It’s My Thought That Counts

It occurs to me with no lack of regularity that, because of my persistent status as single and childless, that I have significantly fewer opportunities to receive presents as the rest of you romantic and procreating beasts.  And hey, listen, I’m gonna admit something most people avoid saying out loud:  I would like more presents!

So recently, I was thinking, maybe it’s not just the lack of Valentines, Father’s Day, and anniversary (as well as the extra gifts one gets at Christmas and birthdays etc, from your significant other and children) that are preventing me from getting a significant amount of free goods.  Perhaps part of the problem is, when gifting times roll around, many of you potential gifters think my interests are limited to just a few things, like pompous music, post-1930s American and British poetry, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and you just don’t know how to buy presents for a guy like that!  And, while it is true that I really love those things, the fact of the matter is, I have literally hundreds of interests, and with the advent of the internet, there is nearly no shortage of ways you can spend money on me! And the internet also means it is very easy for me to re-sell something you may accidentally get me that I already have!

So, in case you have just been hankering to buy a gift for a guy but don’t know who the hell Philip Larkin is, I will here lay out for you a massive list of interests I rarely talk about, but I assure you I am just crazy for!

1.  Soundtracks to movies made before 1980 on vinyl records

2.  Anything to do with early thought on city planning, especially dealing with pioneer Jane Jacobs

3.  I like hats

4.  I like notebooks to write in, but not one with Hallmark-y or sentimental messages printed on the cover

5.  Corduroy clothing

6.  I collect old postcards, preferably with messages written on them, preferably from 1915 and earlier

7.  Single-issue Marvel comics (any title) from between 1993-1997 are usually a good bet

8.  Anything celebrating the state of Pennsylvania, especially including its coat of arms

9.  Back-issues of Discover magazine, pre-2005.

10.  Post-it notes, white-out, index cards, legal pads, mechanical pencils

11.  Owls

12.  Games for the original Game Boy (original only, no Game Boy color!)

13.  First edition of any book by Orson Scott Card, Dave Eggers, Flannery O’Connor, or John Updike

14.  Hoodies or winter coats ordered from the websites of any of my favorite bands.

15.  Anything that you see on this list, if you can find a mousepad that in some way depicts or deals with it, I would like to own that mousepad

16.  I have a genuine interest in the Johnstown Flood.  Aside from the famous book by David McCullough, I own nothing about it.

17.  Aside from the DVDs, any merchandise or materials related to the film “Labyrinth” would be a home run.

18.  I have a high interest in the European particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC (sometimes also called CERN).  Yes, there is merchandise.

19.  I love Grey Flannel cologne but haven’t owned any in years.

20.  Any DVD that says it is part of the “Criterion Collection”…you can buy me that.

21.  I am a big fan of motorized inclined planes, or “funiculars“.

22.  I love backscratchers.  It is not possible for me to own too many of them.

23.  Books or materials about early American filmmaking are always great (post 1910 and D.W. Griffiths only, I have no interest in Edison’s important but dreadfully boring experiments).

24.  Dr. Strange is my favorite comic book character.  I have plenty of stuff but feel free to take a leap of faith, there’s a lot out there.  Statues, figures, and busts are especially desired.

25.  The easiest thing on the list:  I love all Philadelphia sports teams.

26.  I have an interest in Quantum Physics.  There are tons of books and DVDs on the subject.  I will read and watch them all.

27.  John Sloan, the painter.  That man painted my soul.

28.  I am intrigued by the lost colony of Roanoke and would love to learn more about it.

29.  Post-Revolution, my favorite historical figure is Aaron Burr.

30.  I could always use a new (good) digital camera.

31.  I have an interest in but have not read much about behavioral psychologist BF Skinner.

32.  I am a major evangelist for Dr. Pepper, and even more specifically Diet Dr. Pepper, and I will, without irony, wear, brandish, or otherwise use merchandise imprinted with this soda’s logo.

33.  I have always been smitten with now-deceased scientist Carl Sagan, and any of his books are welcome.  Likewise, his television series, “Cosmos”, and any materials related to it, are high on my love list.

34.  In the realm of living scientists, I have a bona fide man-crush on Neil DeGrasse Tyson and will gladly accept his books, DVDs, or tickets to see him speak somewhere.

