Barkerburgh

1> ‘The Unit’ looks like a good show.

2> So does ‘Boston Legal’.

3> That poor kid in Detroit who the 911 operator told to stop fooling around with the 911 system…

4> I really should have been watching ‘Babylon 5′ years ago.

5> Dean Koontz’es’s book ‘From the Corner of His Eye’ is a good read, nicely constructed, even though hardly anything really plotty happens until about page 600.

6> ‘My Name is Earl’ gets funnier and funnier.

7> Venus Express!

8> I love this weather.

9> The last few episodes of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ have been kickass, except I missed it both times on Space this past weekend through bad TV viewing planning. I guess I need to take a course.

10> ‘Coronation Street’ is getting kinda wacky, but that’s good. It’s a little boring when things are normal.

11> Nancy Grace is a foul human being.

12> If I was taller, I could see farther in a crowd during an emergency.

Two weeks without Coronation Street because of the 400,000-tickets-shy-of-an-SRO Olympics, that’s why, you bloody stupid wankers!

“But then out of the turgid miasma of Television white-noise video, on the same night he lost Coronation Street for two weeks, there came what were probably the last four episodes of his beloved ‘Arrested Development’, and the blasphemous and heretical South Park episode about the Blessed Virgin Mary. He nearly nearly choked twice from laughing, lost his breath, and his throat kind hurts today a bit….and all is good.”

Thank God for Battlestar Galactica and that there are no sports in space. Nerdal responses to that last phrase go here, God love ya.

When I was visiting Guildwood a while back, I took a look at Reid’s list of movies and TV shows that he’s downloaded.

Here’s just a sample.

Now, I would never stoop to such a thing, and I have been rewarded.

Last night, I was transported by the new film “Doctor Who and the Christmas Invasion.” Now I know that all my immoral, unethical friends have already seen it but this was the first time for me.

It was a blast that rocked. I’d been waiting for it for a while and had my snacks and juice boxes all ready.

Yee haaaa!

It ran a little bit shy of its 90 minute time slot, and as a reward, I got to see the Christmas edition of Nick Park and Aardman Studios’ ‘Creature Comforts‘.

Now if you haven’t heard of or seen them, well let me just tell you that they took ‘man on the street’ type interviews and animated them in Aardman’s classic Claymation-type stop-motion style of those shows about the guy and that dog, only with animals as the speakers…

I say I was rewarded because my immoral and unethical friends who watched ‘The Christmas Invasion’ via download back at Hallowe’en probably didn’t watch it last night because of it was commercial television and so missed this little stocking stuffer.

It’s against my nature but I want so hard to feel smug. Really smug. The smuggiest. Smug-arama comin’ atcha down the train tracks! In-your-face smug-and-a-half.

But I won’t, because instead, I feel humble and blessed.

Na-na-na-Na-na-na!

I cannot remember a sitcom season when I laughed out loud so heartily and surprisedly as I have this fall with Corner Gas and My Name Is Earl.

Earl was new this week and was so goddam funny I pretty much didn’t stop laughing the whole half hour. The ketchup! The ashes! The knives!

It was funnier than Battlestar Galactica, the old one I mean.

Starting with a cameo by the Prime Minister, Corner Gas on Monday was just great, and I mean funnier than any Canadian sitcom ever was. Partly because the competition is mainly things like Mosquito Lake and The Trouble with Tracy, but even if those had been any good…

And if you care, Stephen Colbert’s own show ‘The Colbert Report’, apparently pronounced ‘The Cole-bear Re-pore’, is going to be on CTV at 12:35 am (Himself corrected the time to am from pm because he always gets them confused…) after ‘The Daily Show’ starting next Monday.

I hope it doesn’t suck as much as ‘The Daily Show’.

Just when I was thinking that Canadian politics was boring, along comes the Gomery Report and I’m nailed to the TV, bouncing between Newsworld, Newsnet and CP24 just to see who’s saying what.

Then the American Democrats, those competitive Yanks, have to go and lock down the Senate for two hours in order to force a resolution to the whole buggered and butchered pre-war intel thing, promised for a year by the Republicans.

Ya can’t laugh for cryin’, my friends. And, thank god, vice versa.

I have not properly expressed my appreciation of the Canadian TV series Corner Gas. I have mentioned it before with appreciation, but I don’t even have a category for it, as I do for both Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, without which life would mean nearly nothing. But for Corner Gas.

So here it is. Wait, I have to mention Robson Arms too, even though I’ve only seen one episode and it was funny.

Okay, Corner Gas. It takes place in the small town of Dog River, Saskatchewan, which, like the New York City of Friends or the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, is entirely fictional.

It’s make-me-laugh funny, even when I least expect it. They’ll say a line that’s funny, in, say, a scene five minutes into an episode, and I’ll laugh. Then, say, ten minutes later - or even right at the end - they’ll use the line again, out of the blue, out of left field, but still durn funny, and there I am blindsided, larfing again at the same line. Well, really the same joke in a slightly different context.

