I'm Billy Quizboy!

You are really smart! You have a mechanical hand and a really big head. So you're small and somewhat unsettling in appearance. That's not your fault.

Take the Which Venture Brothers character are you? Quiz at HeavyInk.com

• Pitchfork says the new Green Day album cover art looks like Sixten's work, but I think the infringement suit clearly belongs to Moore/Gibbons.
• I might have a job teaching Kaplan classes. Far from ideal, but acceptable.
• I had something else, but was distracted for a few hours. Dammit.

We find ourselves in straitened circumstances indeed, don't we? Every day a car wash sits idle; every day a taco gets halfway to a mouth but then the purchaser thinks no, no, I cannot do this. The taco is put back on the plate. The car rolls on in relative filth, its dashboard (particularly the area around the steering column) dusted with cuticle dander and atmospheric motes. Verily, the driver gets a taco at Taco Bell, which is actually cheaper than a real taco. This land is your land, this land is mine.

I hope that those of you who straddle the twin lips of the crevasse between WTF and OMG can make a break for either camp and parts beyond. I hope we stop scaring each other into groupthink hoarding. I hope we enjoy each day with a hot or cold beverage and a sweet or savory dish.

Thank you for reading, and as I ramp Achewood back up into a fairly steady mode of production, I hope you continue to enjoy the work. It'll be what it'll be, and it is my hope that as long as I have a laugh, you have a laugh.

Best wishes on a lifeboat of a year,
/C

raysimoto

OK, one more thing. Which do you think is cuter, koalas or pandas?

This is a hard one, as you must know. I struggle with this a lot. Koalas sleep like 20 hours a day, and also will tear your ass up if you bother them. And then go back to sleep, I guess. And when a cute animal's usual M.O. is drowsy passivity, but can be provoked into devastating violence... well that's just like turbo cuteness, to me. In animals, and honestly, in people too. I don't think panda bears have this kind of game, so I'll go with koalas.

• In a Salon article about Juliana Hatfield, the author casually mentions and links to the video for the song Out There by her late 80s-early 90s band, The Blake Babies. I now have a compulsive need to listen to that song. Compulsive.


• Over the course of the last week, I watched all of Sorkin's tenure on The West Wing (the first 4 seasons). Sorkin has unbelievable and much-discussed strengths, but watching all of it together highlighted some of his weaknesses as well. The biggest one is his ability to just drop a thread entirely. The core characters are all strong, but supporting characters have a way of coming and going in convenient, shoehorned ways. SPOILERS AHEAD Mandy summarily disappears after season 1, never to be mentioned again. Danny disappears without so much as a mention, but thankfully returns in season 4 in a convincing way. Mallory comes and goes, with no real rhyme, reason, or fully-sketched set of character traits. Sorkin has said that he doesn't like to plan a season out in advance because it doesn't allow him to explore the path less traveled - the result is a sufficiently and satisfyingly quirky sweater with a high number of shaggy threads hanging off it.
  
  Season 4 also reveals Sorkin's other major weakness, which is the drug and alcohol addiction that got him canned from the show. It's not so much that the writing goes downhill so much as scripts without Sorkin's fingerprints on them start to show up. "Swiss Diplomacy" is the first episode of the season written without him, and it's a serviceable job at faux Sorkin. The dialog is quirky enough but not quite right. But "The Long Goodbye" is about the worst episode of Mary Sue Bullshit TV I've ever seen. Matthew Modine is watch repairman who used to be in a punk band and now lives in Paris and gets to have sex with C.J. in the show's only sex scene. Puh-lease. Not to mention that following the show to C.J.'s home feels reeeeeally weird. We hardly ever see the show's characters in their private lives, and if we do, it's to underscore how even when you go home, the job is right there, waiting to steal you back. An unbelievable turd of an episode.



• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a huge mixed bag for me. Sometimes it's ingenious, sometimes it's boring. The boring times are invariably when the show's creators and stars seem to smugly think that they are more charming than they are, and that they are more transgressive than they are. But I have to say, when it's on (as in this season's "The Gang Solves The Gas Crisis"), man are they on.



• It sounds like I've watched a lot of TV lately, you say? Well, it turns out that working from home all the time is driving me insane, so I do what I can to have a little background noise. I can't believe I'm actually looking forward to job-hunting.



• In other job news, I got thrown a monkey wrench that means I'm not going to apply to grad school. It's a relief in many ways, and it definitely increases the likelihood that I will return to the Boston area. Hurrah!