Month / July 2006

by Edward Champion

Another Friday, Another Meme

I’m wiped out from work and scant sleep, but I will post the remainder of the T.C. Boyle Talk Talk roundtable next week (which also offers the group some time to formulate more responses). In the meantime, from Rarely Likable comes this lazy Friday meme:

Bold television series of which you’ve seen at least three episodes, and bold and italicize those for which you’ve seen every episode.

Most of my television watching precedes 1998, but there were a few surprises here.

24
7th Heaven
Adam-12
Aeon Flux
ALF
Alfred Hitchcock Presents [Ed: 1950s or 1980s?]
Alias
American Idol/Pop Idol/Canadian Idol/Australian Idol/etc.
America’s Next Top Model/Germany’s Next Top Model
Angel
Arrested Development
Babylon 5
Babylon 5: Crusade
Battlestar Galactica (the old one)
Battlestar Galactica (the new one)
Baywatch
Beavis & Butthead
Beverly Hills 90210
Bewitched
Bonanza
Bones
Bosom Buddies
Boston Legal
Boy Meets World
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Bug Juice
Chappelle’s Show
Charlie’s Angels
Charmed
Cheers
Columbo
Commander in Chief
Coupling (the UK version, of course)
Cowboy Bebop
Crossing Jordan
CSI
CSI: Miami
CSI: NY
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Dancing with the Stars
Danny Phantom
Dark Angel
Dark Skies
Davinci’s Inquest
Dawson’s Creek
Dead Like Me
Deadliest Catch
Deadwood
Degrassi: The Next Generation
Designing Women
Desperate Housewives
Dharma & Greg
Different Strokes
Doctor Who (new Who) [Ed: Does second season count here? If so, yes through “Doomsday.” Count me as a fanboy.]
Dragnet
Due South
Earth 2
Emergency!
Entourage
ER
Everwood
Everybody Loves Raymond
Facts of Life
Family Guy
Family Ties
Farscape [Ed: almost italicized, but I gave up on the last season when it got too smug for its own good.]
Fawlty Towers [Ed: many, many times!]
Felicity
Firefly
Frasier
Friends [Ed: Yes, I’m one of the few and proud to have only viewed two episodes.]
Futurama
Get Smart
Gilligan’s Island
Gilmore Girls
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
Green Wing
Grey’s Anatomy
Growing Pains
Gunsmoke
Hannah Montana
Happy Days
Hogan’s Heroes
Home Improvement
Homicide: Life on the Street
House
I Dream of Jeannie
I Love Lucy
Invader Zim
Invasion
Hell’s Kitchen
JAG
Jackass
Joey
John Doe
LA Law
Laverne and Shirley
Little House on the Prairie
Lizzie McGuire
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
Lost
Lost in Space
Love, American Style
M*A*S*H
MacGyver
Malcolm in the Middle
Married… With Children
Melrose Place
Miami Vice
Mission: Impossible [Ed: 1960s or 1980s?]
Monk
Moonlighting
Mork & Mindy
Murphy Brown
My Life as a Dog
My Three Sons
My Two Dads [Ed: Oh, great shame.]
NCIS
Nip/Tuck
Northern Exposure
Numb3rs
One Tree Hill
Oz
Perry Mason
Picket Fences
Pokemon
Power Rangers [Ed: Don’t ask.]
Prison Break
Profiler
Project Runway
Psyche
Quantum Leap
Queer As Folk (US)
Queer as Folk (British)
ReGenesis
Remington Steele
Rescue Me
Road Rules
ROME
Roseanne
Roswell
Saved by the Bell
Scarecrow and Mrs. King
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? [Ed: I own the DVD box set.]
Scrubs
Seinfeld
Sex and the City
Six Feet Under
Slings and Arrows
Smallville [Ed: About a season behind on this, I think.]
So Weird
South Park
Spaced [Ed: Brilliant UK comedy that deserves US release.]
Spongebob Squarepants
Sports Night
Star Trek [Ed: I’m assuming this is TOS.]
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Star Trek: Voyager [Ed: Crap.]
Star Trek: Enterprise [Ed: Good riddance.]
Stargate Atlantis
Stargate SG-1
Superman [Ed: If George Reeves version, yes.]
Supernatural
Surface
Survivor
Taxi
Teen Titans
That 70’s Show
That’s So Raven
The 4400
The Addams Family
The Andy Griffith Show
The A-Team
The Avengers
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Brady Bunch [Ed: I may have seen them all, but the notion of going through a Brady Bunch episode guide and checking off episodes is about as salutary to me as plunging my head in liquid nitrogen.]
The Cosby Show
The Daily Show
The Dead Zone
The Dick Van Dyke Show
The Flintstones
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
The Golden Girls [Ed: One episode was enough, frankly.]
The Honeymooners
The Jeffersons
The Jetsons
The L Word
The Love Boat
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Mighty Boosh
The Monkees
The Munsters [Ed: A poor man’s Addams Family.]
The Mythbusters
The O.C.
The Office (UK)
The Office (US)
The Pretender
The Real World
The Shield
The Simpsons
The Six Million Dollar Man
The Sopranos
The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
The Twilight Zone [Ed: 1960s, 1980s or UPN bomb? If the first two, yes to all.]
The Waltons
The West Wing
The Wonder Years
The X-Files
Third Watch
Three’s Company [Ed: Yes, I’ve seen them all. There are reasons for this, too complicated to get into.]
Top Gear
Twin Peaks
Twitch City
Veronica Mars
Whose Line is it Anyway? (US)
Whose Line is it Anyway? (UK) [Ed: All that were broadcast on Comedy Central, at any rate.]
Will and Grace

