Song of the Day
- February 4th, 2006
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“Hackensack” by Fountains of Wayne
James Frey got bitch slapped on Oprah. I didn’t see it, but as I understand it she took him apart on her show. Not that I feel sorry for the guy, especially since he’s already made his bank being one of her “Book Club” selections, but it seems to me that Oprah took him down more as damage control for her than any sort of righteous dressing down that he may have deserved. Oprah’s no fool, after all. She stuck up for him on CNN, but when the winds were blowing decidedly in her face, she turned around and kicked the man while he was down. “How dare you make the fool of me! I am Oprah, and no pissant little shop clerk in a Paris boutique or heretofore unknown writer will take me down! Only Tom Cruise gets a pass on my show!”
This show has been on a couple of times now. It stars that guy from “Ed” and the goody-two-shoes guy from “90210″ as well as Kitty from “Arrested Development” and that woman from “Three Sisters” (the OCD/uptight oldest sister) and Eric Bogosian!
If I had to name that tune in the least amount of notes, I’d say the show was a cross of “High Fidelity” and, well, “Ed”. Not that I watched “Ed” much (in fact, I’m not sure I can honestly claim to have seen more than two episodes of it in their entirety), but for some reason I happen to know a strangely fair amount about the show. I think it may be because you can learn an awful lot about a show just from commercials and teasers, especially if it’s about a guy who pines after the woman of his dreams. Not a whole lot of range is required for a show like that. It’s not like all of a sudden an outbreak of Marburg Virus happens and the show’s characters have to deal with people spontaneously bleeding through their skin and from their eyeballs.
Anyway, “Love Monkey” is about a guy who’s got the kind of job that most of us would love to have. So it’s got that going for it. And then it has quirky guy (who’m I’m going to call “Ed” from now on) who has to deal with the trials of said Cool Job along with the tribulations of being old and single. Hilarity – and poignancy! – ensues. I think I also like this show because Ed also reminds me of another Ed (Robertson of Barenaked Ladies fame) who I happen to think is mightly clever and humorous.
On top of that, the music on the show has so far been great! I love shows that have great musical producers/directors/whatever with taste. “Scrubs” has got super taste in music (I swear whomever is in charge of picking the songs has pretty much EXACTLY the same musical taste as I do), and “Gray’s Anatomy” has been pretty good so far in that department as well.
Good writing, good music, good theme. Actors need to enunciate better, though. Thank God for 10 second skip back!
Just so you know, it’s on Tuesday nights at 10:00 pm on CBS (in hi-def, if you’re into that sort of thing).
James Frey emailed me with some suggestions for my “about” page. Let me know what you think about his suggestions:
About
I was born just as the mortar given by Josef Stalin himself to Kim Il Sung exploded next to my mother. The mortar took her life but fortunately I was saved. I was found by a platoon of GI’s and they took me in as their own for a few weeks as they fought on the front lines of the Korean War. I remember them dropping me off at an army hospital near the front as they rotated off the front line. I was given to a couple of doctors to raise. I remember that these doctors had a distillery in their tent. They had a cross-dressing friend, but none of them felt it was all that strange. Of course, I was too young to remember all this, but this is what I suspect to be true since I have video tapes documenting all of this from my younger days (“video tape” being the technology of the times, I suspect).
After the war, I lived on the streets artfully dodging my way through the streets of London. Or maybe it was Paris. I’m not quite clear on that now, but it’s a tale, I’m sure, that is equally valid in either of the two cities. But I’m quite sure that during my stay in London (having been sent there by my aunt’s only sister) at my eccentric uncle’s flat, I discovered a very curious wardrobe that appeared to be a gateway to a magical land.
Having had all sorts of marvelous adventures during my youth, it was time for an education. As I noted before, my parents had perished and I was living with a most unfortunate uncle who, after discovering that I was mucking about in the back of his wardrobe, locked me in the attic which doubled as my bedroom. Luckily for me, one evening a great owl flew in and dropped off my acceptance letter to school! Hoorah! I was picked up by a flying car and sent off to gather myself an education. Let it be noted that I paid for this schooling with an athletic scholarship – I’ve got good hands.
Once educated, it was time for me to get into the “real world”, as they say. You know how it is when you’re striking out on your own. Well, I had to find a place and ended up in this house with 6 roomates. Oddly, none of them knew each other and – might I add – they were all asses. So here we are, seven strangers living in a house. If I had more time I could tell you what happens when 7 roomates stopping being polite and get REAL nasty with each other. If only I had it on tape!
