Moving

Moving day is Saturday!  (You're all invited to come help!  Free booze!  (Afterward!))

This move is shaping up to be similar to previous moves.  Late in the packing phase, there comes a time when I'm simply sick of packing.  Everything left, including paperback books, Costco receipts, used Q-tips, whatever, gets tossed into boxes, to be sorted "later".  That phase is coming soon.  So far, though, the packing phase has gone well.  My living room is full of boxes, ready to go.

Several people from work will be helping, so it should go pretty quick.  Booze has already been purchased for them.

So, no posts lately, and probably none for a few days yet.  If my helper friends don't show, it'll be longer, because I'll have to drink their booze myself.

Groundhog Day

Super Bowl Ads

I am not a fan of American football.  (I'm not a fan of "real" football, or American soccer, either, but that's neither here nor there.)  However, I have always enjoyed the advertisements for the Super Bowl.  Since they cost so much to air, greater care is taken to make them good and entertaining.

The last few years, I have been able to watch them on the Internet, thus bypassing the game entirely.  But this year an odd thing happened.  I was watching them via a link on Yahoo (you remember them).  Get this: they were "brought to me" by some stupid looking TV show I can't even remember the name of.

So imagine.  I'm watching ads, and ads are interspersed in them.  Two Super Bowl ads, one 15-second spot for this TV show.  It was surreal.

Pretty quickly, I tired of this.  Really, that TV show looks pretty stupid (which I realize is also a trend).  So I haven't seen most of the Super Bowl ads this year, ironically due to ad saturation.

Lost Weekend

Something strange happens when you sit down to watch an old season of 24 on Saturday:  Suddenly, it's Sunday.  Evening.  Late. 

It was Season 4.  On Friday, I started to watch Season 3, then realized how awful Kim Bauer is.  Just awful.  In Season 1, she's the "Helpless Female", a character cliche I loathe.  In Season 2, there's a nuclear bomb that's about to go off in LA, and Jack tells her to leave the city.  He tells her not to tell ANYONE about the bomb.  She then proceeds to tell  EVERYONE she meets, everyone from her boyfriend to the cop to the nutjob who lives in the woods in a cabin with a bomb-shelter basement.

But Season 3 was the worst.  She works at CTU, and alternates between "I am Smart and Capable!" to "Helpless Female" to "Woman in Love with a CTU Field Agent, but Toughly Able to Handle It" to "OMG!  My BF got a scratch!".  Personally, as able and willing as I typically am to suspend my disbelief, I simply cannot accept that CTU would even employ her to clean the restrooms.

And while we're on the subject of 24, what exactly do they do in that office, anyway?  I swear they only had one cue card for the actress portraying Audrey Raines:  "We're going over DOD protocols".  Everybody is constantly going over protocols, uploading protocols, crossloading protocols, or managing protocols.  Every once in awhile, someone moves a satellite so they can follow some car. 

And I say all of this, even though I'm a huge fan.  Jack Bauer is awesome, and fun to watch.  It's a lot like James Bond, right down to the fact that important characters are evidently immune to machine gun fire.  I also like the realtime format of the show, even though that sometimes works against them.

The trouble is, sometimes I sit down to be entertained for awhile, and suddenly it's Sunday.  Evening.  Late.