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show #50

segundo50.jpg

Author: John Updike

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Defending himself against obnoxious talk show hosts and ready to move on.

Subjects Discussed: Epigraphs, faith and disbelief, starting Terrorist with a Catholic priest, first person vs. third person, on writing upon Americana, post-9/11 symbolism, humanism vs. pessimism, blow jobs, Christopher Hitchens, the state of the September 11 novel, Norman Mailer, Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat, applying “On Not Being a Dove” to Iraq, airport X-ray machines, external sexual imagery vs. internal emotion in prose, why Updike concentrates on explicit anatomical detail, Goths, language, challenging Updike on the BEA speech and the Internet.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

by Edward Champion

Thank You for Hating My Blog

“Actually, this is good,” my drinking buddy said when my blog got ignored once again by a few members of the literati. “You don’t want humorless New York types or Me Generation holdovers to sully your comic instincts.”

My drinking buddy then drew a caricature of my receding hairline on the back of a cocktail napkin. The thin reddish fuzz, the sad balance of my forefront follicles, resembled the collection of pubic hairs I had just seen in the men’s room after micturating into the urinal. As a former girlfriend put it, quoting Dr. J as was her wont shortly after smothering me with her bosom whenever we watched the Final Four, “I live my life trying to never appear to be a small man.”

Yet here I was, thoroughly ashamed of my drinking buddy’s slapdash sketch, which he had spent all of two minutes on. I was a small man. In the days that followed, I would still appear to be a small man. All because of the considerable alcohol I had ingested that evening.

It had left me impotent. I had downloaded several MILF Hunter videos from Kazaa, but it was to no avail. How could I get an erection again? Through the act of writing? Perhaps if Graydon Carter offered me a moist kiss, with his reassuring cigarette breath, then I might be small no longer. Indeed, to smell was better than being small, and all it took was switching one vowel. How often had I had this conversation with myself? How often had I stared at myself naked in the mirror hoping that the New York Times might subsidize my writing therapy? It was only through writing an op-ed column that I might be able to purge myself of these demons.

My writer friends thought the ignorance was great. They knew that I was a perverted bastard and that I should probably take a break from thinking about sex for a few minutes. It was an opportunity, a buzz word, a way for me to take up cross-stitching, a hacky sack I could bounce on the tip of my nose to turn into a hacky sack I could ricochet off my knee. Their ignorance of my blog suggested to me that there were other parts of my body besides my penis. I had conjured up grand conspiracies that they were all out to get me. And perhaps they were.

Of course, like every blogger, I had checked my Technorati rating every ten minutes. I had been obsessively monitoring the links to my weblog even before I started blogging on a regular basis, even before I had a blog, ignoring the advice of my drinking buddy, who repeatedly intimated that there was a world outside my apartment.

“Get a life,” said another friend, who was more blunt than my drinking buddy. “Get over yourself.”

By 8 p.m., my Technorati rank was far from the top 100. I basked in the knowledge that I would never be a Boing Boing or a Gawker.

“You see?” my drinking buddy said a week later. “Now let me draw a picture of your penis, since you seem to be having such problems with it.”

I told my drinking buddy to put down the pen. He asked for a small payment to stop sketching.

And all it took was $256.88, which I slid across the table to my drinking buddy. My penis was erect the next morning.

Edward Champion is the author, most recently, of Return of the Reluctant, a weblog of little worth that you really shouldn’t be paying attention to.