Decoded: Brad Meltzer's Decoded

Recently we happened upon a TV show called Brad Meltzer's Decoded, which was about Fort Knox and what may or may not be inside it. The idea of the show was to take a critical look at Fort Knox, visit it, and talk to people involved to see if they could figure out what's inside. They investigated rumours that all the gold that was originally in the vault is now gone, but they maintain the security to make people think it's still filled with gold because otherwise chaos would erupt. The show was certainly entertaining, and we all enjoyed it.

It turns out that this is a series which just began its second season. Each week they investigate something different, and we've watched three or four of them now. As a skeptic, I was excited by this. Perhaps this would be TV's first show to investigate these kinds of rumours and urban legends from a truly skeptical point of view – a TV version of the Skeptoid podcast. There have been other shows that claimed to investigate these types of things, but they generally sensationalized what they were investigating and ignored the scientific method. I've seen a number of shows that start by assuming rumours to be true and then decide that because they failed to disprove them, they must be true. That's not how it works. A prime example is a show called Ancient Aliens, which Ryan and I watched a few weeks ago. I will have to get to that one in another article, which means I'll have to watch the show again. It may be difficult to write through the fits of laughter I will undoubtedly have at what they called "evidence".

Brad Meltzer is an author who writes political thrillers as well as comic books. I had never heard of him until this show – or didn't think I had. A couple of weeks after we first watched the show, my son was looking over our "bookshelf of books we hope to read someday if we ever find some free time" and found a book of his called The Tenth Justice. I don't even know where it came from. Anyway, Meltzer only appears in the show in front of a green screen showing weird symbols (including the phrase "U83R L33T H4X3RS") and on the phone. He has a team of three investigators (a lawyer, a historian, and an engineer) who do the real work, travelling around the country (and across the globe – they were in Germany in one episode) visiting places, doing research, and interviewing people.

They do manage to find people who were really involved in the things they're investigating. When talking about Edgar Allen Poe's connection to the Declaration of Independence, they talked to a distant relative of Poe's. They talked to General George Patton's granddaughter as well as descendants of both Billy the Kid and the man who killed him, Pat Garrett. They talked to the national head of the KKK (and you could see the discomfort on their faces as they interviewed him). They talked to someone who's actually been inside the vault at Fort Knox, or at least claimed to have been. They talked to the last living person who helped carve Mount Rushmore. But sometimes their interview choices are less useful, like the head of some fringe conspiracy theory group. One time they interviewed the bartender at a bar near Fort Knox, and another patron happened to overhear and offered up his own theories.

In one or two episodes, I found that Meltzer seemed to be sensationalizing a bit – he'd say something like "We've learned that <X> happened" when we'd learned nothing of the sort. We'd heard someone say that X happened, or we've perhaps surmised it, but he seemed to jump to "learned" a little too quickly for my liking. But most of the time, they do a pretty good job of ignoring the rumours and meaningless "evidence" and taking the anecdotal evidence with the appropriate grain of salt. I was impressed that after investigating the death of General George Patton (there have been theories that he was murdered ever since he died in a car accident in 1945), one of the crew basically stated the null hypothesis – that unless we have compelling evidence proving otherwise, we must assume that the accident that killed Patton was just an accident.

Unfortunately, they don't always find what they set out to find. This is not a failing of the show; sometimes the required information is just not available. We still don't know what's inside Fort Knox. We still don't know where the original Declaration of Independence is. We still don't know whether Billy the Kid was actually killed by Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner. But some things do seem to have been dug up. For example, General George Patton died in a car accident, but the soldier who was at fault in the accident was never charged and there was no autopsy. This led conspiracy theorists to suspect that he was murdered, and some nutcases extremists even suspected it was done at the command of Dwight Eisenhower. But after the investigation, it was discovered that Patton himself ordered that the man at fault not be court martialled, and that his wife requested that there be no autopsy. The cynic in me wonders if these things were truly "discovered" by Meltzer's team and weren't previously known, or if they just set up the episode to make it look like they'd discovered it.

