Chuck = Dumb Name

Joosh has delivered unto me some new crack. I hesitate to post the url here for fear that all my millions of readers will flock to the site and overload it's systems and therefor deny me my new habit. This. Would. Be. Bad.

However, in the interest of sharing the love (and getting you to be my co-dependent crack using partner so I don't feel so bad about imbibing alone), I will tell you that if you use the abbreviation for television, and you add a hyphen, and then you type the word for something that connects two things, or the thing that chains are made of (and as we know, chains are only as strong as their weakest this same thing), and then instead of writing dot com, you type dot and the abbreviation for company and then another dot and then the abbreviation for the other name of Great Britain, you will find yourself at a beautiful, masterful, endlessly entertaining bounty of time- suckage material, both currant and vintage.

I really should not be telling you about this, especially you myriad of friends and relatives that are in school right now, but if it can bring you one ounce of the fun times it has brought me so far (and I've only known about it for a week), it will be worth the risk of my being responsible for your having to take Incompletes in two classes due to your time spent on the above-hinted-at site.

It is this site, this place of Wonderment-and-Punky-Brewster that is responsible (along with the recommendations of Bex, of course) for my newfound love interest, Veronica, a perky blond from Neptune, California. It is this site that allowed me to watch and be baffled by what I assume is the NYC answer to The OC, a little drama called "Gossip Girl" (which, by the way, super sucks, and managed to mortify me in many many ways, none more so than by the fact that the parents of the high school kids seem like they are barely older than I am - uh oh, Botox-io).

Anyway, this site is both good and bad, and I do fear it will cause me not to be able to say "I don't really watch television" anymore and get away with it (as if I could ever really get away with that one, right?).

BUT (and this is what I came here to tell you today), because of this site and the little fuzzy red "updated" next to it's myriad bounty, I discovered this show:

Chuck.

This is show is all about everything I have ever loved on TV. This show has elements of X-Files, 24, Arrested Development, Clerks/Mallrats (okay, not technically TV), Firefly, and The Office, just to name a few. If you can get past the main guy's not-even-remotely-disguised impersonation of our beloved Jim (John Krasinski) from The Office; overlook that the blond gal is sort of a Portia de Rossi/Ben Stiller's Wife knock off (actually, to be fair here, she's way better looking than both of those gals) and that she has sort of distracting teeth (though honestly I'd rather be distracted by her bunny teeth than by Portia's eyebrows and the fact that she sleeps with Ellen, but nevermind); not dwell on the weirdness of there being another show on TV with an unextraordinary, nebbishy, nerdy guy working in a "Big Box" type store suddenly developing an extraordinary life (but thanks to the evils of the devil, instead of the evils of the US guvment); and totally ignore the fact that entire thing is COMPLETELY implausible and ridiculous (less so than 24, though, so you viewers of that ongoing explosive pile will have no trouble suspending your disbelief, I hope), then you will love this little oeuvre.

It is exciting, it is funny, it is laughable, it is relatively suspenseful, it has cute boys and girls in it, it has crazy driving (in a Fiat Punta, Joosh pointed out to me, which are all over U.K and Ireland, but rarely seen in the likes of LA, and if they were they would be mistaken for, like, Ford Aspires, and by the way the name reminds me of a spanish curse word, but again, nevermind), absurd computer geek inside jokes and kick-ass fights, stabbings with poisoned hair accoutrements and other stunt-type hat tricks. But most of all it has our long-loved Jayne back on the airwaves*.

He didn't get a lot of play in the pilot episode, but what little he did get promised good things to come. At the end of the show, dressed in the full-on dork uniform of an Almost-But-Not-Exactly-Best-Buy employee, he has the old Knowle Roher/Jayne Cobb look on his face that I predict bodes well for future episodes. (Can I just say, though, I really liked Adam Baldwin better when he had some more meat on his bones? This gaunt faced/intense/trim/lean/angular/craggy thing he's got going on doesn't do it for me quite the same as the brawny doofus from Serenity. Wah.)

So yeah, "Chuck" is super dumb name for a show, as far as I'm concerned (then again, with this tagline: "an offbeat look at spies in their 20's," what the hell would I have called this show?!?), and Chuck's sidekick with the really crotchy facial hair is so far not deserving of airtime, but Chuck is darling and Jayne rocks almost anything, all the time, ever, oh and ps this show, as with so many others, has figured out that music is important to the likes of us and so the show has a very KCRWesque soundtrack. What's not to love?

