Aaron Sorkin: Dick

"I do believe we've seen an enormous rise of amateurism. The thing I find troubling about the Internet, as great a resource tool as it is, great for communications as it is, and that everybody has a voice -- the thing is, everybody's voice oughtn't be equal."

Read more about how he's awesome and you're not.

OC You Later

FOX finally turned the writing on the wall into cold, hard fact yesterday, canceling The OC after 3+ seasons. After a creatively uneven/disappointing third season that involved attempted murder in its season premier and actual murder in its finale, the network only ordered 16 episodes for the fourth season. Even Josh Schwarz, the show's executive producer admitted that season three was a poor try and claimed that the fourth season would be more on track.

The show was always able to survive the ridiculous story-lines ranging from the affair between mom Julie and daughter's ex-boyfriend Luke to the Oliver fiasco to the death of Caleb to Julie's alcoholism to Marissa's expulsion due to an attempted murder charge.

What it couldn't survive was a season long plot involving Marissa and her non-affair with Johnny the non-interesting surfer with a non-angry Ryan on the sidelines. The lack of chemistry between Marissa and Ryan didn't help either. Viewers of the OC should be feeling pretty good after watching an episode -- not feeling like they want to stab their own eyes. It also couldn't survive losing almost half its audience between the height of its popularity and today.

I always found the kids' stories overwrought with emotion and tended to get into the adults' story-lines with more enthusiasm. Peter Gallagher and Kelly Rowan played the Cliff and Claire Huxtable roles with a down-to-earthness that never came off as hammy. Who would have guessed that a surf-liking New York Jew living in California and making a living as a public defender would end up being the voice of reason in the OC's crazy universe?

This show was hotter than white shit on the surface of the sun.

Somehow I stuck with it for this first three seasons plus four episodes of this past season. Most TV critics will tell you that the show did improve a bit since last year -- and I agree, but The OC's time has come and now it's gone.

Farewell to the OC, bitch.

What the...?

I'm mostly immune to banner ads that appear on web pages these days, but sometimes I just have to put on my "BS in Communication Science with a focus on Adverting" hat and try to figure out what the heck this is:


It's obviously for some sort of prescription drug. What Abraham Lincoln and the fact that some people miss him (or maybe me, the reader) has to do with it is lost on me.

A better way to air your grievances

Blogger doesn't provide an easy way for anyone who writes a comment for a post to know if their comment as received a response. Wordpress has a function that shoots emails to all commenters of a post once a new comment has been added -- it's a decent little feature, but not big enough to make me want to export all my posts and set up shop at Wordpress.

So, while we wait for Blogger to develop more features (and hopefully a new comment-email feature will be one of them), I've added some scripting to the posts here that will now tell you whether or not someone has added a comment since the last time you visited. This involves cookies, so if you would oblige me in accepting cookies from this blog, it's a win win situation.

Don't Call me Shirley (MacLaine)

Ken Jennings made an interesting tangent in his most recent post about past lives and reincarnations. By his method of determining who you were in a past life, it turns out I was Leonard Strong -- an American born actor that specialized in mostly Asian or American Indian roles. He's problaby most well-known for his role as the interpreter in The King and I, as well as the hitchhiker in the Twilight Zone episode, The Hitchhiker. He only had two lines of dialogue.

I decided to look up that particular Zone episode and found that the story of a woman driving cross-country has some classic Rod Serling prose:

"Her name is Nan Adams. She's twenty-seven years old. Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store, at present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California, from Manhattan....".

We learn that she had a close call on the road:

"Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania, perhaps to be filed away under accidents you walk away from. But from this moment on, Nan Adam's companion on a trip to California will be terror; her route--fear; her destination--quite unknown."

At the end of the episode, Nan discovers that she's actually dead and the hitchhiker was some sort of Grim Reaper figure:

"Nan Adams, age twenty-seven. She was driving to California, to Los Angeles. She didn't make it. There was a detour--through the Twilight Zone."

Too bad Rod Serling died so early -- I would have liked to have been his reincarnation.