The trump card

This year's Super Bowl will be between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts. The news media (even outside of sports segments and sections) are in raptures over this. Not because of who the teams are, but rather because...can you guess?...both head coaches are black.

The news media present this as a giant step towards the goal of racial equality in football. The main-news segment of CBS News gave some stats: 70% (or so) of all NFL players are black, but only 14.7% (or something) of head coaches in the NFL are black. Now here we are with two black-head-coach teams in the Super Bowl! Yay for racial equality!

Everyone, however, is missing the point. To my mind, this is a step backward. Here's my observation: making a point of highlighting race, whether in a positive or negative way, is still racial discrimination. If the world were truly blind to race, nobody would have batted an eyelid when two black head coaches made the Super Bowl.

The head coaches themselves are handling the asinine questions with as much grace as can be expected, saying, in effect, "it doesn't matter". This is the best response I could imagine, short of giving offending reporters a good hard poke to the solar plexus. Or, if the journalist is a member of an underrepresented minority among journalists, asking in response, "What do you think about a [offensive word for whatever minority the journalist is a member of] being allowed to interview a Super Bowl-bound head coach?"

In other words: the US is nowhere near racial equality. If you couldn't see that, you're completely deluding yourself. The evidence is everywhere. The press uproar over the simple fact of there being two black head coaches in the Super Bowl is more than enough evidence.

Pretty soon, there will be a new issue. I'm pretty sure that the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008 will be either black (Barack Obama) or female (Hillary Clinton). For months, the press will heatedly debate the issue of whether the US is ready for a member of either of those groups to become president. The response to two black head coaches in the Super Bowl is microscopic in comparison (although, on second thought, I'm sure there are a goodly number of people who care more about the Super Bowl than the presidential election, but that's a completely separate issue).

Is the US ready for a black or female president? Obviously not. We're not even ready to handle black coaches in the Super Bowl.

Scrubs 605...

...is good. In many, many ways.

In the interest of not being a very sad little man, I will not analyze it. I will stop writing now.

Scrubs 604

My feelings are mixed. This episode takes some positive steps toward solving the humor problem, but then it just goes backwards again. The positive steps are small; so small, in fact, that I’m starting to doubt they’re even there. I may have made them up out of wishful thinking.

The first major positive step I want to mention is one that I definitely haven’t made up: KIM IS GONE! This is cause for celebration. However, they’ve left their options open: she may be coming back after “four months”. However, for the moment, perhaps the emphasis will shift away from all the frigging babies.

Subtle Wacky Randomness peeks its absurd self out a few times. I failed to mention this the other times I mentioned SWR in previous reviews, but SWR also manifests itself in the direction and editing of the episode. For example, the shot of Elliot’s reaction after the Janitor mentions that his paintball gun worked great at the zoo. The paintball gun was a pretty good gag as far as Janitor gags go, especially when he hits Ted with a paintball (although it’s definitely Ted who carries that joke – one of the genuinely funny moments in this episode).

Cox may have gotten some of his old humor value back. “Touch your eruption button” was an especially good line. In that same rant, though, the self-referential tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the fourth wall was, I think, quite a silly move on the part of the writers. Not a good move. Making fun of “House” is an OK move, though, but I’d prefer it if they’d done that in the same way they made fun of “Grey’s Anatomy” – i.e. by just making a single quip about it, not an entire subplot. Cox actually gets in on the SWR at one point: emptying sugar packets onto the table for no apparent reason. His dialogue (and ranting) still leaves a lot to be desired, but I’ll accept this as one of those small victories that gives you hope that there might be a brighter future. Moving on.

Any other things worthy of note? The orange guy – not that funny. Reminds me of the “donkey boy” joke in 521. (Yes, a random gag in one episode can remind me of random passing gags in other episodes – this is how well I know my Scrubs.) The serious twist at the end of the episode – pretty darn good, indicating good choice of music once again and highlighting Judy Reyes’s vastly underrated acting talent. I can just see them screwing it up next episode though. Yes, I am very cynical about the abilities of the writers to do anything right anymore. The appearance of Ted’s band was good; it was SWR again. Elliot is still funny, thankfully. I was afraid she might regress. THE BOX OF KITTENS — AMAZING. This is by far the best fantasy in all of seasons 5 and 6 put together. Holy moly. Wow. The listing of side effects afterwards was completely unnecessary and sort of ruined it, but I'm glad to see the writers haven't gone off acid completely.