My kids and I are enjoying Decoded, so we've set up the PVR to record new episodes. The boys also like to listen to Skeptoid, which I encourage. I'm happy to play my part in raising the next generation of critical thinkers. Unfortunately, the History channel won't let us watch episodes from season 1 online, though it does give a helpful link so that I can buy them from iTunes. It'd be nice if History would get with the times and let us watch past episodes online like many other channels and networks do. Hey Brad Meltzer – decode that.

The Plot of Every Episode of Criminal Minds

Criminal Minds is a cop show police procedural drama that deals with the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) of the FBI, and how they profile and catch serial killers. It's well-written, interesting, action-packed, and has a great cast. During the 2010-2011 TV season, it was the tenth-highest rated primetime show – and if you consider just the dramas (removing American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and football), it's number 4 behind NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, and The Mentalist. Gail loves this show and I enjoy it as well, but some episodes seem a little formulaic. If you've never seen it, fear not – here is a plot summary of the majority of episodes thus far: 

Opening: We meet the psycho killer (usually a man) and his most recent victim (usually a woman). The victim is killed and the body dumped.

Cut to someone finding the body and the subsequent police investigation. Hey, this killing is similar to that one last week, and that other one three weeks ago. We better call in the FBI.

Opening credits.

Fade in on a small airplane in flight. Someone, usually Hotch or Rossi, does a voice-over of a meaningful quotation. It's a little-known fact that Thomas Gibson, who plays Hotch, is contractually forbidden from smiling on Criminal Minds – he's been really grumpy since Dharma left. Joe Mantegna (Rossi) is the older veteran who frequently gives advice to his younger colleagues. He doesn't seem old enough to be grandfatherly, but he's at least friendly – he replaced Inigo Montoya Mandy Patinkin after a couple of seasons because it was decided that having two actors who weren't allowed to smile was a total downer for the audience.

After the quotation, we cut to the plane's interior, where the members of the BAU are examining how the victims were abducted and the locations of the body dumps. I'm always impressed at how they can talk about whatever town they're going to like they've lived there all their lives. They can look at a map and know what the locals call each part of the town, and whether a particular section of town is industrial or residential or new or old or rich or poor. They talk about the "unsub" (short for unidentified subject) and what's making him do these terrible things based on who he's selected as his victims and how they are abducted, tortured, killed, and disposed of.

Cut back to another person who is vaguely similar to the first victim we saw – usually in looks, occasionally in some other way like occupation. We see the killer stalking and eventually abducting her.

The BAU has arrived at the crime scene and is finding all sorts of clues that the local police missed. Police across the country must hate this show, since they are frequently portrayed as well-meaning and willing to help but not very effective on their own. The team adjourns to a meeting room in the local police station, where they find links between the victims with the help of über-hacker Penelope Garcia. If you ever watch NCIS, Garcia is the Abby of this show – both are sweet, extroverted women with mad haxor skillz and an outlandish wardrobe. Abby loves all her co-workers like family while Garcia is flirty with the men and never talks to the women. Garcia seems to be just a hacker, while Abby is a general forensic scientist with advanced knowledge of other things like chemistry, molecular biology, and weapons. Just like all other computer forensic people on TV, Garcia types queries in English and never uses a mouse. She can instantly cross-reference things in any database in the world, with vague references like "look for someone with an unfinished degree in American literature, who owns a gray or silver Honda sedan, and whose mother died of lung cancer in the mid-90's."

After another glimpse of the killer and his next victim, we have a big meeting with all the local police officers and the BAU team. The team explains the profile to the cops, telling them what kind of person they are looking for, and giving hints as to what kinds of behaviours they might see. "We're looking for a white male, 40-45, probably tall, say 6'2" to 6'4". He's confident but not very friendly; not the life of the party, but not a loner either. He may work as a welder or in construction. When eating an Oreo, he doesn't pull it apart and scrape the filling off with his teeth. ["What a psycho" says one of the cops.] His victims are tall dark-haired left-handed women 25-30 with glasses. He meets them at Citibank – they start to talk when she borrows his pen."

