Okay, fellow parental units. Parental guidance is required.
Little E has just gotten out of bed. Again. This started a few weeks ago with the big storm, but even if there’s not a cloud (or a single bolt of lightning) in the sky, it’s become an every-night phenomenon. … Read more
A bit of a rant about the Lost finale. This would be a good one to avoid if you’re not up on the show or haven’t seen the finale yet.
Because here there be spoilers. And elephants. Lots and lots of elephants. … Read more
Okay, guys, I’m just gonna get right down to it without any formalities. We’re about 17 hours away from the beginning of the final episode of Lost. I’m going to be “on the board” for this show, probably the biggest TV draw of May sweeps if not the entire frakkin’ year, so please allow me to implore you to do the following:
Don’t f@$% it up. Seriously. If it turns out to be a St. Elsewhere ending that makes people pick up pitchforks and torches and storm their local ABC stations, it’s my ass they’re after, right? So, seriously, don’t get me killed. Please. It’ll look really bad on the paperwork afterward.
Purely as a fan, let me add the following request:
Don’t f@$% it up. You might just be able to top the audience figure for the finale of M*A*S*H here. Personally, I kinda doubt that’ll happen, but hell, stranger stuff has happened recently – look at what we now consider the #1 movie of all time to be. (I still think that ranking is the result of “cooked books” by way of inflated 3-D ticket prices, but what do I know?)
But more to the point, you have an opportunity to make this a finale that people are talking about years – or decades – later. J.J. Abrams himself once said that one of his chief inspirations for what he turned Lost into after he took over the show from its rather simplistic “Castaway on TV” pilot pitch was The Prisoner – as in the original show from the 1960s, not the miserable mash-up from earlier this year. People are still talking about The Prisoner’s final episode, 42 years later. Some folks claim to know what the message is. Other folks claim we’re still peeling back the layers (of an hour of TV shown – let me say it again – 42 years ago) and still aren’t close to the message. Others simply assume 
that there is no message, and that those involved must surely have been high on a stash of LSD covering roughly the same acreage as The Village itself.
Can the finale of Lost get us talking – for years afterward – like The Prisoner did? Or will it turn into something where people are merely grumbling about it for years afterward (see also: Roseanne)? I guess we’re about 17 hours away from finding out.
Don’t f@$% it up, guys.… Read more
… has been made by me, and you can enjoy (or, perhaps more appropriately, endure) it here. It’s just me playing some music that I liked from last year. Unfortunately, it’s also me rambling on without a script, “ah”-ing and “um”-ing a lot, and sounding like deep fried crap because my allergies were giving me trouble that day. (The whole thing was recorded several weeks ago, but honestly, I’ve been sitting on it since then and pondering whether or not it would be possible for me to make it suck less. Ultimately I decided the answer was “probably not, this is me we’re talking about here.”) … Read more
I should really take it easy on the news-reporting industry. After all, I’ve been tangentially connected to it for most of my adult life, so I understand their struggle to make things interesting, right?
Well, yeah. But I also reserve the right to pick on the occasional “WTF?” that pops out of the woodwork too. Attend carefully. … Read more
Last night, the super-nasty thunderstorm that had been dropping tornadoes all through Oklahoma went right over my house, complete with a very big, very obvious rotating wall cloud. Which, of course, my wife took my son out on the back deck to see, since it wasn’t even raining at our house. I’m all for giving him an intellectual understanding of bad weather so he’s not afraid of it, but… wait a minute. Who’s this knocking on my door at 3:30 in the morning? “Dad, I’m scared.” Um… yeah. Couldn’t get him back to his own bed without a major meltdown until 5 in the morning. Good show!
But other interesting phenomena happened at our house last night as well. I don’t think he was deposited by the storm either. He was lured by the smell of dog food on the back deck. (The reason dog food hits the back deck is simple: Xena hauls off her dog food bowls to points unknown for fun. It’s gotten expensive and a bit silly trying to replace all the bowls. So… dog food on deck!)
Of course, it wasn’t our dog chowing down on dog food. It was someone all three cats were very eager to eat, erm, sorry, meet.
Not much to say lately. Due to a somewhat sudden personnel change at work, I’ve been working insanely long hours and then coming home and wanting to do nothing but sleep. Or spend time with the little guy. His latest obsession has been using his dad as a big flabby, hairy set of monkey bars. If my spinal cord ever suffers fatal damage, it’ll 
probably involve being jumped on by a two-year-old.
The weather today is supposed to be monumentally bad in eastern Oklahoma, and by extension here as well. And of course, I’ll be at work during this, not at home where I can try to implore the boy to think instead of just reacting in blind fear, like I did when I was well past his age and deathly afraid of anything that even prompted the issuance of a watch. That being said, the setup for today’s bad weather is looking to be… unfriendly. How do I know this? I just visit the Storm Prediction Center website, where they’ve got handy forecast maps that say stuff like…
…well, there you have it. Says it all, really.
Hopefully, normalcy – or the nearest approximation that takes place in my immediate vicinity – will be restored soon.… Read more
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