Categories
Serious Stuff Television & Movies

Full of Grace…or…well…full of something

My wife, bless her heart, became a lot less picky in her viewing habits while she was pregnant and in the first six weeks after our son was born, while she was at home recovering. I’ve already mentioned her propensity for watching E!, but another viewing habit she’s picked up that drives me up the wall is Nancy Grace. Oh. My. God. I can’t stand Nancy Grace. I know she’s got a fan base that would no doubt argue that she’s just dealing with the issues in a straight-talk, shoot-from-the-hip style (which seems to be the defense of any ultra-conservative or ultra-liberal media figures these day – “you just don’t like it because I’m telling it like it is!”). I’m not saying that any of the cases she discusses on her show deal with completely innocent, blameless people, but whatever happened to assuming that innocence until guilt is proven? Some of the topics discussed tonight dealt with folks who seem pretty reprehensible, but all the same, they’re still awaiting trial, and there’s Nancy, going off with little gems like “Who knows what else this guy has done?” Who knows indeed, Nancy? Nobody on your show does. But in the meantime you, a TV host who supposedly has a legal background, are speculating wildly in a nationally broadcast forum in a way that’d get your butt chucked out of any court in the land. (I was about to say that she ought to know better, but oh, look, maybe she doesn’t.) What all of that worst-possible-case-scenario gossipmongering is doing to the jury pool, I have no idea….but apparently there’s nothing to stop us from speculating a bit, is there, Nancy?

I know she’s all about victims’ rights, and that’s fine. Let’s not forget that until a jury hands down a verdict, the accused have rights too. And once again – and this is a fight I had to fight numerous producers, reporters and even news directors on during my years in the teevee news biz – it’s not the media’s place to do the prosecuting. Someone please yank this appeal-to-the-lowest-denominator lunatic off the air, and don’t let her go back to trying to pass herself off as some kind of journalist without reminding her that her job in that role is not to throw people to the lions and wait for the faithful to send up a cheer.… Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

So…ahem…the, uh…Sontarans.

Exciting pictures of Doctor Who’s new Sontarans from the BBC. (Hey, they said it, not me.) Apparently the main Sontaran is played by Christopher Ryan of The Young Ones fame, who also played a different critter in The Trail Of A Time Lord in 1986. I just dunno, for the first time a new series “update” of an original series creature has me kinda scratching my head and wondering if they’ve missed the mark. We’ll see how he looks on the screen.… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base

Solo flight

Today my wife went back to work, and I stayed home with the little guy. It seemed to go well on all fronts, though there were one point during the day where he was crying his little head off because, for the first time, his mom left him home with me for a significent length of time. (I’m pretty confident that was the cause – I changed him, bathed him, fed him, tried to play with him and get him to calm down, gave him some tummy time, sang to him*, played him some new music, sat him in his bouncy chair, laid him in his crib and every bed in the house, you name it. Inconsolable.) I felt like I’d struck out on my first daddy day because I pretty much had to let him cry that one out. On those occasions, a couple of times a week, where he gets like that – usually at bed time – I wind up ushering any and all cats out of his room like Geordi La Forge evacuating a bunch of non-speaking-but-clearly-panicked extras away from a warp drive that’s about to explode on Star Trek, and closing the door as the last one out. Then I go and turn on the baby monitor and listen to him cry anyway. But today, since he’d resisted any attempts to sleep all day long, I set my alarm to get me up in an hour and then went to take a nap in the next room. There was nothing I could do for him, and I was exhausted.

Of course, his mom came home and he was a perfectly behaved little angel. 😛 (He had actually calmed down before then.)

But overall, it was a good day. I’ve got to do some serious work on his sleeping patterns, but I thought that today was a good start. The only time I got frazzled was with the crying fit, but that was more a case of being worried about him than being upset or exasperated with him. Even when he was waking me up every 20 minutes or so, I’d go and look at him and he’d flash me that little smile (which he has clearly learned to use to his best advantage) as if to say “Yeah, dad, I gotcha. I just blasted my binky and made you come and give it back to me. Ain’t I just a stinker?”

I’m disappointed that I’ve had no bites in the O2 community on helping me with the Binky Blast! game, by the way. I know that, in execution, it looks like an average O2 game, not a trendsetting, flashy G7400+ game that pushes the bounds of what the system can do, so I suppose it’s failed to capture the imagination. Maybe someday I can figure out how to program it myself.

Anyway, back on track: infinite respect to the stay-at-home moms and dads out there. Today was my trial by fire, and I know there’ll be days both better and worse than this ahead. But one look at that little face is more than enough to know it’s worth it. And my reward for today? Evan’s mom came home and cuddled him all night and then went off to snooze with the little guy.

I guess she missed him too.… Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

Well…I hope you like reality shows

…because that’s probably all you’ll be seeing after Thanksgiving and well into next year at this rate.