Back to the killer. We get a little bit of insight in to how he thinks or why he's doing this, usually a flashback to his childhood as he remembers something his mother / father / teacher / caregiver did or didn't do, or some traumatic event like when his brother died in a bizarre gardening accident.

The team splits up. Some go to interview people associated with the crime – hotel managers, store owners, taxi drivers – while some stay behind and continue analyzing the existing evidence. Some of the people interviewed are quite obviously innocent, but at least one matches the profile and seems shifty. Another major clue is found – a link between the victims or crimes that wasn't noticed before. The suspect pool gets pared down, but they still don't have a name.

Another cut to the unsub and his victim. His torture is almost done and she realizes she's likely going to die soon.

At this point, Derek calls Garcia again asking for more information, and she flirts shamelessly with him, usually on speakerphone. Strangely, none of the other team members is uncomfortable about listening to this, even though her version of "flirting" might get her fired from most jobs that don't involve phone sex. Someone on the team has has just discovered some little tidbit and when Garcia adds that to her query, she finds the unsub's name. He's either someone they have already talked to (but not the shifty guy), or he works or used to work at the same place as someone they've already talked to. Another query and Garcia finds his address. They go there. He's not home.

Now that they know the killer's identity, they try to figure out where he might be holding his next victim. The killer, who usually doesn't know his identity has been discovered, sticks to his MO thus making him easier to find. He's generally holed up in the house he grew up in, or a cottage or business left to him by a dead relative, or an abandoned building near where he used to work, before he was fired a few weeks ago. Eventually Derek searches the house with his gun drawn, showing off his sculpted muscles. Hey Derek, you're obviously an XL, so you really should stop buying those L sized T-shirts.

After a standoff with Derek and/or Hotch, the killer is cornered and usually arrested. Unless: he's not just a killer, he's a sadistic torturer and general whack-job, in which case he's killed. Unless: he's a sadistic torturer and general whack-job who gets under the skin of someone on the BAU team, in which case he's arrested and will escape from custody in a future episode.

Regardless of what happens to the killer, the abducted person survives and after another meaningful quotation, the team flies home.

So there you go – six seasons of Criminal Minds in one handy place. You're welcome.

Postscript: When this article was mostly done, I decided to watch an episode of Criminal Minds from beginning to end while paying attention to what I'd written, just to confirm the order of events and such. We didn't have any recorded, so I started looking through the PVR guide for upcoming episodes. For two weeks I looked for one that might match my "summary", but I couldn't find one. "Nope, that's a season finale with a cliffhanger, that's an episode focussed solely on Reid, that's one where one or more members of the BAU are themselves kidnapped, that's one where they know who the killer is from the start, ..." Here I am with an article on how formulaic this show is, and then I couldn't find an episode that matched the formula. More irony for you.

The Guild

While listening to Wil Wheaton's podcast a few months ago, he played an interview he did with Felicia Day, creator, writer, and star of The Guild, a web comedy series (a TV show but only available on the web). I had never heard of The Guild, but Wil did a number of guest appearances on it and kept talking about how great it was, so I thought I'd give it a try. The Guild is undoubtedly one of the funniest shows I've ever seen, on or off TV. The writing is brilliant, the characters are hilarious, and there are even shocking plot twists and cliffhanger moments that make you look forward to Tuesdays. Each episode is only 6-8 minutes long, and a new episode is released every Tuesday. A "season" lasts for about 12 weeks and season four just finished last week. I started watching The Guild when I was off work, so I managed to catch up with all of seasons 1 through 3 in a couple of days, and during season 4 I tried to watch it every Tuesday night.

