Fathers and Sons and Pop Culture

I was watching Tom & Jerry with my son for the first time when my dad, who had been quietly sitting next to us, completely absorbed in trying to work his new Droid phone, glanced up at the TV and said, “Oh, I love these guys.”

“You what?” I said incredulously.

“I love these guys," he said matter-of-factly.  "Used to watch them all the time. They played them in front of the movies. Popeye too.”

Later that night over a bottle of wine, I told my sister the story. She turned to our father.  "You like cartoons? You?”

My dad confirmed that he did.

As far as I had known, my dad had never watched a cartoon in his life. The fact that I grew up worshiping at the altar of Bugs Bunny seemed to be lost on my dad. When I was watching TV, he would often swoop in the room, wrest control of the remote and turn on sports or news or something boring like that.

“Dad, do you realize I’m almost 38 years old and this is the first I’m hearing of this?” I said to him.

I was stunned and I was also a little ticked off. All of the times my dad tried to get me interested in sports and all of the time I spent fighting it, we could have been watching cartoons instead?

_______________________________

WonderWife™ had given the Bean a figure of Spider-Man riding a motorcycle. Despite my umbrage at the fact that Spider-Man does not ride a motorcycle (a fact I made well known to my nonchalant wife) the toy piqued the Bean’s interest in the web-crawler. During a long car trip, the Bean started asking a few questions and WonderWife™ attempted to answer. It was a valiant effort, but I needed to jump in and correct her on a few important details—namely that Spider-Man does in fact wear a costume. 

“So Dad,” the Bean asked me the next morning, “Who is the person under Spider-Man’s costume?”

“That’s a really good question. I’m glad you asked. His name is Peter Parker…”

I laid it all out for him—the radioactive spider, the wall crawling, the web-slinging, the crime fighting. I taught him, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

As he absorbed all of this, his eyes got really big.  More questions soon followed.

It's Be-Yootiful!

As is the custom of my people, I'm going to be spending Christmas eating Chinese food and watching movies. The joy of which will be multiplied this year, thanks to the new HD TV that now resides in my living room.

With that in mind, I hope that all of your holiday wishes come true.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Geeky Gadget Research

I’m standing at the back of Best Buy, staring at the wall of flat screens. I’m trying to compare the images from two TV’s in particular. My eyes dart back and forth between the screens, carefully studying every detail. To everyone else in the store, I probably look like a real idiot.

“By the end of the year, I will have a HD TV!” I proclaimed a few months ago. Surprisingly, I’ve been late to the whole HD game and had decided I was long overdue to plunge headfirst into twenty-first century TV technology. This declaration was met with a “meh” from WonderWife™.

“I promise you, you’re going to love this. It’s going to be just like when I got us Tivo,” I told her.

WW™ rolled her eyes, “Whatever, dude.”

Okay, so I was on my own. Bringing my plan to fruition was going to cost money and time. The money part was being taken care of, since I had been squirreling away funds for this endeavor for a while. But I am a geek and when buying a new gadget, I must research. If the purchase is consummation, than the research is foreplay. Much like foreplay, there is a lot of planning involved. Tactics. Strategy. The internet must be scoured for information. Brands compared. Customer reviews from Amazon, Price Grabber and Consumer Reports are cross-referenced. For when I buy a new gadget, I want to make sure I know what is the best.

But alas, I cannot always have the best because the best costs a lot of money. Even if we weren’t in these tough economic times, I’ve got a family to support. As much as I want to be ahead of the technological curve, concessions have to be made. Which is why I spent the greater part of 20 minutes ping-ponging between two TV sets during my lunch break.

Every review I read told me that set #1 had the better picture. But set #1 costs $300 more than set #2. Best Buy had both sets displayed side by side. I sat there, scrutinizing the images on each TV. I couldn’t really detect a difference. After a few minutes, I thought that the picture on the more expensive set was slightly better…maybe. But is it a $300 difference? If somebody switched the tags on the TVs, would I even be able to tell them apart? Wait…by even having this inner monologue, am I betraying my self-proclaimed geekboy status? Shouldn’t I automatically get the best piece of tech that I can? It wasn’t long before self-doubt set in, threatening to turn this otherwise happy jaunt to the electronics store into an existential crisis.

