But he’s still responsible for Charlie Sheen

President Obama might have had a nice day today, but I saw everybody’s favorite tv president, Jed Bartlett, today in Port Authority. Martin Sheen might very well be awesome, but having fathered Charlie Sheen knocks him down to just aight.

This is why Atlanta rocks

(Written while I was still in ATL, hence the present tense.)

Why doesn’t stuff like this happen to me at home?

I’m in town to hang out with the fabulous Joy and take in an Ingrid Michaelson show (omniscient future-living editor: it was awesome). This is what we encountered at our pre-show meal.

The opening act was Scars on 45, who were really good. I didn’t know their name, but recognized one of their songs from an episode of The Vampire Diaries. Best show on tv right now, and you can just keep it to yourself if you don’t agree.

Did I do that?

Ooopsie! Looks like Dustin just made the classic “if I’m not aware of it, it must be obscure” error common in children and privileged members of society, and decided that since he didn’t remember certain things from the 90s, they must have similarly fallen below everybody else’s radar, too. How could he forget Sister, Sister? Forgetting a character here or there is one thing, but an entire show? Pfffft.

Vampire Diaries

You guys, why didn’t you tell me how awesome Vampire Diaries is???

Okay, I know that some of you tried. Buy why didn’t you try harder????

This show is hilarious, well-written, and well-acted, and the cast is gorgeous (the 16-year-old in me swoons over Baby Boreanaz, aka Paul Wesley). I’m sure that some people may assume that my like for this show is based on how much I love (the first 5.5 seasons of) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but no. This is just another good show that happens to deal with vampires. And witches. And I’m thinking possibly werewolves, too. And Bianca Lawson also appeared on this show for a couple of episodes. Hmmm. Well, they never claimed to have reinvented the wheel, right?

Perhaps my favorite thing is the lack of ridiculous footwear on these supposed high school students. Yay for realism!

Total downgrade

Seriously, Kal Penn???

The dangers of tv knitting

All in all, not bad for something I started after work on Tuesday

For the past few weeks, I’ve been watching Eureka as I knit. I tend to watch comedies (or really mindless dramas) when I’m knitting, because they require less attention on my part. I started a new hat today, and I’m feeling a wee bit victorious, since it’s stranded knitting, a style that I haven’t done before. I was finding it surprisingly easy, and really enjoying how fast this hat was going. I said was, because I ran out of Eureka episodes to watch, and switched to Damages. I spent the first half of the first episode watching intently and knitting on autopilot, and now have been unraveling my work for the next hour. Note to self: serious drama and Fair Isle knitting do not mix.

I read the season arcs/spoilers on the wiki, because I suspected that this show was too mean for me. I’m pretty sure it is. Ever character on that show is vile, and I don’t care enough about them to overlook it. I did see that the 5 most recent episodes of Eureka are available on Hulu, so I will catch up and then watch the remaining episodes there.

What is “Something I’m going to regret faster than I would have expected,” Alex?

The answer: Legally changing my name to the ridiculous nickname of a television character.

Although Castle has recently supplanted Chuck as my favorite still-running tv show, I am still really enjoying this season of the nerd/spy dramedy. Chuck as both a show and a character had been getting on my nerves ever since the most recent, and probably final, death of Agent Superman (whose actual name I have aleady forgotten).

His abs I remember just fine.

Luckily, the show somehow turned around for me over the last several episodes, and now I’m firmly back on Team Chuck. Even at its worst, Chuck is a smart and funny show that turns its minuscule CGI budget (I guess they’re not too flush after paying all the cool guest stars like Richard Chamberlain, Summer Glau [reunited with her Firefly co-star, the delusional Adam Baldwin], and Nicole’s Future Husband Isaiah Mustafa) into a selling point, instead of a reason for despair.

I guess I’m  not the only one whose life is enriched by Chuck. I watch it for the lulz, and the former Douglas Allen Smith, Jr. watches it for…motivation? I say former because this man’s legal name is now Captain Awesome, which is the nickname of Chuck’s ridiculously good-looking doctor brother-in-law.

Another shirtless/towel pic, merely for comparison's sake. You're welcome, comparison.

I get why this show is so cool and Captain Awesome in particular is pretty special, but why would anybody do this? The real-life Mr. Awesome’s new signature, which is a smiley face bracketed by arrows, has been rejected by his bank because it’s too easy to forge. I can’t even imagine what other stupid consequences he may have to face because of his new name. I think that the judge who granted the name change was smart to allow this; sometimes you have to do really stupid things in order to learn valuable lessons. Unless the world is nicer than I suspect it to be, I give this name change 5 years, tops.

I feel like this is my fault

I knit (I may have mentioned this before), and I like to watch tv shows when I do. I prefer shows that have been on for several seasons, so I can just plow through the episodes, without having to wait a week for the next installment. Right now I’m watching Eureka, which I’d never heard of before another knitter told me about it last week. It’s a quirky little show whose low budget mostly-Canadian appeal warms my heart. I had been watching Psych while I knit, but it got too stupid for me to enjoy.

Although I do own far too many tv shows on dvd, I primarily watch my knitting-montony-relieving shows through Netflix’s streaming option. I currently have the 2-disc-a-month plan, and I always mean to watch the dvds that I order, but it almost never happens. On Saturday I went to the Netflix web site to see if I could switch to a streaming-only plan. To my surprise, they didn’t have any such thing! It seemed like offering the option just to stream content would be a no-brainer, but maybe the Netflix people had too much in the way of brains, because that wasn’t the case. Anyway, I switched to the 1-disc-a-month plan.

Imagine my surprise then when I saw in the newspaper today that, beginning December, Netflix will offer a streaming-only plan (that article said January, but the email that Netflix sent me said December). Yay! So I switched again. When I do want dvds, I can easily get them from the library, and even if they’re rentals, that cost plus the cost of my streaming Netflix subscription won’t equal what I paid for 2-discs-at-a-time (not that that was terribly expensive, either). Netflix is also raising the cost of all of its disc plans by a dollar. That’s not a ton, but I’m sure it hurts a bit. I know that to have all of this in place, the final decision about this had to have been made long before Saturday, but since I had just looked into this, I feel the tiniest bit responsible.

So, dear internet, I apologize for the increase in cost of your Netflix subscription. Unless, of course, you’ve moved to Streamland like me, in which case I welcome you to my broadband-dependent country.

Jennie Stencel is my new hero

I’d never heard of Jennie Stencel until this Metafilter post, but now I’m cracking myself up watching youtube videos of her.

Wow, I’m really glad that, despite being in sincere pain, David Boreanaz is soldiering on through the tough times that he has experienced since it became common knowledge that he cheated on his wife (there have been rumors about his infidelity forever, but he had to come clean in order to head off an extortion attempt). A lot of guys wouldn’t be able to keep going. They might even miss the cut at Quail Hollow. But David, well, he’s a trooper. He’s not going to let the man (or woman) bring him down! This kind of internal fortitude must be why he was able to so convincingly play first a vampire, then an FBI agent, for all these years.

I had the hugest crush on him in high school, but I’m happy it died a natural death before this happened.