35.  I get weak in the knees for Ben and Jerry’s “Late Night Snack”.

36.  Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece of graphic novel literature, “Maus”, is an all-time fave, but is always priced just out of reach.

37.  Toblerones.

38.  Coffee-table sized books featuring the art of Henri Rousseau, and/or merchandise featuring his paintings “The Dream” or “The Snake Charmer“.  If I listed all of these items in order by what I’m interested in right now, this one might be #1.

39.  I have an odd interest in the history of the Mormon religion, specifically the handcart disaster, the Mountain Meadows massacre, and the early life and “visions” of founder Joseph Smith.

40.  I’d love a Polaroid camera.

41.  I love coffee, of course, and there are a few things I still need, primarily a pour-over set for iced coffee and a French Press.

42.  If I hit the lottery tomorrow, two of the first purchases I’d make would be the complete series of “The Fraggles” and “24” on DVD.  Don’t judge me.

43.  My favorite living poet is Billy Collins.  I have all his books.  See what else you can do.

44.  I love riding my bike.  But I’m not a serious biker, like, wearing spandex, etc.  I do it just to cruise around.  But I could use a new lock, gel seat cover, or other biking stuff you might think of.  I could also use a new bike, but if you want to go that far, we should probably collaborate on that.

45.  Anything relating to the old TV shows “Northern Exposure“, “Twin Peaks“, or “Picket Fences“.  I own the entire series of “Northern Exposure”, but other than that, it’s open season.

46.  I find the Donner party very interesting.  I have read this book on it, but nothing else.

47.  I like to use caramel coffee syrup in my coffee and oatmeal.  I can never have too much of it.

48.  I love newspapers, but it’s not easy to find merchandise regarding them, such as hats, shirts, etc.  My favorite newspapers are The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today.

49.  Museum memberships.  Any kind of museum.  Art, history, whatever.  I can’t imagine a gift I would love much more than a membership to just about any museum.  Currently, I am a member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but no other museums.

50.  Old coinage, pre-1900, from early America or other countries.  Confederate money would be very cool.

Vote for my new mousepad

So, it’s time for me to get a new mousepad, and I figured since I was having trouble deciding on one, I’d open a poll and let you folks decide for me.  Currently I have a kickass Jack Bauer mousepad that has served me well for a few years, but the bottom of it is becoming frayed and is annoying my wrist.  You can see the fray in this picture I just took of it:

So, here are the options for the replacement pad, with the poll at the bottom.  Thanks for voting!

A Pearl Jam mousepad themed after their "avocado album"---one of my favorite albums of theirs.

 

A super-funky Mr. T mousepad!

Super badass "LOST" mouse pad

Seth’s Favorites of 2009: Television

May I present to you the first of several year-end wrap-up blogs I will post to attempt to convince myself you all care about my opinions.  First up: television!  Feel free to yell at me in the comments (you will anyway, I may as well invite it).  Notice I’ve finally caved to the pressure and am going to be calling these my “favorites”, not the “best” of 2009.  I hope you’re happy!

#10: Mythbusters

The seventh season of Mythbusters (still in progress) has seen our guys Jamie and Adam quite revitalized, after an admittedly lackluster season 6.  The myths no longer seem forced, and we’ve gotten back into–dare I say it?–good science. Especially exciting were the YouTube special and the duct tape episode.  My favorite Discovery channel show might just have a longer shelf life than I’d thought!

#9:  How I Met Your Mother

Let me address something right up front here that some of you are going to get at me for:  I have not included any of the uber-hip “one camera” sitcoms on my list (The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation).  I DO love these shows.  These shows are very funny and expertly crafted.  But I’ve never felt…I don’t know…close to these shows.  They are hilarious, but their method of filming leaves me a bit cold, at arm’s length, sort of.  And one of the things I need in my comedy is a feeling of comfort laced with a devious amount of “edginess” (asking a lot, I know), and this year, that is what How I Met Your Mother finally managed to do.  HIMYM has always been edgy for a two-camera sitcom, with its over-arching mystery (who is the mother?), its multi-dimensional characters, and its occasionally intellectual jokes. But season 4 ratcheted it up a notch, giving

stock charcter Barney–the token sleazeball–something of a heart, a subplot that never got old, and paid dividends all season long.  And I know I’m not very original when I say this, but Neil Patrick Harris is absolutely amazing, and is one of the best things on television.