Thankfully, the answer hit me before I worked myself into a shame spiral. It’s so simple. Use the money saved by getting the cheaper TV to buy a soundbar. Problem solved. Sure it’s not the best TV, but I will have the latest innovations in stereo sound. Yes, I’m still very much a geek.

You Have Chosen...Wisley

My TV viewing habits have had to radically change since having kids. Time is precious and I can’t follow as many shows as I’d like. So for me, every new TV season is like playing Russian Roulette (but with a slight less probability of gruesome death). Tivo only compounds this problem by allowing you to collect new shows like baseball cards. The hard drive soon becomes like a giant “to-do” list, providing more hours of programming than I can cram into a week. (These blogs don’t write themselves, you know.) My OCD acts up and I get all stressed out about having to watch everything I’ve recorded.

So at the beginning of each new TV season, I need to pick and choose my shows very carefully. It’s like eating at a good restaurant. I don’t want to fill up on bread and not have room for the main course. Making a commitment to watch “Knight Rider”* means I won’t be able to enjoy “Mad Men.” By the way, I got tired of the gasps and disappointed nodding everyone gives me when I say I’m not watching “Mad Men” so I tuned in to an episode. Turns out, unless you’ve watched it from the very beginning, you’re not going to think it’s the best show on television. Considering it took me the better part of a year to catch up on “Battlestar Galactica” on DVD, and that was when I had one kid, I don’t foresee being able to devote enough time to dive into another show now that I have two.

It’s with a sigh of relief when I hear about shows being canceled that I have chosen not to watch. “My Own Worst Enemy”, “Pushing Daises” and “Dirty Sexy Money”, we hardly knew ye. I’m sorry if you’re a fan of these shows. But to me, their cancellations means that I’ve chosen wisely.

Now if I could only add another few hours to the day, I might be able to watch “The Shield.”


*For the record, I am not watching "Knight Rider."

It's Just a Jump to the Left

It would have been just another semi-productive business trip where I breezed in and out of a city so fast it felt like I was hardly there at all. Except that it was the weekend we rolled the clocks back, so of course on the one morning in years that I could have slept late, I found myself wide awake at 6am.

This was one of those fancy, ultra-modern hotels where everything is brightly colored and nothing comes in a recognizable shape. (That egg looking thing is an ottoman?) There was no TV in the bedroom, but there was a small one in the adjoining “living room”. I sat on the ugly, uncomfortable deco couch, pissed off that this stupid hotel was robbing me of the chance to at least lie in bed while watching the meager 10 channels they served up. (Really in this day and age of 300+ channels, to offer only 10 is simply insulting.) The inside of the room’s coffee maker was coated with some sort of rust-colored sludge. Even though the hotel had many questionable design choices, I was fairly confident that this was not one of them. Since it was both ass-early and pouring rain outside, so I dared not venture out for caffeine.

I numbed myself with an hour of political coverage before stumbling onto a rerun of “Mythbusters.” And that’s when it happened, the thing that made this whole trip worth it. I very rarely watch TV live anymore, so I very rarely see commercials. But sitting in this cold, unfriendly room there was no Tivo, so I was forced to watch everything that appeared on screen. And right in between the ad where they will buy your gold and one for the next “Dirty Jobs”, I saw this:



I went home and immediately set the season pass. A few days later it appeared on my hard drive. WonderWife™ by my side, I sat down to watch wearing a big giddy grin.

The verdict? Come on, did you watch that promo? You already know the answer.

Oh "Time Warp" where have you been my whole life? I am so happy that this show exists. It’s such a simple thing of beauty—a few geeks with some amazingly sophisticated cameras, who like to set stuff on fire, shoot things and watch people leap in the air in slow motion. Even things that I didn’t think would be interesting, like a woman pole vaulting, become unbelievable when slowed down.