The Guild is about a group of six people who play some kind of online game, similar to World of Warcraft (which I've never played). Note that you don't need to know anything about gaming (I don't) to enjoy the show. The game has taken over their lives and they even use each other's game character names when talking in real life. In fact, of the six of them, I only know the real name of one of them – Clara, because her character name is also Clara. Oh wait, Bladezz's name is Simon but even his sister calls him Bladezz. The other characters (except Tink, I believe) have had their real names mentioned, but only a couple of times. The main six characters are part of a guild known as The Knights of Good, meaning that they play together as a group and fight against other guilds. The guild members are:

• Codex is the main character, played by Felicia Day. She's a single woman who's very insecure and always concerned with what the other guild members think of her.
• Zaboo is a young man of Indian descent who is good with computers but has no social skills whatsoever. (When he moves in with Vork, Vork tells him, "Men only shower together when there's more than one shower.") He lived with his very controlling mother until season 3 when he moved in with Vork.
• Vork is a 40-something balding guy who is extremely cheap and follows rules to the letter. He's the leader of the guild.
• Tinkerballa (known as Tink) is a bit of a mystery. I believe she's a med or pre-med student, though her personal life is pretty much off-limits to the other guild members. I don't think they even know her real name. Tink is beautiful and not only is she well aware of this, she uses it to her advantage whenever possible.
• Clara is a stay-at-home mother of three (or two, depending on the season – one seems to have vanished) very young children, who she routinely ignores while playing the game. Her husband, George aka Mr. Wiggly (named after.... um, never mind) once joined the guild temporarily but was completely inept at the game.
• Bladezz is a high school student who works at a local burger joint, "Cheesybeards". Bladezz is always making off-colour sexual comments and was described in a recent episode as "skeevey". Good word.

The Axis of Anarchy is another guild that the Knights of Good are constantly battling with. Their leader is Fawkes, who has a strange love/hate relationship with Codex. Fawkes always has this little "I'm smarter than you but I suppose I can bring myself down to your level" smirk on his face when he's talking to someone. Fawkes is played by Wil Wheaton, who does a great job of playing an evil yet oddly charming douchebag.

When I first started watching it, I assumed that it was done as a web series because it wasn't good enough to be picked up by one of the big networks. <sarcasm>Because you know, the sitcoms that are shown on the big networks are all really good. cough $#*! My Dad Says cough</sarcasm> But it looks as "professional" as any network sitcom, the actors are all really good, and as I said before it's very funny. If it were a network show, they'd have to expand it to 22 minutes per episode, and tripling the length of each episode would likely water it down too much. Having a "live studio audience" watching the taping of each episode would not make the show any better, and God help Felicia Day if she were to add a laugh-track.

Being an internet-based show aimed at geeks, it is a little surprising that the website for The Guild is so confusing. If I were to design it, I'd have a page for each season and links to each episode in that season all in one place, so it's easy to find episodes. There is a blog that has a page for each episode, but that bumps you off to Bing where the episodes are hosted. Once you're there it's not easy to find other episodes – the "related videos" on the right seems to be a random assortment of episodes from all the seasons. One page I went to (season 4 episode 10) had a link to season 4 episode 5 instead so I had to start poking around until I found the right episode. From the time I started looking to the time I was actually watching the right episode was at least five minutes – should be a matter of seconds.

But being an internet-based show aimed at geeks, it is not particularly surprising that there is a fan podcast for The Guild. It's called Knights of the Guild and features a guy named Kenny who is a member of the crew, though he hasn't mentioned (in the few podcasts I've listened to) exactly what he does. After every episode, he does a "companioncast" during which he interviews many cast and crew members and talks about that episode. This is recorded right after the episode was filmed, which is months before it actually airs. Most of these interviews are pretty interesting, though some are kind of Chris Farley-esque. "Remember when <event> happened? That was soooooo funny" isn't much of an interview question. It does seem a little weird to have a 90+ minute podcast about a 7-minute episode, but whatever, it's fun.

I suppose The Guild is not for everybody, but I think a lot of internet geeks like myself (I have a blog, I use twitter, and I use terms like "epic FAIL") would love it. As I said, you don't need to be a gamer (or even a geek) to like the show, but if you're a gamer or a geek, give it a try at watchtheguild.com.

Star Trek – the acting career killer

I watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager a little while ago, and wondered what happened to the actors on that show. After some investigation on Wikipedia and IMDB, I found that other than Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine), none of them had had significant roles in anything after Voyager ended. I did some more searching and found that to be true of just about every actor in every Star Trek series.

