Heard Florence and the Machine on the car radio for the first time this afternoon, and the first thought that popped into my head was that this song is the love child of Siouxsie Sioux and Adam Ant. I believe the video bears me out. Catchy. I particularly love the blue-skinned Star Trek go-go dancers. Also, the fact that everybody in the video look's like an extra from either the Tom Baker iteration of Doctor Who or Blake's 7.
A postcard in the mail has informed me that the season's flu vaccines are in.
Appointments have been made, and due to circumstances beyond my control, I will be the only parent present at the ceremonial bloodletting. I hope the nurses are wearing body armor this year. I don't know how my kids got to be such weenies, but I've come to realize that when the zombies rise, they're going to be all but useless. In attempt to ward off the inevitable wailing and rending of garments, I've promised them breakfast at McDonald's and $5 a piece to spend over the weekend, but I fear that will be totally inadequate.
Maybe for the rest of the week I should secret myself in various locations and jump out ninja-style and poke them with a pin, as to desensitize them. It probably wouldn't work, but it might be amusing.
As for everyone else, if you are in a target group, get the innoculation. As per the CDC, the target group includes:
•Pregnant women
•Household and caregiver contacts of children younger than 6 months of age (e.g. parents, siblings, and child care providers)
•Health care and emergency medical services personnel
•Persons from 6 months to 24 years of age
•People aged 25 to 64 years with medical conditions associated with a higher risk of flu complications (e.g. asthma, diabetes)
Even if you're not in a target group, get the shot. I repeat: get innoculated. I could go into all the microbiology hoo-haw (hey, I even have a degree!), but trust me, getting a flu shot is important. Creating a pool of resistance keeps everybody healthier. There are also people who can't, for legitimate medical reasons, have the flu shot. They are often vulnerable, and depend on an immune population. Also, the life you save may not just be your own, but the life of some poor kid whose parents are too boneheaded to get the innoculation.
Devoted 12 minutes of my life last night to watching Running Wilde. In retrospect, that seems quite generous.
It was like someone got an old hat and filled it with scraps of paper on which were scrawled stereotypical characters, plot cliches, and over-used narrative devices, then they just started picking them out and arranging them willy-nilly on a corkboard. Then they played beer pong for several hours and rearranged them. Voila!
Will Arnett should be glad that Amy Poehler has her own show.
Some people are going to have problems with Greg Garcia's new Fox series Raising Hope. A lot of problems. I'm not one of them. Funniest moment from the premier for me? The car seat scene, where Jimmy (Lucas Neff) and his mother Virginia (Martha Plimpton) are driving the baby home in the new car seat Jimmy just traded for at the pawn shop.
You know why that's funny? Because when I was a kid, we DIDN'T have car seats, hell, I don't think we even had seatbelts. You know what was the only thing standing between little jammy-clad you and a metal dashboard? Your MOM'S RIGHT ARM. That's right, your life depended on your mom's reflexes. God forbid she was trying to tune the radio or light a cigarette or was leaned over the back seat trying to break up a wrestling match between your siblings and then had to make a sudden stop. Well into high school, if I was riding in the front seat and my mom was driving, every time she stopped, her right arm would shoot out and whack me in the chest. And this was AFTER we had the new-fangled seatbelts.
Our childhoods were an obstacle course of hazards worthy of Indiana Jones. Anybody remember lawn darts? Or the Creepy Crawlies creature oven, the one that was made of super-heated metal that would literally fuse your fingers together if you accidentally touched it? How about Wacky Clackers? It was a toy you could get at Shakey's Pizza which consisted of a string with a huge solid glass ball on either end, and you would whack them together to make the most glorious noise. But still, they were GIANT BALLS OF GLASS. THAT YOU SLAMMED TOGETHER REPEATEDLY.
Which brings me back to Greg Garcia, purveyor of the visual Wacky Clacker. Garcia last graced the airwaves with My Name is Earl, which I thoroughly enjoyed, so sue me. That loopy, low-brow, poor-white-trash, Snopes-next-door* comedy is hard to pull off. Comedy is hard, but Snopes comedy is double-hard. It's a fine line between hilarious and pathetic. When you hit is right, you get Malcolm in the Middle or Roseanne, when you miss it, you get Sons of Tucson. When you miss it, it becomes brittle and mean-spirited and uncomfortable.
So far I like Raising Hope a lot. Lucas Neff is sweet and earnest, and I adore Martha Plimpton (and have ever since Goonies). Add in Garrett Dillahunt and Cloris Leachman, and there's a lot of promise there. The thing about Snopes comedy, it's a throwback to the Three Stooges, which is a throwback to the Keystone Kops. It's the bastard child of slapstick and William Faulkner, and it's not for all tastes. But then again, neither were Wacky Clackers.
*For those of you who only know the word "snopes" from the urban legend debunking website, my use of Snopes goes back to a trilogy of novels by William Faulkner and is our family shorthand for bascially ignorant, ill-bred, trashy people. Think of the Bumpasses, Ralphie's next door neighbors in A Christmas Story.
We actually had Snopes-next-door not that long ago. The kind of people who burn their old lawn furniture in the yard, even though it's plastic. They weren't actually next door, but around the corner, so that their back yard abutted our side yard. Instead of backing out of their driveway, they would drive through their back yard into our side yard and then across our front yard to use our driveway. The S/O repeatedly accused the kids' friends of driving on our lawn until one day he came home unexpectedly and found the Snopeses actually driving their pickup truck (Snopeses always have at least one pickup truck) through our front yard. Caught red-handed, with their means of egress blocked, the Snopeses did not apologize, but merely did a donut on our lawn and went back the way they came. Eventually they were evicted by the sheriff's department, which I imagine is an end quite a few Snopeses come to.
I've noticed something recently, I'll call it the "Theory of Guest Star Relevance to the Mystery Plot," or more simply "He Did It!" Basically, if you're watching a mystery/detective/police prodecural/crime story on TV, you can accurately predict the perpetrator by their relative name recognition. You don't have to know the plot, you don't have to pay attention to clues, you don't even have to watch the damn thing, all you have to do is look at the guest stars, and realize which name is most recognizable. If this person is not the victim, they will almost certainly be the criminal.
I first stumbled upon this years ago, while watching the movie Striking Distance with Bruce Willis. Robert Pastorelli was in the credits, and he was relatively famous at the time, coming off of Murphy Brown and the American reboot of Cracker. It seemed he had a relatively minor, walk-on role, but the moment I saw him, I realized he was the killer. You werent going to have an actor with his name recognition have three lines at the beginning of the film and never be seen again. Sure enough, at the end, he did it.
Just in the last several weeks this has been borne out again and again. Brian Dennehy on Rizzoli & Isles? He did it. Lochlyn Munro on The Mentalist? He did it. Kay Lenz on The Closer? She did it.
Of course, it only spoils it for you if you're an absolute TV nerd and have some bizarre mental database of everybody who's ever been in the movies or on TV, and have assigned your own imaginary Q number to them in your head so that they can be appropriately stratified. But what kind of crazy person does that?
I want to marry this song and have its babies. I want to sit parked at the stoplight and jam to it while people honk at me and make rude gestures. This song makes me HAPPY. I pity the fool who does not love this song.
I'm a writer. Things that make me happy: hockey, zombie movies, good books, ginger beer, my DVR.
Things that make me unhappy: bad writing, a lack of intellectual curiosity.
Favorite Authors: Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, James Lee Burke, Carol O'Connell, Edward Gorey.
Posts