#8:  Eureka

This little-seen SyFy network show just keeps getting better.  A quaint but exciting cross between Northern Exposure and The X-Files, season 3 saw Sheriff Carter taking on an interesting, different role in the community, as well as more imaginative, dramatic and–yes–believable phenomena taking place within the town.  Oh, and Carter’s daughter, Zoe?  Yeah–season three practically belongs to her.  And that could never be a bad thing, could it?

#7:  History Detectives

Long the most underrated show on PBS (and hence one of the most underrated on all of television), History Detectives continues, in its seventh season, to be entertaining, informative, and, sometimes, awe-inspiring.  Check it out some time.

#6:  24

Sure, the premise has gotten shaky over the years.  Sure, they’ve really pushed the limits of believability and sometimes even respectability.  But 24 remains a vital show to television, because–if you haven’t watched it–its a lot more than what you think it is, and it’s even a lot more than what is has to be.

24 is not just some serialized action series.  If it were that, I certainly wouldn’t watch it and evangelize it so much.  24 explores current, important, hot-button political issues–without even telling you it’s doing it.  But more impressively than that, 24 explores vital philosophical questions.  In fact, I have seen no better exploration of Utilitarianism in all of popular American culture, ever.  24 has been exploring Utilitarianism for 7 seasons now, and I dare say, has had more to say about it than John Stuart Mill ever did.

Season seven was certainly not the best season, but it was far from the worst, and featured one of the most exciting (though too-brief) set-pieces of the whole series:  a terrorist invasion of the White House (which is incredibly exciting when viewed on the surface level, yet also has alot of say when viewed symbolically or allegorically).  Here’s some of the White House hostage crisis:

#5:  Heroes

Yeah yeah yeah, it had a real crappy Season 2.  And Season 3 started off shaky–in fact, it didn’t even gain its footing till halfway through, when the season changed titles from “Villains” to “Fugitives”.  The “fugitives” half of the season was spellbinding, and finally seemed as though the half-thought crap we’d sat through for a year and a half had all been adding up to this, and all this wayward character development finally had a point.  Consider me impressed.

#4:  Big Love

HBO’s Mormon polygamist drama found some serious legs in Season 3, and those legs have a name:  Harry Dean Stanton.  How this show ever scored the elusive, reclusive, least-famous legendary actor we currently have alive is beyond me, but he’s been the main driving factor behind my continuing to watch this show.  Sure, Bill Paxton’s marital woes as the head of an illegal four-way marriage is interesting and at times spellbinding (and I’m in love with wife #3, Ginnifer Goodwin) and would make for a show to check out occasionally, but it’s Stanton’s creepy, Godfather-esque Roman Grant who makes this show must-watch, and has kept it that way for three seasons now.

#3:  FlashForward

OK, so it’s only aired 5 episodes so far, but it has come out of the gates just swingin’ away.  This show is just utterly captivating and frustrating and dramatic and mind-boggling and emotional and plain-ol’-neat wrapped up into one, and I give big kudos to any show that could do all those things all within 5 episodes, all while making me care about almost all the characters (I could do with less of John Cho’s Agent Noh, who is, in a word, unappealing).  Not only is every episode expertly written and acted, but they feature something rarely found on television: careful and thoughtful use of music.  I can’t wait to see where FlashForward takes us, and even if it derails, I daresay these first 5 episodes are good enough to land it in my #3 spot.

#2:  Dexter

In all honesty, the full breadth of Dexter is, at times, flimsy.  It can run into cliches and predictibility fairly often, and at times seems to throw a twist at you just for the sake of doing it; more than anything, it suffers from not knowing which reality to reside in: the hyper-real reality the show’s viewers live in, or the somewhat unrealistic world the show has created for itself.  It often flip-flops between these realities on an almost whimsical basis.  And, really, Showtime can’t cough up any more money for the Police Department set?  It looks like Who’s the Boss in there!

So why, you ask, do I love it so damn much?  In a word, Dexter.  The character of Dexter Morgan is so complex, sometimes you wonder if he’s not actually simple. So simple he’s complex.  Ug.  To try to know or understand Dexter (even as a viewer) is like trying to know smoke and mirrors, and that’s why it’s so amazing that the writers of Dexter have managed to make him so likeable, interesting, and watchable.  With every episode, we see a Herculean writing task pulled off, but we don’t feel it as a writing task, we feel we’re getting a little closer to our quirky friend Dexter.