Note that when I say "nothing" below, I mean nothing of significance in terms of movie or TV acting. Many of these actors have gone on to do other things (directing, stage acting, music, etc.), and some have appeared in single episodes of shows or bit parts in movies, but I'm looking for significant roles.

Star Trek

William Shatner went on to to do T.J. Hooker and Boston Legal and some movie roles, but is mostly famous for being William Shatner.

Walter Koenig was on Babylon 5 for a while.

Leonard Nimoy, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei: nothing.

TNG

Patrick Stewart : X-Men, lots of voice acting

Brent Spiner: A small part in Independence Day

Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Wil Wheaton: nothing.

Michael Dorn was on DS9 for a year or two.

DS9

Terry Farrell was on Becker for four years

Avery Brooks, Nana Visitor, Cirroc Lofton, Armin Shimerman, Colm Meaney: nothing.

Alexander Siddig was in a few episodes of 24

Rene Auberjonois was on Boston Legal for a couple of years

Voyager

Jeri Ryan – Boston Public, Shark

Kate Mulgrew, Robert Beltran, Tim Russ, Roxann Dawson, Robert Duncan McNeill, Garrett Wang, Robert Picardo, Ethan Philips, Jennifer Lien : Nothing

Enterprise

Scott Bakula, Jolene Blalock, Linda Park, Anthony Montgomery, John Billingsley: nothing

Dominic Keating (Reed) was on Lost for four episodes and Connor Trinneer (Trip) was on Stargate Atlantis for 9 episodes.

---

So of all of the forty actors listed above, only Shatner and Stewart have had starring roles in anything else. Of the rest, only Jeri Ryan and Terry Farrell have had anything more than a recurring guest role on a TV show. That's four out of forty that have done anything significant since Star Trek. The other 90% have seen their acting careers wane or vanish completely.

Update: Just to be clear, I am not saying that these people are all washed-up has-beens, and I'm not suggesting that they are all sitting at home staring at the phone hoping someone will call them with a gig. Like I said, some are directing, some are acting on the stage, others may have moved on to other things. I know from reading his blog that Wil Wheaton is now a writer, blogger, and part-time actor, and is perfectly happy with that. I just figured that with the number of actors that had become successful through a Star Trek TV show, a greater percentage would stay with TV/movie acting and more would end up with starring or major supporting roles than actually did.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Everyone is talking about Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and how fantastic it is and what a genius Joss Whedon is. I like a good funny as much as the next guy, so I checked it out last week and honestly, I just don't get it. It was pretty funny ("Wow, sarcasm! That's original!"), and Neil Patrick Harris was really good, but genius? I wouldn't go that far.

Maybe I need to see more of Whedon's stuff. I've never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, or Firefly. We did rent the Firefly movie "Serenity" and it was OK, but I thought the same thing at the time: "It was OK, but what's the big deal?" I didn't worry too much about Serenity since I figured you had to know something about the TV show in order to fully appreciate the movie. But Dr. Horrible is a standalone thing and while I enjoyed it, I still didn't get the "genius".

Canadian Sports Personalities - Best and Worst

I read an article on another blog on the best Canadian non-hockey sports announcers. There were also specific articles on the hockey people and the anchor desk people. I thought I'd put together my own list of Canadian sports announcers, writers and broadcasters, good and bad. These are in no particular order.

