Author Archives: Rob MacD

I’ve added another show to my “watch every week” repetoire – Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  This does not necessarily mean that I love the show.  At the moment I’m undecided, but more about that later.
Here, by the way, is my current “watch every week” repetoire, broken down into days:

Monday:  Nothing really.  What am I missing?
Tuesday:  Nothing really. Again, is there anything on I should be watching?
Wednesday: Don’t think there’s anything here.  Should there be?
Thursday:  Watch Survivor.  Download The Office, and download Extras (watch them next day)
Friday:  Nada.
Saturday:  Now it will be Battlestar Galactica, that it’s back on.  Depending on anticipation, I may not be able to wait, and will download Friday night’s US airing.
Sunday: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  Amazing Race. The Wire.

That’s it.  Not a lot of TV for me right now. If you think there’s a show I should be watching, let me know.

So, anyway, back to Studio 60.  Back in the days of Sports Night, I was an Aaron Sorkin fan.  I dug the fast-paced dialogue and witty, intelligent things the characters said.  I liked the way the show ran.  Bam, bam, bam.  For whatever reason, I didn’t bother following him to The West Wing.  Even though the segments of The West Wing I did see didn’t really thrill me too much, I thought I was maybe missing out on some great writing and acting.  So, this time, with his third show starting, I made an effort to be on board from the beginning.
I watched, and enjoyed, the first episode quite a bit.  Then, dammit, I read a Salon review of that episode.  It talked about how Sorkin’s style of writing, and the hyper-intensity of the characters/moments and of what they say, and the fast-paced style really fit well in a setting like the White House, and that made us care about those characters.  Will we, the reviewer asked, care as much when the characters display the same qualities, intensities and manic quippings all in service of a late-night comedy show.  In other words, we dig clever things that are said on the long fast walks down corridors as the President balances Middle East turmoil, pouting subordinates and whatever familial problems his wife is complaining about, but will we dig it as much when the outcome isn’t, perhaps, so important to us?  In other other words, fast-paced drama works in the White House, but can it work in a late-night comedy studio?
I don’t know if I buy the reviewer’s question, but being aware of it has made me more critical of the show than it perhaps deserve I be.  As long as the events are important to the characters, that’s all that should matter, right?  Yet, it does leave me thinking “ease up on the self-importance”.    I don’t want to be thinking that, though.

So, I want to like the show, but I am not really digging the Sorkinisms.  I really didn’t like last week’s fast-paced walking scene with Matthew Perry and Nate Corddry.  It was too manicured.  The dialogue is too precious. 
And that Amanda Peet network president is too precious, too.
Another thing I don’t like about the show:  As of yet, there hasn’t been any sketch or line from the pretend sketch show that I found to be particularly good.  Much of the humour is too collegiate, I think, to be found on a sketch comedy show.

Anyway, who am I?  I’ll still make it part of my repetoire, but I won’t be surprised if it eventually makes its way onto my “I’m on the computer and that show is about to start. Do I stop browsing the internet and go watch it?  Hmm, wonder what’s new on YouTube?” list.

We got our two new kittens today from the Humane Society.  The orange and white male is called Zoozle, and the calico female with the goatee is called Mafia.  Karyn is at work and hasn’t had any time to be with them at home.  Cameron and I are totally smitten by the kittens.
Zoozle is more of the adventurer so far, whereas Mafia has a more subdued personality.
They both have colds, which hopefully won’t bother them too much or too long.

Technorati Tags: kittens

Technorati Tags: kittens

Yesterday, I was riding out to the Ch’town Mall on the transit (Bus 1 for those keeping track).  A woman, a young lady, was sitting beside me.  She’s what I would stereotype as a non-fighting Tammy.  A hard-workin’ Tammy.  An Island girl from the lower end of the social spectrum, I’d guess.  I assumed she was on her way back home to her family after a hard day of work.  Anyway, at one point I noticed, on her hair, on a strand of hair (her hair was pulled back, but at the end of the day, more than a few strands were sticking out), was this tiny, tiny little bug.  Perhaps a little spider? It was crawling down her hair-strand to her head.
At that moment, I realised, I had options. I could tell her, or not tell her. I could help her out by pointing out that she had a bug in her hair.  This, I rationalised, could be potentially embarrassing for her, and for me (why was I looking at her hair?).  So, I decided not to tell her.  It was a pretty tiny little thing.  And who knows, maybe it was on its way back to its family too.