Hang on, I was wrong earlier. Making fun of “House” is retarded. I have no opinions about House, never having seen it, but making such blatant and sustained references to it on Scrubs is not on.

In the interest of not being a complete loser, I will now conclude this rant, noting that I am cautiously optimistic about the way this season is starting to go.

My Boys

There’s a new sitcom on TBS called “My Boys”. It centers on a female sportswriter in Chicago, all of whose friends are male, and the trials and tribulations in her personal life. I am here to train my critical eye on it, after watching the entire first season (which aired in the space of like 3 weeks).

The first thing that struck me (I watched all the episodes, starting from the first, in order) was that it’s stylistically quite similar to Sex and the City. Then I got hung up on the fact that My Boys is not at all edgy like Sex and the City was, and thus I was disappointed for a while before I reminded myself not to judge a book by its cover, or rather, a TV show by its quality relative to another show from which it drew stylistic inspiration. My Boys jumps on the now-ubiquitous no-laugh-track bandwagon, and uses voiceover narration by the main character. Said narration always contains some overarching theme for the episode. Annoyingly, in My Boys, these themes are invariably baseball metaphors. I don’t know why it bugs me so much, but it does. Maybe it’s because life isn’t a baseball game, and baseball isn’t a microcosm of life.

Another problem I have with My Boys is that the setup is hilariously implausible. A single, twenty-something woman, attractive, intelligent, enamored of sports and apparently quite good at poker has a lot of friends who are all male but one — and it seems that there are absolutely no desires* among any of them to move beyond a casual friendship, and there never have been. Excuse my cynical attitude, but this is so far outside the realm of possibility you can’t even spot it from here with the aid of one of those cheesy coin-op binoculars-on-a-stand. I appreciate that there are good reasons for avoiding the whole issue of how this little hexagon of friends got established in the first place; maybe this issue of non-credibility could be solved with a little explanation of backstory. That would bog the show down in a big ugly mess, though, so I suppose it was better to just avoid it. The idea seems to be to just accept the situation as the status quo and use that as the background for the more important events that are taking place. Certain events in the first and last episodes of the first season (also somewhere in the middle, I forget which episode) notwithstanding, I’m OK with that. I still don’t believe that it’s possible to get to such an arrangement and have it be stable, but that’s not the point of the show.

After all that blather, I think it’s high time for me to answer the question that has the most bearing on whether this show succeeds or not: is it funny? If not, then it’s not doing a very good job as a sitcom, is it?

Here’s my feeling in a nutshell: it’s mostly bland, with the occasional funny moment. It’s nowhere near the level of quality you’d think it’s at from reading reviews in the mainstream media. It’s not “refreshing” or “charming” at all. It breaks no new ground. As I said before, stylistically, it’s Sex and the City dumbed down. The humor is overwhelmingly verbal — I can only recall a single instance of physical humor, and that was quite understated (PJ hopping around the floor while sitting on a basketball — episode 12). There’s no visual humor at all, aside from facial expressions and gestures, which are also nothing special (although Jordana Spiro, who plays PJ, exhibits a surprising deftness with comic facial expressions). So all the humor essentially comes from people talking at a mile a minute. The creator(s) achieve their apparent aim of creating an atmosphere that suggests being a fly on the wall, watching a group of old friends bantering. Where’s the originality in that? “Friends” sort of ran that one into the ground. Speaking of Friends, My Boys commits the sin of having nearly all the action take place in a very limited number of locales: PJ’s apartment and Crowley’s. There is the occasional foray into the Cubs locker room and somebody else’s apartment, but nowhere else. Of course, the premise and plot don’t require anywhere else, but then maybe that’s a sign that the premise and plot are a bit bland.