Best

• Bob McCown — simply the best. Host of Prime Time Sports on the FAN 590, one of my favourite podcasts and according to Bob, "the country's most listened-to sports talk presentation". Says what he thinks, doesn't care if he offends anyone, doesn't (usually) pull punches during interviews, knows his stuff inside and out, and he's funny too.
• Stephen Brunt — he writes for the Globe and Mail, which I don't read, so I only know him from his appearances on Prime Time Sports, but he's very knowledgable. And he's from Hamilton.
• Jim Kelley — writes for sportsnet.ca, and also appears on Prime Time Sports. He's in the Hockey Hall of Fame as a writer, and for good reason. He knows more than just hockey though. He, Brunt, and McCown make PTS the best sports show there is.
• Dan Shulman — Used to do play-by-play for the Blue Jays. Smart guy, and just an all-around great broadcaster. So good, ESPN grabbed him and hasn't let go.
• Rob Faulds — I didn't like him much when I first heard him on Jays telecasts, but he used to host Prime Time Sports when McCown was away, and I grew to respect him. Listening to him on the radio doesn't feel like listening to the radio, it feels like talking sports over a couple of beers with your buddy.
• Jennifer Hedger — smart, knows her stuff, and easy on the eyes. Married to Sean McCormick (see the worst list below), but nobody's perfect.
• Eliot Friedman — another former guest host on Prime Time Sports, but haven't heard him for a while. Works on HNIC, though I think he's underused there.
• Tom Cheek and Jerry Howarth — Cheek called every single Blue Jays game, including pre- and post-season, from their first day in 1977 until 2004, a streak of over 4,300 consecutive games. I grew up listening to him and Jerry calling Jays games on the radio.
• Don Chevrier and Buck Martinez — called Jays games on TV in the 80's and 90's. Buck went on to manage the Jays, and I was disappointed when he didn't return to the broadcast booth afterwards.
• Jay Onrait — host of SportsCentre on TSN. Not particularly insightful, since he's just reporting the sports news, but he's pretty funny. The last couple of years, he's done a real-time blog on trade deadline day which was very funny.

Worst

• Mike Toth — I used to really hate this guy, but he's growing on me. Now I only hate him a little bit. He hosts Prime Time Sports when Bob McCown is away, and he's OK, but I prefer when Rob Faulds used to guest-host.
• Sean McCormick — they call him The Dude. Or perhaps he calls himself that. Just seems a little too full of himself.
• Michael Landsberg — speaking of full of himself...
• Warren Sawkiw — did Jays broadcasts for a year after Tom Cheek passed away, then they fired him. Haven't seen him since. Didn't seem to add much to the broadcast, and had too much of a "golly gee whiz, I'm in the big league!" air about him.
• Don Cherry — very entertaining and I enjoy watching Coach's Corner because of him, but what an idiot. Thinks that any hockey game without a fight is a waste of time. Thinks that wearing helmets and visors to protect your head and face makes you a pussy. Hey Don, the truth is that it just makes you smart.
• Nick Kypreos — thinks along Don Cherry's lines. He was a goon when he played, and thinks that players who don't know one end of the stick from the other but are great fighters make a valuable contribution. News flash Nick — the '94 Rangers would have won the Cup even without you. He's so pro-player anti-owners it's not funny, which was particularly annoying during the lockout.
• Fergie Olver and Tony Kubek — both worked for the Jays in the '80s. To be honest, I don't remember what it was I didn't like about these guys, I just remember that when watching a game on TV where these guys were broadcasting, I'd turn the sound down on the TV and turn the radio on. I do remember that Fergie also hosted a kids game show called Just Like Mom where kids and their moms competed as a team against other kids and their moms. Fergie's wife was the co-host.

A bit of both

• Pierre McGuire — Most of the time, he's fine, though he talks really quickly. (I do too, but I'm not a professional broadcaster.) He knows the fine points of hockey very well. However, when he gets excited about something, he talks a mile a minute and STARTS TO YELL. Then I can't listen to him anymore.

Them cops is smart

I'm watching an episode of CSI: New York. On the show, someone is blogging, and the police are trying to find out where he's blogging from. One of them comes up with the following bit of brilliance:

I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic. It might give us an IP address.

Gail and I both literally laughed out loud. Even better, a few minutes later the same person is seen manipulating a smoothly scrolling 3-D detailed map of NYC. Sure, you can throw one of those together in minutes with VB.

The things you miss when you're a kid

I found out something a little while ago that was a little bit disturbing. When I was a kid, I used to watch the TV show Laverne and Shirley — this would have been in the late '70's. I have since found out that one of the recurring jokes in the show was that Shirley and her boyfriend Carmine never had sex — Shirley refused. I had no idea about this (since I was only 8-10 at the time), so who knows how many jokes I just didn't get while watching this show in my youth. That made me wonder what other things happened in TV shows at the time that I was not privy to because of my age and relative inexperience in the ways of the world.