It’s kinda funny, everyone who’s still trapped in teevee land is going into November sweeps, and here the Writer’s Guild of America is, going on strike for the first time since 1988. I remember that year, and I was “into” the behind-the-scenes machinations of TV enough at the time to be aware of the strike. That probably says more about the state of my life at that point than it does about the state of TV, but I remember the glut of oddball specials and dismal variety shows that the networks had to fall back on during that summer, and it was a mess. We didn’t have “reality TV” as such back then (and with a few shining exceptions, I think our cultural lives were richer for it; this was back before more people were interested in voting on the next American Idol than there were interested in voting for the next President of the United States).

The thing is, my wife and I were talking tonight, and we were really able to count on one hand the number of scripted shows we follow that will be affected by this strike. Now, let me say this – in principle, I’m behind the WGA on this one. The studios are putting the screws to union writers any way they can, whether it’s in the area of new media (i.e. webisodes), residuals for DVD and paid download (i.e. iTunes) usage of scripted shows, or just forgoing scripted shows altogether, even when the “non-scripted” stuff is just as scripted (just not by folks whose paychecks have to cover residuals and pension). But the number of shows we follow that would actually be affected by the strike is pretty small – Heroes, Lost, The 4400, Dead Zone…maybe Stargate Atlantis (though my enthusiasm for that show hasn’t just bottomed out, it’s hit rock bottom hard enough to leave a crater)…and then…after that…oh, wait. We’re already in the process of getting over network TV as we know it. … Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3

And that’s why we do all this stuff

Despite the fact that my wife and I are trying to get back to normal, sleep-at-night “regular people” schedules ahead of her return to work on Saturday, last night I was told at around 10 o’clock that I needed to somehow pull together a bunch of Halloween-themed songs for a function at my niece’s pre-school the next morning. I had already shorted myself considerably on the sleep front Tuesday with the idea in mind that I would, in fact, be going to sleep at a “decent” hour (i.e. not after 9 in the morning after an all-night shift with the little guy), and would wake up a couple of times to bottle-feed Evan. So needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled with this. It took me most of the night to try to track down a bunch of such tunes, which I don’t normally keep in stock in my collection, and I didn’t get around to actually beginning to assemble the aforementioned compilation until about 5:00 a.m.; Evan woke up at 5:30 and I went to feed him. I was dead to the world, basically feeding him on autopilot. It was almost 6 before he sucked down the last of the bottle (by the way, those little disposable-bottle baggie things are really cool), and he was sleepy, and I was too, only he’d actually get to lay his head down when we were done, rather than going and sorting through a bunch of “spooky” ’50s and ’60s novelty songs that I just barely peripherally remember from my oldies radio days.

I burped him to no avail, and then he held up right next to my ear and gave me a big ol’ baby BELLLLLCHH. Right in the old man’s ear.* I had to keep from laughing too loud at that and waking up the whole house, and as I was putting him down in his crib, he looked at me and laughed with a little baby smile that could’ve melted lead. He must’ve seen that it had some effect on me, because he kept doing it all day.

If there’s a better reason to become a dad than to soak up all those baby smiles and kiss away all the baby tears that I possibly can, it certainly hasn’t occurred to me yet.

* THAT’S MY BOY!

P.S. The real beauty of the Halloween music CD that I made? It then proceeded to not get used at all. For anything. Long story.… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Gadgetology Home Base

The Baby Monitor and other tales

After much complaining about our complete and utter lack of one, my wife finally got a baby monitor Sunday, and I immediately set about plugging it in and putting all the pieces in place. This has been incredibly handy to have around because, as I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned a time or two, having the Avid gear up and running is like having an airplane idling right next to you. If Evan’s down for a nap between feedings, and starts getting fidgety, I’m not going to hear it until he’s at a full-bore wail. Which probably means he’s woken his mom and I’m in really deep trouble. So a baby monitor isn’t an “oh, that would be nice” for me; it’s an “I need this.”

Abou the only drawback is that I get to listen to Evan FM all night – the aforementioned mix CD of baby music that I made for him. Good thing I like most of that stuff. But so far, it’s worked great. There’s just one little drawback. 1 night = 1 9-volt battery. Ugh.

Evan in the hood
Fig. 1 – Evan in the hood. … Read more

Categories
Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Windows to the past…and Binky Blast!

I think I may be the only person, at this point, who looks over to the left side of the screen (assuming you’re looking at the actual Scribblings page instead of crossposts on Livejournal or Myspace, or the RSS feed box I’m trying out in a couple of places, etc.) to see what I wrote on this date X years ago. Over the past month, I’ve become almost obsessed with clicking on that for myself, just to see who I was, where I was, and what I was doing this time a year ago, before I assumed my new superhero identity* of Evan’s Dad. Today’s entry from a year ago is especially interesting to me in that regard, in that it illustrates a frustration that is simply no longer a part of my life. Man, how I don’t miss that place. As distressing as I’m sure it is for anyone still working there, it heartens me to some degree that everyone else working for the person in question followed me out the door within the past year. That validates it to some extent – it wasn’t just me.

But enough about that place. For some reason – possibly the combination of lack of sleep and being in the house too much – my creative juices haven’t been so much in overdrive as they’ve just been pouring out of every orifice in a viscous ooze. This is behind the sudden burst of stuff like the Doctor Who DVD covers and, now, presented to you here for the first time…my idea for an Odyssey2 homebrew game. … Read more