Good ol’ Discovery Channel…keeping me in geekboy heaven.

Dear "Heroes",

We had a good run for a while, but I’m sorry to tell you that it’s over. I’m leaving you. I wish I could tell you “it’s not you, it’s me.” But the truth is, it’s you.

Your first season was good. Compelling. Fun. Okay, your season finale was lacking, but I was willing to overlook that because of the hours we had spent together. Unfortunately, that was the shape of things to come.

Let’s be honest about season two. It was just plain horrid. You got a bit full of yourself and it showed. And don’t go blaming it on the writer’s strike. You were heading down the wrong path long before the writers called it quits. The strike mercifully put an early end to an aimless and lethargic season.

This season was supposed to be your comeback. You took a good long look in the mirror, said you had recognized your flaws and promised to fix them. You got off to a good start in the first episode. And even though the next few faltered a bit, I stuck by your side for six weeks, knowing that you were capable of so much more. But I’ve recently come to the sad realization that you’re not. And I can’t continue the charade anymore. I need to say goodbye.

But before I go, I want to offer you some advice. Who knows, maybe it could benefit somebody else someday.

1. You don’t need any more new characters. You can barely keep up with the ones you have now and you seem to be reaching to give them all something to do. It’s really okay not to introduce two or three new characters every episode when that takes screen time away from the ones you made me care about in season one.

2. You don’t need to put every character into every episode. How about focusing on one or two story threads per episode instead of spending an hour dizzily jumping around between half a dozen stories? You want to know how to handle a large ensemble week to week? Pay attention to “Lost” and see how it’s done. (I know, you’re sick of hearing about “Lost” but they know how to pull themselves out of a slump. You should have been taking notes.)

3. Not every single character needs to be related to each other.

4. Make your fights more interesting. It’s boring to watch all-powerful characters who can’t be hurt and can’t die do battle. So stop having Peter and Sylar square off against each other.

5. For the love of god, just get rid of Mohinder already. He’s always been a whiny baby with little to do but explain things to everybody else. But now that he’s become some sort of spider thing, he’s a reclusive evil whiny baby. And what the hell is he doing anyway? If he’s a super villain, he needs to be carrying out an evil plot, not lurking around in his lab sticking everyone to the walls. These days, he’s really only one step removed from a crazy homeless person who mutters to themselves as they walk down the street.

6. Sylar should not be a good guy. And stop making him comic relief. He was a really cool, creepy villain whom you’ve castrated and now he’s totally lame.

7. Lighten up. You used to be fun but now everything is so dark and gloomy. You’re actually making it seem like it sucks to have super powers. You’ve even managed to make your most heartfelt and enthusiastic character, Hiro, a total bummer.

8. One villain. Have we learned nothing from BATMAN & ROBIN, SPIDERMAN 3 and BATMAN FOREVER? One villain with one evil plot makes for tension and suspense. More than that and it gets messy. I wish you would have thought about that before subtitling season three “Villains.”

9. Your stories need to go somewhere. Remember in the first season when you set up that the world was going to explode and every episode was about this random group of strangers coming together to save it? That worked. Why did you stop doing that? Now we’ve got Hiro going after some formula, Horn Rimmed Glasses and Sylar going after escaped bad guys, Peter and his mother going after….something—I’m not sure what, and Nathan sitting around doing nothing. You're rambling more than my Great Aunt after a glass of wine.

10. If you kill off a character, stick to it. It’s always a fun surprise when major characters are killed off mid-season. But why are you always bringing them back? Nathan freakin’ exploded at the end of the first season. Still here. Nikki’s gone, but now she’s her own triplet, Tracy? What?? And after being killed last year, Linderman is back as both a vision and some sort of hologram? Puh-lease. It’s beyond convoluted.

So I guess this is it. I need to find another show that satisfies me like you used to. I’m sorry that it had to end this way. But I think this is the best thing for both of us.