Now, there’s two kinds of jokes (for this comparison: there are at last official count, eight hundred and thirty seven kinds of joke in English alone - of the living languages, Hindi and Elvish have over a thousand each) . There’s the joke you see coming because of the setup. If you have a clue, the setup is like an answer on Jeopardy. “Aw, jeez, the question’s right there.” If you’re not paying attention, then good comedy, good jokes, depend as much on misdirection as anything fancy by David Copperfield or Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin (1805-1871). It sneaks up on you over here, when you’re looking over there. Good comedy - good jokes - are as delightful and manipulative as good magic. Whaddayano.

Corner Gas is as nearly perfect a TV comedy as there’s ever been. And it’s Canadian. And it stars a lot of Canadian stars - well, people who should be stars. Now I enjoy them all, but two of my favourites are the cops; Lorne Cardinal as Davis and Tara Spencer-Nairn as Karen. Not giving too much credit where credit is overdue. It’s an ensemble show, and the cop gags are always funny.

So that brings us to Brent Butt. Yes, il s’appele Brent Butt. He’s the creator and, inspired, plays the lead character of the show, Brent Leroy, who runs the gas station cum corner store that names the series. (See, I avoided the term eponymous, for no good reason.) His delivery is priceless.

Years ago, I remember thinking that the American cable stations were producing really cool stuff, outside the Hayes Code, the Mann Act and the Ten Commandments. This was before you could say ‘boobies’ and ‘underpants’ on Canadian TV.

Now you can, and when you have a nearly perfect situation comedy, you don’t have to. Although they skirt that ‘don’t have to’ sometimes.

Watch it and see.

I shall miss the Doctor, Rose, Mickey, the 51st Century American flyboy, even the nasty Daleks. Nasty, nasty Daleks, all flying naked in space like Cylons and killing people. Ick.

And how old is that new Doctor? Thirteen, maybe fifteen. New teeth, too.

No Battlestar Galactica until God knows when, now no Doctor Who until 2006 and no more Star Trek:Enterprise ever. Oh wait, that last one’s a good thing. So I guess TV’s not all bad.

Now check this out: The Cutest Dalek.

And welcome back, tnir.org!

Who’s here.

Okay. I love the new Doctor Who. I liked the Slitheen story-line. I liked the London Blitz story-line.

I like story-lines that combine other story-lines. It’s basic story telling. Vergil incorporated the Trojan War story and the separate Romulus and Remus legend with a (probably totally) made-up story-line about Aeneas and Dido, to explain the classic and traditional enmity between Rome and Carthage. (It was really territorial and small ‘i’ imperial ambitions and trade rivalries, but the slighted mad-woman love story schtick sold the whole thing a lot better than pie-charts and drawing pins on a map…)

So anyhoo, I think that maybe they shouldn’t have brought back the Slitheen so quickly (how ever much I liked the episode). It’s kind of like what all the Star Treks did in their first seasons, which was to bring out all the kick-ass TV SF tropes; in case the show didn’t last, they wanted to go out with a bang.

I don’t think this show has to worry about that.

If Russel T. Davies stays associated with it, I think this show will be around for a while.

Told you the Brits can do TV SF better than the Americans. Pace my beloved Battlestar Galactica.

Well, that was a pleasant surprise, after the last, kind of weak, episode.

Last night’s episode of Doctor Who was excellent, a literal spine-tingler, literally. Having been a time-traveller all my life, and having had to wiggle my way out of a few paradoxes, of the Grandfather sort, but not the Grandfather Paradox specifically, I’m a fan of fictional treatments of the issues.

You could tell the Dad was a Star Trek fan, and that he’d seen ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ enough times to get it.

I don’t remember a lot about the character dynamics in the old show, but I must say how I like them in this one. Like Battlestar Galactica, the people come across as people, not SF characters. I like Rose.

And, okay, yeah, Mickey was black, not South Asian.

PS, I was thinking of titling this entry ‘Civility on the Edge of Forever’ cuz everyone in the church was being so stiff-upper-lip and ‘their finest hour’ about everything…

Two nuns are ordered to paint a room in the convent, and the last instruction of the Mother Superior is that they must not get even a drop of paint on their habits. After conferring about this for a while, the two nuns decide to lock the door of the room, strip off their habits, and paint in the nude.

In the middle of the project, there comes a knock at the door. “Who is it?”,calls one of the nuns.

“Blind man,” replies a voice from the other side of the door.

The two nuns look at each other and shrug, and deciding that no harm can come from letting a blind man into the room, they open the door.

“Nice boobs,” says the man, “where do you want the blinds?”

So I watched the last episode ever of Star Trek:Enterprise last night.

What the irredeemable fuck?

Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, whoever you are (and I know who you are), fuck off, shut up, sit down and go away. “Franchise fatigue”, my ass. You just don’t know how to tell a story. Period. Stop trying. Go try retail instead. Idiots.

To the rabidly irrational fanboys who kept this crap going for way too long, [sarcasm_fyi] thanks a lot [/sarcasm_fyi], and in your face.

To the thirtieth century alien archaeologists reconstructing this period of human history, hello, and I hope things are going well. I owned a significant proportion of everything. I also hope you’ve found evidence of Battlestar Galactica, just so’s you get a balanced picture.

To Majel Barrett, you bear some of the blame for this. Just because a fan means well doesn’t mean - oh, never mind. The damage is done.

To Gene Roddenberry, please, sir, rise from the dead. You couldn’t save the Star Trek universe, but just you - or anybody - rising from the dead would be really cool.