After 16 long years of that – really, it went on about 13 years too long – I decided it was time to do something else. At this stage of my life I felt that I really had to do something with myself; get a career; have a family. But, alas, that was not to be. As I was crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a luxury liner, I met the woman of my dreams. After living in the shared house for 16 years doing nothing, I didn’t really have any money – or skills, really – and so all I could afford was a room in steerage. And I only got that on a lucky hand of Texas Hold ‘em. Well, I got on this boat and was minding my own business until I saw her – the woman I would one day make my wife. She was, naturally, up in First Class (ain’t it always the way, brother), but I was clever and just a skosh charming and soon we were macking it up in the back seat of a car (long story)! Unfortunately, the ship we were on had the bad luck of hitting an iceberg, and I died.
So, this is another story that lends more evidence as to why I should just buy everything online.
We were shopping today for various necessities, and I remembered that one thing we’ve been wanting to get is a handheld vacuum cleaner for those little messes the young’uns make that don’t require hauling out The Beast. So, I wandered into a local “Linens ‘N Things” to make what amounted to an impulse buy.
I was looking at the various options and boiled them down to 2: a $20 corded vac and a $60 cordless one that “supposedly” offered tons of sucking potential. As I was mulling over my purchase (no Internet on hand to make an educated buy), a sales drone came by and asked if I needed any help.
Well, sure. Why not? I mean, I don’t know which one I want. Perhaps this guy could be helpful. So I say to him, “I’m having trouble deciding which way I should go here. This one is 3 times more expensive and I’m wondering if it’s worth it.”
Well, he takes a look at both boxes, one of which (the $20 one) says “600 watts!” (which he points out) on the box and the other which says “12 volts!” (again, pointing that out) on the box and declares (pointing to the 12V one, which was the cordless), “Oh, well, with that one you’ll get a ton more power.” (or something extremely similar to that).
I look at him blankly and almost ask him if he even knows what he’s talking about since either he has a ton of E&M knowledge sitting around in his head because he was able to – at a glance – determine the relative Power of the vacuums with only those 2 figures at hand*, or he looked at the relative size of the boxes and the price tags and made a value judgement of quality based on that.
While considering whether or not to make this guy prove right then and there how he knew for sure which vacuum actually had more power, he managed to redeem himself by asking me, “Do you think you’ll always use it with an outlet handy? Like, would you use it in your car?” And, voila!, a sale was made!
I suppose the moral of this story for folks who work in retail is that you should never try and make a sale by trying to bullshit the customer into thinking that you know what you’re talking about (unless you DO know what you’re talking about) because while sometimes the customer may take what you just said at face value because (s)he may be completely clueless about what they’re buying, at other times you’re just making yourself irrelevant to the purchasing process and the customer no longer trusts that you add value. In this case, the salesperson was able to make a sale not by some mystical store of wisdom on vacuum cleaners, but by making me see why I would need one feature over another. That’s adding value in my book.
* NOTE: Being a bit “sciency” myself, my bullshit detector went off the scale the instant the guy said what he did. One should be aware that Power (measured in watts) is the product of voltage and current (P=V*I). And, really, I think that the “600 watts” on the box probably really refers to the amount of power the vacuum consumes and really has very little to do with how well it sucks, though there’s probably some correlation to how well the motor works. I assume an E&M and mechanical engineering savant is not who I ran into at Linens ‘N Things today.
Today marks the seventh anniversary of the night we got engaged.
Seven years ago it was a rainy but mild Saturday. I had planned on popping the question that night, but it was to be a surprise and I had schemed the entire week and a half prior to get all of the pieces in place. We spent the day shopping for a chair and purchased a wingback chair* (from I forget where) mid-morning and came back to the duplex we were renting.
Fortunately, the Girlfriend had to go pick up some dry cleaning. So I took that opportunity to throw some of her clothes into a bag and head down to the Four Seasons (now the Fairmont Olympic Hotel) where I had previously made a reservation. I was able to upgrade to the Presidential Suite (nothing like a marriage propsal to get a free upgrade) and get the room set up for later that night.
I’ll skip the dinner part because, quite frankly, the restaurant wasn’t very good and I was pretty unhappy with the recommendation from a coworker. Suffice to say that we had an average meal at an average hotel restaurant.
But, the dessert was the piece de resistance (and, to be fair, this was where the brunt of the recommendation came from). I asked the restaurant to print up a special dessert menu with the last menu item being the actual proposal. I had to talk up the desserts at this place (because the food was really nothing special) to ensure that the Girlfriend would at least take a look at the dessert menu. I watched her scan it and then stop at the bottom at which point I produced the ring. Heh, not bad if I say so myself.
So then we headed to the Four Seasons and we had quite a nice rest of the weekend. We had “fancy brunch” at the Four Seasons and the funny part about that was the questionable choice of clothes I threw in a bag for her to wear the next day.
So here we are today. We had alphabet soup for dinner (homemade!), but we did add some brie and stilton and a nice sausage with some pears so it was pretty nice all-in-all.
* As an aside, our taste in interior decorating and furniture has changed considerably since then. We’re in the middle of a slow but sure migration to contemporary designs. Furniture, unfortunately, lasts a little while and is expensive to replace. More on that in future posts.