Season three got even more exciting, however, as we watched our friends at Dexter try to change their main character without ruining the premise of the show (which pretty much requires Dexter to remain static), and we watched in awe as they somehow managed to change Dexter in a way which showed he was…unchangeable.  Huh?  I’m still not sure what happened.  I only know it was television magic.

#1:  Lost

For the past 5 years, there has not been a better show on television than Lost. There has not been one year in the last 5 years in which I have not thought that.  It has everything good dramatic entertainment and art needs.  I won’t go on and on, or say much more:  there’s certainly enough being said about Lost all around us all the time, you don’t need me to fill you in.  If you’ve never seen any, every episode is available streaming, for free, right here.

Honorable mentions:

Season 2 of Californication–Duchovny at his smarmy best

Season2/3 of The Big Bang Theory–More 2-camera sitcom ground-breaking

Season 1/2 of Dollhouse–best parts for females on television since…well, maybe ever, but at least since Roseanne or thirtysomething.

Kings, the four episodes it existed for:  incredibly ambitious, engaging, epic.  Too big for television, I’m afraid.

Full disclosure (shows the critics love which I haven’t seen):

Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Fringe, Weeds, Damages, Monk, In Treatment, Brothers and Sisters, The Closer, Ugly Betty

Seth Reacts to the Emmys

The Emmys were last night, and though I didn’t get to watch them and I don’t watch most of the major winners, but a few of my horses were in the race, and thought I’d just bounce some feelings off my blog here:

“30 Rock” is still deserving of the Comedy Series win, but I can’t wait until “How I Met Your Mother” starts getting some golden statues.  It’s the best 3-camera sitcom in a decade.

Three of my favorite shows were nom’d for drama–“Lost”, “Big Love”, and “Dexter”, as well as one of Mary’s favorite shows, “Damages”, only to be trumped once again by “Mad Men”.  I think this just means I should probably watch “Mad Men”.

Huzzah for “Grey Garden”‘s two wins!  This made-for-television movie was outstanding and I would probably be on a plane to somewhere to hurt someone if it hadn’t been recognized.  However–and this is a big however–FUCK them Emmy voters for giving the acting statue to Jessica Lange instead of Drew Barrymore.  Barrymore had a much harder job in “Grey Gardens” and actually did her job better than Lange.  Guess people still want to go with the safe vote.

It would have been nice to see Jim Parsons win for “The Big Bang Theory”.  Alec Baldwin has won enough shit in his lifetime.

Call me crazy, but I still root for Julia Louis-Dreyfus every time I’m able, and not just because of Seinfeld.  Have you seen “The New Adventures of Old Christine”?  It’s a good show!!  And has anyone ever even seen this “Untied States of Tara” show that Toni Collette won for?

Fuck the Lead Actress in a Drama category entirely, since not a single of the amazing women from “Lost” were even nominated.

JON CRYER wins for “Two and a Half Men”, are you fuckign kidding me?????!! EVERYONE knows that show is an unfunny piece of douche written for the lowest common denominator (and acted that way, too).  And Cryer wins over Neil Patrick Harris from “How I Met Your Mother”, two worthy “30 Rock”ers, and Rainn Wilson from “The Office”????  Poo-poo!

Michael Emerson wins for “Lost”!!!!!  Thank goodness someone’s still paying attention to how good this show is!  And especially Emerson–it’s nice to see the exact actor who deserved it more than the rest to actually get it.

The Supporting Actress in a Drama Series:  I only watch one of the shows nominated, and it won, and it was “24”, the show that awards have forgotten!  Yay for Cherry Jones, who just does a passable job of playing the nation’s first female president on the show, but I’m thrilled she won anyway!

I wish Jeanne Tripplehorn would have won her supporting statue for “Grey Gardens”, even though she’s barely in it, but you know she’s never going to nominated for “Big Love”!  However, Shohreh Aghdashloo did win it for some movie I’ve never heard of, but she used to be in “24”, so it’s all good!

Of all years, how did “Saturday Night Live” not win the variety category this year?  I love Jon Stewart as much as anyone else, but c’mon!  SNL was swingin’ this year!!  They influenced public thought more than any other non-news show, in my opinion.

“Intervention” wins over “Mythbusters” and “Antiques Road Show”=just plainly ridiculous.