Thank you tee vee dash ell eye enn kay ess dot see oh dot you kay. I am forever (for this week, anyway) in your debt.

*I just looked at Adam Baldwin's imdb page more in depth and he was on some crappy looking show last year called "Day Break" that I never heard of, and in addition to some other junk, he was on an episode of something called "Invader ZIM" and played a character called "Shplooger's Customer". I am dying.

**Update. I should have suspected from the name, but alas, I am not savvy in the ways of non-live-action television: "Invader ZIM" is indeed a cartoon, er, um, 'scuse me, I mean an animated series. Ahem. But seriously, who am I to judge, anyway... Brother's got to pay his mortgage, just like everyone else, right?

Sucktastic.

I am a truly sucky blogger. It's true. So true that I've had to use 'truly' and 'true' in adjoining sentences, right out of the gate. That is some truthy truth. See, I thought it had been maybe two or two-and-a-half weeks since logging in some mindless sharing here, but no no. When I clicked over today, I realized: it's been over a month. Shiza.

This is pretty typical of me and projects. Fun or otherwise. Big ideas. Lots of thought/discussion. TONS of intent. A decent start, full of commitment and maybe a dash of ingenuity (I'm thinking of the millions of bead-store-necklaces that are sitting around half finished, not necessarily the bloggy blog here). But delivery? Um. Yeah.

I don't have any great excuses. It's only stupid Working On Work Projects stuff. And since I sit at my computer 10 hours a day some days (14 on more than few, I'm sorry to admit), it's not like I couldn't click over and login and dash off a post. Except I can't. Because I'd have to log out of my work Gmail and all associated Google docs (people, Google docs are amazing - a bit slow on occasion, but cheap and convenient... like my men). In logging out of work Gmail, I risk not only missing something time sensitive and critical (it's been one emergency after another, I'm telling you) but also having to log back into 25 spreadsheets and templates -that would be pure craziness- anytime I want to say something. Plus with the constant sitting and writing and stressing and staring at the (lovely and large but glaring) screen, I'm completely boring and have nothing interesting to say, can't even pretend to have anything noteworthy to note (hilarious conversations & periodic chat with Bex notwithstanding, but totally inappropriate for bloggage, I'm afraid).

But you know, popping in this evening, I realized something: I've lost time. Not X-Files lost, but like, blink of an eye/where is my-life-flying-off-to-now lost. I don't know what happened to our beautiful summer, or how the cold crept in and bit the leaves red and yellow and called in the Big Storm guns to battle the sunshine and shower us heavily in bursts throughout the day (super beautiful, I must say, but best of all: washes away all the damn crazy HUGE spiders that have invaded the building and the greenery around here). So suddenly there are only a few fragrant peaches and crapload of pears, apples, pomegranates, and other fall-ish fruits where the plums and plucots and berries spilled forth just a few days ago (or possibly a few weeks ago since I am obviously completely dissociated from real time right now). If I didn't have a calendar and had to guess the date, I'd think it was maybe Labor Day at most. So wrong.

But as far as blogging goes, it's not that I haven't made some attempt. In the past few weeks I've written and somehow not saved for editing the following posts:
Why Iowa is Great (a beginners guide)
Why Jakob is Great (an ode to the pre-three's)
Sneaky Subversive Movies and the Studios that Hide Them (until two minutes before the Oscars, forcing me to suffer "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" when I need some movie time but the screens are utterly bare.)
The Coming Recession.

I will likely not try to recreate these, with exception of Why Iowa is Great, but it will be sadly lacking in photos as my phone was an unworthy tool for capturing more than a few up-close details, and the fellow traveling with me through it's cornish hills and prairies can't be relied upon to send me any of his promised photos (from his dumb i-phone that totally didn't work anywhere in the entire state except Des Moines, by the way).

Oh yeah, that was another entry: Why iphones Are Dumb. I will likely skip that one too, so as to avoid the wrath of the growing Applafia.

Though it has kept me from participating in the blogosphere lately (writing or reading), the one good thing about current work is this: the utter ridiculousness that will make an excellent story one day, maybe even mildly amusing enough of a sitcom scenario to get a pilot made (but not shown, of course). The bad side of this absurdity is that some of the circumstantial hoopla is so totally implausible outside of something like an (admittedly poorly written) sitcom that you will think me totally trite and/or a lier if I try to explain it to you here in a factual rendering.