I used to work at MBS Radio.  I left the company primarily because I got tired of working for a company that didn’t seem to care one iota about the people who worked for it.  For the most part, I enjoyed working with the people I worked with.  But the company itself drove me (as it had countless others) away.
Anyway, I was made aware that the Charlottetown stations (CFCY and Magic93) are looking for a new producer, and that their online advertisement was rather, um, unique?
Here it is, in part:

PRODUCER

Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

Some say that primates are a gene or two short from
being human … so we could actually hire a monkey as a producer, but we’re
looking for more than a button pusher … we want someone with that special touch,
a magical touch when it comes to producing commercials and station
imaging.  A producer
who understands the entire process of production from client expectations to
programming consistency.

“we could actually hire a monkey”.  Is this really supposed to entice a potential producer to come and work there?  Anyway, perhaps it’s just sour-grapes on my part, but this made me laugh.

At any rate, I see a potential sitcom for Bolo, the Monkey President.

Today a bunch of VIPs were handing out special literacy editions of the provincial paper.  In a front-page “Literacy: The Challenge” fact box, it states that “43 per cent, or 40,000 Islanders have reading skills so limited that they cannot deal with most printed materials such as newspapers or telephone books (source: Provincial Literacy Secretariat)”.
That has me wondering what percentage of Islanders have limited math skills too.  Because by my calculations (admittedly arrived at by using a calculator) 43 per cent of the population of Islanders (which, I believe, is around 137,000) equals almost 59,000.  That’s quite a difference in figures, Secretariat.  Perhaps you mean “43 per cent, or 40,000 Islanders who are of an age where they should have competent reading skills etc.”?

Another fact from the same fact box:  “Recent international tests place 15-year-olds in P.E.I. lower than other provinces in reading and writing.”  What kind of vague  information is this?  How much lower, and lower than how many other provinces?  By this statistic we could be third highest, since “other provinces” signifies at least two provinces rank higher.

Our family cat died about a year ago, I think.  At the time, all of us, I think, were pretty sure that the days of us living with feline companionship were over.  We’d done the cat thing, and it went very well, even if it ended sadly and suddenly.
A few months later, though, we started talking seriously about getting a dog.  The concept was appealing to us, to the point where we were searching for a dog to call our own, with the full intention of adopting him/her.  However, as the days turned to weeks turned to months, and as it never seemed to come to fruition, I think the idea of a having a dog began to become engulfed by the realities of having a dog. 
The desire to search for a dog weakened, and now, I think the very strong urge for us to get a dog has passed.  If we had adopted a dog, I have no doubt that we’d be very happy with our choice.  But the fact remains that we kept putting that final step off. One factor that kept me from that final step was the concept of picking up a dog’s shit with a plastic bag and carrying it around for the rest of a walk.  To me, this indicates a fault in our society, and made me re-think the very idea of owning a dog.
And yet, the pet desire remained and we began to think about cats.  We like cats, all of us.  We missed having that feline companionship.  And so, we decided to adopt a cat.
In fact, we decided to adopt two cats.  Today, we went to the PEI Humane Society and adopted two cats.  Kittens.  A brother and a sister.  They have yet to be spayed/neutered, so we won’t be bringing them home until later next week.  But we are pretty happy with our choices and are all looking forward to the two new additions to our family.
I’ll post pics, of course, when they arrive home.  If we haven’t given them names yet, by the time I post their pics, maybe I’ll ask for suggestions.

The long-awaited second season of Ricky Gervais’ BBC TV series, Extras, is now underway.  And I say “Yay!!”
What an absolutely wonderful show.  Second season, Episode 1 was very funny.  But Episode 2 was extraordinarily so.  The sitcom that is being presented this season is perfectly awful (Ricky Gervais’ character is the writer on a new sitcom this season).  I don’t want to give away too much to those who haven’t seen it but want to, but the end of that second episode was fantastically funny.

If you haven’t seen Extras, you really owe it to yourself to watch.  If you must, learn how to download the episodes off the internet. The new season is available on torrent sites.  If you don’t know what ‘torrent’ is, then you owe it to yourself to learn, because it could change your life forever for the better.

Your results:
You are Robin

Robin 63% Superman 60% The Flash 60% Green Lantern 50% Hulk 50% Spider-Man 45% Catwoman 40% Supergirl 33% Batman 30% Wonder Woman 23% Iron Man 20%

Young and acrobatic. You don’t mind stepping aside to give someone else glory.

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