How about the quality of the acting? Good, but then again, the roles these actors have are hardly demanding of vast thespian talent. Fortunately, the main character is played by the person with apparently the most acting talent. Maybe it only looks that way because she actually gets to show some of her talent, what with playing a character who isn’t just a cardboard cutout like everyone else. She actually noticeably improves over the course of the season. All the other characters are not much more than tired old archetypes, though. They talk in a style very close to that of real people, which, while commendable from an acting and scripting standpoint, grates on one’s nerves because most real people have annoying speech mannerisms (e.g. “like”, “dude”) that really aren’t welcome on television. The characters don’t grow, they don’t change, they aren’t developed (with the exception of Andy, in the last few minutes of the last episode). Not only that, they’re entirely uninteresting characters too; without exception, they’re one-dimensional and shallow. Their only problems are their dating lives – which, it scarcely bears saying, is such an overused sitcom device that it can’t possibly carry a show all by itself nowadays.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us at the end of a first season that seems to have exhausted all the possible story arcs given the premise of the show. Then again, there was something that, I guess, passes for a plot twist at the end of the last episode, so I’m sure they’ll have fun with that in the second season. Unfortunately, that means that it’ll take some effort to keep the show from descending into the depths of “cliché sitcom centered around a good-friends on-again-off-again couple with a supporting cast of people who spurt one-liners and have their own little relationship foibles, then all get together in somebody’s apartment and banter about it”. But hey – that crap earned its cast a million dollars an episode. I guess the creators of My Boys think it’s worth a try.

Don’t get me wrong – it may seem like I’ve ripped on My Boys pretty mercilessly, but I’ll admit there’s definitely some potential. This is only the first season, after all. Other shows have gone on to success after rather rocky first seasons, e.g. Scrubs. It’s possible that after the second season I shall be singing the praises of My Boys from the rooftops. Well, no, because that’s not really my thing. But you get my point.

Overall, though, I can’t see My Boys becoming anything more than “decent” or even “mediocre”. TBS likes to note that critics have hailed it as “original” and “refreshing”. Original certainly, by the simple expedient of being a new show. Not ground-breaking by any means. Refreshing maybe, for at least attempting to put a twist into the old “relationships are not easy” formula. There just isn’t anything left in that setting, and My Boys doesn’t introduce enough new ideas to get much of anywhere. If there’s nothing else on except Friends reruns, go ahead and give it a watch if you’re bored. Don’t set aside time for it, though.

Escape from the loony bin

Hey, funny story. I had a cell phone here in my European domicile, but since I've been away for just about a year, it wasn't used for about that long. Since I'm an infrequent cell phone user, I was on a plan from Proximus known as Pay&Go. Pay&Go is what it sounds like: you buy a refill card from any grocery store or gas station, enter the code thereon into your phone, and bam, you get more credit on your account. You don't pay a monthly fee or anything.

However, if you don't use or add any credit for a year, your number gets deactivated. That's what happened to my number.

Well, I was in a situation where I rather needed a cell phone. This necessitated getting a new number. Here in Europe, we use cell phones with SIM cards. The SIM card concept is a good 'un: the phone service and the phone device are completely separate from each other. Got a nice phone, but want a different service? Pop the SIM card out, buy a new plan, the provider sends you a new SIM card, pop the new card into your phone, and you're done. Got a good service, but want a new phone? Pop the SIM card out, buy a new phone, pop the card into the new phone, and you're done. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this concept. It is the perfect way to run the cell phone system. There should be no other.

In my situation, all I had to do was stroll into a little electronics store (think Mom-and-Pop Radio Shack), and ask for a new Pay&Go SIM card. I paid 25 euros and got a SIM card with 25 euros of credit (i.e. there wasn't even a one-time setup fee). I put it in my phone and ta daaaa, I had cell phone service.

*back into the loony bin*

Now, just for fun, imagine I were in the same situation with my American cell phone. I have the closest thing to Pay&Go that I could find: Credit-Based Service With A Stupid Name Because Everything Virgin Mobile Makes Has A Stupid Name, from Virgin Mobile. Of course, when I got the service, I was forced to choose from the eleven shitty cell phones that Virgin offers with their Pay as you Go plans. If I had had a phone before, with a different service, I'd have had to throw it out along with the old service. I digress, but the point I made in the digression is relevant. Since, it would seem, my physical phone is inextricably bound to the (hypothetically) expired phone number, this would also leave my physical phone expired. Granted, I only paid $20 for it, but still, this could hypothetically happen to any phone. I'd have to buy an entirely new phone to go with the new number and service account. Where's the sense in that?

Oh wait, the sense is that it makes the cell phone manufacturers and the service providers rich and the customers can't do a goshdarn thing about it. That's why I love America, and why anyone who doesn't is wrong.

Advice

Here is a little nugget of advice for y'all. You might even see it as a plea.

If you are making something that's color-coded, choose colors that are HUGELY different. Also, make the color swatches in the legend (if present) large enough that they can actually be compared against the colors in use.

In other words, if you make something with colors like this, I will come to your house and steal all your cones while you sleep.