Tue, December 18

Little Fat Man Who Sold His Dream—9:27 AM

Get thee to a copy of the Extras finale if it's at all possible. It's Ricky Gervais brilliance in top form, and despite the somewhat uncharacteristic ending, its message is fantastic and well explored.

I know season one was a little spotty, but season two through this extended finale were just excellent – an engrossing examination of fame and ego, and hilarious all along the way. I'd be interested to know if this was his planned trajectory from the start. It might warrant re-viewing those first episodes in a new light.

I think I actually forgive him for stealing Alec Baldwin's Emmy. (Plus, with his Tracy Jordan therapy role-playing scene this year, is there any doubt that Baldwin will capture the Comedy Lead Actor Emmy along with two or three Lifetime Achievements?) (I submit that there is not!)

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Wed, December 5

Less News, Faster

Lord, I hate the cable news outlets. Sometimes I seriously want to just sit and cry. (Read more.)

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Camping Matrix—12:17 PM

Dad is planning a few camping trips for the winter and spring of next year.

See? I get it from somewhere.

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Mon, December 3

Ratatouille at the Oscars

It's unlikely Disney wants my opinion about how to submit Ratatouille for the Academy Awards, but just in case, here it is. (Read more.)

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Sun, December 2

Sibilant Earth's Greatest Hits—3:51 PM

I'm not a music person, but I know and occasionally date people who are. (In the same way we are "occasionally" at war with Japan; give me a break, I'm 30 in barely a month and trying to stay chipper!) Whenever music people talk to me about music, I love to play a game in my head where I try to guess whether they're making up fully half of the band names they mention, or actually fabricating all of them.

It's one of the reasons I keep a transcript of that SNL fake ad for the Valentine soundtrack on my computer. I love the way a random collection of words, numbers, or even phonemes can create something that is unmistakably a band name even though it doesn't make any sense in any other context. I could write up an alternate universe Grammy ballot for you every day of the week, but if I started it would become a frenzied obsession and soon you'd find me scribbling on the walls and covered in poop.

So today I'm flipping through an ancient back-issue of EW and I come across a page that absolutely makes me laugh aloud. It's a page of blurb reviews of recent album releases ("Daddy, what's an 'album?'") and above each review it lists the album title and the artist. It doesn't say "Album: This" and "Artist: That" – it just displays both. One is a little bigger and colored red. I swear to God I could not tell which was which by looking at the five on the page. They were:

Say Anything
In Defense of the Genre

Coheed and Cambria
No World for Tomorrow

Cassius
15 Again

Deborah Harry
Necessary Evil

The Thrills
Teenager

Now, granted, I had a hunch. "The Thrills" sounds slightly more like a band name than "Teenager" does, but that's not a guarantee of anything. Not even "Deborah Harry" is a solid giveaway: there are plenty of albums named after famous people, and "Necessary Evil" really sounds like a band name. Finally, I glanced at one of the reviews, and "Say Anything" is mentioned as a band name so I had my answer. But I seriously would have believed someone who said they wanted to listen to "Say Anything" on their iPod on their way to buy the new CD by "15 Again" and attend a "No World for Tomorrow" concert.

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