Barkerburgh

I’ve been waiting for this show since last fall.

As many of you know, I truly believe that Google will bring about the Singularity and activate Skynet. Seriously.

To be honest, I never saw the first movie for years after it was made, but when I finally did, I really liked it. The second one was almost as good, partly because of the twist, but the third one…

The premiere, two one hour episodes over two nights, wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be, ie on par with the BSG miniseries, or practically any episode of Earl, Gas, or 30, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was very much afraid it was going to be.

Really though, how wrong can you go with evil robots from the future, a borderline psychotic mother, and hackin’, fightin’ Jesus-boy?

I was very happy with the casting of Summer Glau and Lena Headey, and not discomfited by the rest of the casting.

I’m looking forward to more fight scenes where robots from the future throw each other through walls, unless they happen all the time.

30 Rock, Alien vs Predator and The Dresden Files?

I was watching all three at once last night, while editing PHP files for fun and now all three are mushed around in my head and I really need to know what the difference is.

But seriously.

Peter Cook got me into 30 Rock. The creator, executive producer and occasional writer is the brilliant Tina Fey, formerly of Saturday Night Live. It’s really funny with some of the most internally consistent characters in sit-com history, all delightfully eccentric and unique. No comparison to Corner Gas, though. (And definitely no comparison to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, contrary to what some dummies on imdb would have you believe.)

I wanted to see Alien vs Predator for the SFX ad the fights, which were cool but the initial premise just got sillier and sillier the more they set it up.

The Dresden Files is okay but pretty pedestrian and predictable even though I quite enjoyed last night’s episode.

Tonight was truly one of the best season finales of any comedy series ever. And I can’t tell you anything about it, except that it was downright well and truly hilarious.

Just so’s ya know.

Well, I’m hooked. I’ve got a pretty basic freeware application that lets you mark the cells for what they might contain and then tells you if you’re right or wrong once you start filling the cells in for real. So right now it’s kinda like playing Doom in semi-God Mode, so I’m happy.

With that help, I’m down to about half an hour per medium skill game (ie, 1 or 2 cells with 3 or 4 filled in and the rest with 2 or 3.) I’m sure it would take much longer on paper, which I will try eventually.

A little annoying when I’d rather finish a timed game of Sudoku than watch my TV shows, but whaddaya gonna do?

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.

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!

Laugh blah blah Beau Bridges as Earl’s dad blah blah Brett blah blah Dog River blah blah

What is it with Canadian shows like The Rick Mercer Report and Popcultured?

They’re not the only culprits but they shall stand as exemplars. And to be clear, I am definitely not including Corner Gas in this group. Good old Corner Gas.

Simply put, if you have three minutes to fill and you need say twenty jokes, you don’t just write the twenty jokes.

It’s standard theory that you write fifty or sixty jokes and then pick the best twenty. Look it up, it’s been that way since the 15th Century, although there are enigmatic references in Saint Augustine, not the one in Florida. Hold da Vinci up to a mirror, you’ll see.

I’d been waiting for The Rick Mercer Report to premiere and when it did, about five minutes into it I just flipped the channel.

Now, Popcultured apparently wants to be the Canadian Daily Show, but it suffers the same problem. Sometimes it comes across as the result of a bunch of high school buddies sitting around stoned on cheap weed laughing like hell at the first twenty jokes that come out of their mouths. “Oh, man! I hope I remember this tomorrow!”

Shemp is hemp backwards, indeed.

Popcultured’s only true emulation of American television is the perpetuation of the tradition of Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen De Generes as lesbian comperes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I suppose I should point out, in all fairness, that you can also steal other people’s jokes that you know work, if you can’t come up with fifty or sixty of your own.

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.

(It’s one of Proust’s, I think, your majesty…)

1) A few weeks ago at her Word on the Street presentation, Ruth Ohi showed how she sometimes uses ‘pig noses’ to create faces that express emotions. It was neat. Ask her about it.

b> I’ve seen the first two episodes of ‘My Name is Earl’ three times now on TV and they’re still milk-through-the-noseholes funny, and I wasn’t even drinking any milk!

iii. The other weekend TVO showed ‘Waiting for Guffman’ and ‘This is Spinal Tap’ back to back. Jeezes, those are good movies.

four=I’m trying to learn Linux. I should have started sooner. I’ll be dead before I get it.

cinque…Another excellent Corner Gas! That Wanda!

So far that is all.