Maybe Captain Stubing had a coke problem. Or maybe Steve Austin got addicted to painkillers after his surgery. Did Mr. Roarke want to make other people's fantasies come true because he was abused as a child? Maybe Arnold and Willis got to live with rich Mr. Drummond as a reward for being confidential informants into gang-related activities in Harlem. We already know that Gilligan's Island was a mystery drama masquerading as a comedy. Were Charlie's Angels really hookers who solve crimes? Was Jack Tripper really gay?!?! The possibilities are endless.

24 in '94

If you're a fan of the TV show 24, and you know anything about computers, you have to watch this video, which places the show in 1994, rather than 2007. Not only does it capture Jack and the gang pretty well ("dammit!"), but the computer references are hilarious.

"He's hacking into the mainframe"
"We just installed Windows 3.1, there's no way!"

OK, so Windows 3.1 was about three years old in 1994, but still.

Enough ripping already

One of the TV shows Gail and I have liked to watch for years is Law & Order. In more recent years, we've also enjoyed its cousins, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. For those of you who don't watch them, each of these shows occasionally has an episode they describe as being "Ripped from the headlines", where they take a real-life high-profile news story, and write an episode about it. Of course, they change the names and some details and stuff, but it's usually pretty obvious what story they're talking about. For example, a few years ago, they did one about a man who was arrested and tried for several murders, including that of his wife's sister. Later on, it was revealed that his wife was directly involved in the killings, and was just as evil as he was, if not more. This was the story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. There was another one about a six-year-old beauty pageant winner who was murdered. For the most part, the stories had some obvious connections to the real-life stories, but diverged in some way as the story went on.

I think these "ripped from the headlines" episodes were fairly popular, since they began becoming more and more frequent, and then I think the writers just started getting lazy. In the last month or so, there was a L&O story about a female astronaut who suffered a mental breakdown, and drove across several states (wearing adult-sized diapers to avoid having to stop) to confront her lover and his wife. The other day, we started watching one (this was L&O:CI) involving a pudgy bleach-blonde former stripper who had become famous by marrying a 90-year-old billionaire and inheriting his estate on his death. Her 20-something son died of a drug overdose shortly after the birth of her daughter, and then she died mysteriously shortly after that. When the story started to deal with paternity issues, we got bored and turned it off.

Note to the L&O writers: enough of the "ripped from the headlines" stuff already. It's been done. To death. Drop it. It's one thing to write a story that vaguely resembles a news item, but when you take the news item, modify the names of the people involved, and that's it, well, that's hardly even worthy of the term "writing", is it?

Battlestar Galactica

I've heard in a number of places about what a great show Battlestar Galactica is, so I finally rented the pilot mini-series last weekend. Gail and I have been watching it over the last couple of days (and we're not done yet), and I'm very impressed. We both remember watching the original show back in the late '70s; it only played for one season (1978 — thanks Wikipedia), but we both remember Starbuck, Apollo, Commander Adama, and Boxie (annoying little kid and his weird robot dog), plus the Cylons (with the cool red light bouncing back and forth across their face). The new series is different but cool — Starbuck and Boomer are now female characters (though Starbuck is still a cocky bastard; that I remember from the original series), and some Cylons are human-looking, and the special effects are obviously better. There are a few familiaries in the show — the scientist Dr. Baltar looks and sounds a lot like Dr. Julian Bashir from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Colonel Tigh used to be on Cold Squad, a cop show set in Vancouver that we used to watch. Also, one of the early scenes on Caprica is shot at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver; I visited there when I was living in Redmond back in '91.

Now all I need to do is find someone who owns the first season on DVD and borrow it! I could probably find them on the internet and download them, but that would be illegal. Then again, if I were to download them, watch them once, and then erase the files, how would that be different from borrowing the DVD from someone?

Crossing Jordan premiere bumped

From TV Squad:

Sorry, Crossing Jordan fans. NBC has pushed back the season premiere, in favor of a new game show hosted by Bob Saget. The game show is called 1 vs 100 and it's a game where one contestant battles 100 other people to win $1 million. It's the American version of a game show that is already popular in Europe. The series premiere is at 8 pm on October 20th, as a lead-in to the season premiere of Las Vegas.

