Unlike the presidential candidates, television gives me hope for a better tomorrow
Hey, check it, yo! A Price-penned post that isn’t a Weekend Roundup! Yeah, well, don’t get used to it. I’ll be back to letting you down in no time.
But here’s the thing: I don’t really have much to jaw about, just a bunch of little bits and pieces banging around in my head, all TV-related, so I’ll just throw together a lame bulleted list of random thoughts.
- Lost is coming back! Finally! I was worried about this for a while, what with the WGA strike dragging on and on and many of our favorite shows either already dark for the season (Heroes, The Office) or in limbo (24). Well, I needn’t have worried: the Lost Season Four begins this Thursday night, promising a whole eight episodes of scripted, impenetrable mystery. Thank you in advance, J.J. Abrams, for killing eight hours of my life in 2008. Now just don’t let their death be in vain.
- In other TV show news, it turns out that because animated shows have such a long lead time, The Simpsons and King of the Hill have enough shows to finish the season, so the writers’ strike won’t affect them at all. YES!
- Smallville still has five or six episodes to go, so while it won’t go the full season, I still have several more weeks of superhero-themed soap-opera ahead. The angst! The romantic misunderstandings amongst beautiful twentysomethings! The X-ray vision!
- Battlestar Galactica is supposedly still coming back in March or April or something. Who knows anymore? I don’t know how many episodes they were able to complete before the strike, so I don’t know just how badly we’re going to be left hanging when they come to an abrupt halt. Nonetheless, I am still frakking pumped about this show. (If you watched the show, you’d know that wasn’t a typo.)
- Yes, they’re remaking Knight Rider.
- Yes, I’ll be watching it.
- Yes, even if it sucks.
- Which it will.
- I have not watched a single episode of any program that debuted during the 2007-2008 season. None of them–not one!–interested me enough to make it worth my time. You’ll just have to do better next season, Mr. TV.
- Lots of good stuff on cable, too: Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters on Discovery, Good Eats on the Food Network. (There are two men I want to be when I grow up: humorist James Lileks and Good Eats host Alton Brown.)
- Also, do you realize that I’ve never watched a single episode of Boston Legal, despite the fact that it stars the Thespian Supreme himself, the redoubtable William Shatner? What’s wrong with me?
The greatest Weekend Roundup ever
Samuel Johnson, after reading a lame poem about the wool trade, told the poet, “The subject, sir, cannot be made poetical.” There are many things in this world that can make a man wax poetic, but the wool trade is apparently not one of them.
Which brings us to this weekend. See, some weekends nothing happens of any import. No one does anything worth recounting. No one goes anywhere worth describing.
This was one of those weekends. In other words… this weekend, sir, cannot be made interesting.
Trip to the grocery store? Boring.
Laundering sheets? Even more boring.
Meals? Yes, we ate some, but none of them—not one!—was extraordinary enough to describe to you types.
Maybe next weekend will be more interesting. Maybe next weekend will find us driving around in a van solving mysteries, or rescuing New York from a plague of ghosts. Perhaps we’ll retrieve the Ark of the Covenant from the evil hands of the Nazis, or we’ll infiltrate the Death Star disguised as stormtroopers. One thing’s for certain, though: none of that stuff even came close to happening this weekend.
So I’m not even going to try to make this Weekend Roundup interesting or funny or worth your time. You’ve got better things to do than spend 15 minutes of your precious, too-short life reading about how I took a nap.
So move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
(The best part? The Internet ate this post the first time I wrote it, so I had to write this ridiculous celebration of disappointment twice.)
The life I love is writing Weekend Roundups with my friends
Yes, the Kansas City Horns are on the road again. I’m writing this in the van, as we speed westward on I-70 toward home. Of course, I’m just banging it out in Word to copy-and-paste later; no Internet connection here! As I watch the mile markers whoosh past, working hard to dutifully document the events of the past weekend, Shannon’s driving and chatting on the cell phone (dangerous), Maya’s watching a Spongebob DVD (brain-rotting), and Steven is playing a video game on his DS (time-wasting). Way to kill productivity, family! Our first-quarter numbers are not going to look good, I can tell you that.
Well, anyway, as you might have surmised, we spent the weekend in St. Louis hanging with the Telfords (that is to say, Shannon’s family). The story of that weekend goes a little something like this…
The Weekend Roundup needs somebody… SOMEBODY LIKE YOU
On these gray winter nights, when the cold presses in like prison bars and at times it seems the heat of the sun is gone forever… my mind wanders back to warmer climes, warmer times. I remember the summers of my carefree youth, one summer in particular. That summer, I got my first real six-string, bought it at the five-and-dime. Played it ’til my fingers bled. (It was the summer of ‘69.) Me and some guys from school had a band and we tried real hard. Of course, Jimmy quit and Jody got married; I shoulda known we’d never get far. But oh, when I look back now, that summer seemed to last forever. And if I had the choice, yeah… I’d always wanna be there. Those were the best days of my life… back in the summer of ‘69… two years… before… I was born.
Dang, I’m doing it again! Boy, if I had a nickel for every time I mistook Bryan Adams lyrics for my own life. Well, enough of that. You people are begging for a Weekend Roundup, and your wish is my command. After all, you know it’s true: everything I do… I do it for you.
Sorry.
Weekend Roundups are like a box of chocolates
They are made of cardboard and filled with cocoa solids, I guess? Now that I think about it, Weekend Roundups aren’t anything like boxes of chocolate. In fact, the only thing in this life that is like a box of chocolates is an actual box of chocolates. Forrest Gump said life was like a box of chocolates because you never know what you’re gonna get, but there’s a guide right there on the inside of the box that tells you exactly which ones are maple creams and which ones are rasberry nougats or whatever, I rarely eat those things so I don’t know what they put in there. But I’m just saying, I remember from the last time I saw a box of chocolates that it was a relatively simple matter to discern exactly what you were going to get. And life isn’t like that at all! It’s a constant stream of surprises, unexpected joys, and disappointments. I’m beginning to think that Forrest Gump fellow is not as intelligent as he as made himself out to be.
Wow, I kinda went off for a while on a movie that hasn’t been relevant for like like 15 years. Nuts to that! On with the Weekend Roundup, my pretties!
Happy New Year, Peoples!
Here’s to a 2008 filled with all manner of good things, such as sweet fruit pies, hefty salary increases, more sweet fruit pies, and an amicable settlement of the WGA strike.
P.S. Yeah, I know, there was no Weekend Roundup this week. Nor will there be! Can’t a dude take a vacation once a year?!