie or Alien?
Veronica MarsIf you haven't watched the first season, you're simply denying yourself because it's fantastic. Witty, clever, well written and acted and very original. Season 2, however, was definitely a step down and Season 3 was just ... boring. That averages out way too low to make the cut. Trivia Point: For those of you siding on the side of Hottie in the "Hottie vs. Alien" debate over Amanda Seyfried, this is really where she got her start.
Curb Your EnthusiasmThis is pretty suprising, especially for how highly I have Seinfeld ranked (spoiler alert! Sorry, it still makes me laugh.) But while I really enjoyed the first few seasons of Curb, eventually it got incredibly one note, and even though its fans keep telling me to go back and give it another chance, here's the deal: I don't miss it. At all. That means enough to me to make it miss the list.
The Twilight Zone This one, I know my brother is pissed about. Or, at least, he'd differ because he owns the entire series on DVD. I really liked this series, but just don't hold it quite dear enough to make the list.I also suspect that while many of the episodes would hold up well, that can't be said for many others, and that also counts here.
Other Shows That Just Missed The Cut:Alias, Damages, The Larry Sanders Show, ER, The Real World, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, MI5 (Spooks), South Park and CSI. Probably a few others I'm forgetting here, despite the incredibly anal nature of this list.
