I've been laid out for a few days with a cold, and that's never good for this page. No people, no complaints.
I've spent most of my week prostrate—now there's a letter I always triple-check, right up there with "hard disk"—and watching TV. Really crappy TV. Observations:
- This week on 24, Jack chased this week's McGuffin for 59 minutes, at which time next week's McGuffin was introduced. Rinse. Repeat.
- On American Idol, I found myself not caring which of the remaining one-trick ponies won. But who didn't enjoy the look on Chris' face when he lost? Or the post-show interviews where he was explaining away his loss as the result of "my overconfident fans" not voting? Yeah, Asshat, you don't have fewer voters, just lazier ones.
- On Lost, Kate has officially become a beige accessory worn by alternating men. Meanwhile, the show continues to find innovative ways of not advancing the story, this time by offing recently introduced characters. Yawn. If you take a few months off between episodes in a serial, shouldn't it take more than five minutes to get caught up?
- Survivor hit a new low, stretching out a boring episode and then cutting away to a "To be continued" card right before someone got the boot, making the entire hour moot.
- I watched 2005's King Kong again. Now here's entertainment that the 30-second skip button was invented for! I watched its 3:08 length in about 1:20. Not surprisingly, the movie's far more enjoyable when its plodding excesses (spiders, Adrian Brody) are trimmed. The green screen composites look even more fake here than they did in the theatre. It's astonishing, for all the money they spent on this flick, to see an evenly lit Naomi Watts in the shadowy hand of Kong. Whoever lit the actors in front of the green screen should be tossed under an interminable brontosaurus stampede.