NBC hasn't announced a new premiere date for Crossing Jordan.

Question: Why is Bob Saget still on TV? Has he ever been funny?

Killing time

I have some time to kill before I play baseball at 9:30 (!) tonight. Since I live so far from work (~70 km one way), there's no point in my going home and then coming back — best case, that's an hour and a half of driving — so I'm hanging out at work. What better way to spend that time than blogging?

We'll start with 24, which Gail and I have been addicted to for the last 5 seasons. The season finale was this past Monday, and it did a pretty good job of wrapping up what was actually a rather boring season, by 24's standards. Oh sure, several main characters died (Michelle, Tony, Edgar), so that was exciting, but the whole gas cannister plot went on too long, and I didn't like the way the writers handled the traitorous President — I think it would have been better if he was a strong man acting indecisive and weak, rather than actually having him be indecisive and weak and manipulated by some bald guy (who they never explained, now that I think of it). The only thing that we know about him is that his name is Graham. (I'm just assuming that it's spelled that way, not Graeme. Call me pessimistic.) Maybe they're keeping him as next year's villain, though one thing on this show that you can never do is figure out who the real bad guy is — as soon as you think you do, they bring out another guy who's giving the first guy orders. They also kind of abandoned the whole "real-time" thing at the end, where Jack is is knocked unconscious and abducted (in LA) by the Chinese, and five minutes later wakes up in the middle of the Pacific on (quite literally) a slow boat to China.

Let's move on to baseball now. Barry Bonds hit home run number 714 in his career the other night, tying Babe Ruth for 2nd on the all-time list. Big freakin' deal. Well, I suppose it is, but I just can't get too excited about it, firstly because it's not a record anymore (Hank Aaron surpassed it over 30 years ago), and secondly because we all know that a good number of those home runs (at least all the ones hit in the last 5 years) were done while Bonds was juiced up on steroids. The evidence is painfully clear. Bonds played 14 seasons with the Pirates and Giants, and averaged 32 homers a year in that time — he hit over 45 home runs only once. He also averaged 33 steals per season. Then 2000 rolls around — the year Bonds turned 36, and for the next 5 seasons, he averages 52 homers (over 45 every year, maxing out at a major league record 73) and only 9 steals per season. His batting average over those 5 years was .339, while his career average before that was only .288. Then MLB announces that they will begin steroid testing in 2005, and lo and behold, Bonds sits out almost the entire season with an injury. But he's not on steroids. <Dr.Evil>Rrrrrrriiiiiiight.</Dr.Evil>

On an unrelated baseball note, the Jays finally demoted Josh Towers to AAA Syracuse yesterday after yet another dismal outing. He didn't lose the game because the Jays came back to tie it (and then lost it later), but he didn't even last 2 innings. It's about damn time. I have nothing against Towers — he pitched really well last year — but he's 1-and-freakin'-8. For a second-year player, that's at least 2 losses too many. It's not like he was going 7 innings and losing 3-2 games either — he was getting shelled almost every time out. His one win was very impressive though - he went 8 innings in that one, so maybe John Gibbons figured he'd found his groove or something. Obviously he hadn't, so they've sent him down to try and pick things up there. In 2001, Roy Halladay was sent down all the way to single-A ball to "re-build his delivery" — essentially learning how to pitch again. By the end of that year he was back in the majors, and look how that turned out — a Cy Young award in 2003, and he might have won another one last year if he hadn't broken his leg in July and missed the rest of the season. I don't know if single-A ball is the answer for Towers (heard someone on the radio this morning refer to him as "Fawlty" Towers), but staying in the majors isn't working for him at this point, and it's certainly not helping the Jays out either.

Well, I think that's all I have to say for now, and I still have an hour before my game. Well, since I'm at work, maybe I should, oh I don't know, do some work.

Technorati tags: 24 Baseball Barry Bonds Blue Jays Josh Towers