I guess I will review modern entertainment.

I’ve been watching Conan’s new Tonight Show lately. I have always loved Conan, but towards the end of his Late Night run, I wasn’t watching as often as I once did. I guess I just didn’t care. But I tuned in for his last week, which was awesome and his first two weeks with the new show are also awesome. I love having Andy back, even though at least two of his attempts at having his own show were quite good and I would have lived him to still be there. Nonetheless Andy and Conan back together awakens my memories of watching Conan when I should have been sleeping for school and all that. Though Joel as announcer is missed just because he always seemed willing to do whatever they wanted him to do in a sketch. Not that Andy isn’t willing to debase himself for comedy. Ah well. And when I caught the fact that the Max Weinberg Seven was no longer called by that name, I thought maybe some of the band had left. Not so. They’ve simply added James Wormsworth, who used to just be a fill-in member of the Seven. Fine with me. All in all, it’s a lot like a familial group being back together and it feels right to me.

Then again, one of the things that got me to stop caring enough to find Conan online every day before is still there. In the monologue (and occasionally the sketches as well), I only get about half the pop culture references. I can’t be bothered to follow the careers of celebrities I don’t care about just to get jokes.

Also, this week I saw Drag Me To Hell, which was a quality horror with comedic vibe. I’ll end up buying that one, I would say. The writer or director or someone involved really seems to have an oral fixation, though, that is obvious.

I had to be awake during the daytime yesterday to do some shopping and I noticed something strange. There is this great big ball of fire in the sky and nobody even notices it! The fire is making everything uncomfortably bright and hot and everybody is just walking around like that is normal. Psh.

Haiku!

Never trust an elk.
They all only want one thing.
They want your body.

So, I bought Spaced on DVD yesterday. It cost me like seventy-four dollars. Is it worth it? Sure. But I already owned it on Region 2 DVD from way back when it was not available here. But because the money-worshipers in charge of everything don’t want me to be able to view Region 2 DVDs with ease here in the First Region, I had to rebuy it. There is something wrong with society when I can’t watch a show that I paid for on a machine that I also paid for just because it comes from abroad. Lame. But anyway, now I can watch it again.

Today I went and got my hair cut. A memory of my youth returned to me. At a haircutting place that I was brought as a child, children were encouraged to, once the cut was over, pick up a bit of their hair from the floor and place it in a little box. You would close the box and the “Hair Fairy” would take your hair and replace it with a cheap toy like you’d get in one of those twenty-five cent vending machines. Obviously the hair just fell into the device (probably into a bag if the people who made it had any sense) and the toy would fall out from some other place which was no doubt a heavenly reservoir of cheap toys and I don’t think that even in my youngest days I believed in the Hair Fairy because the mechanism was so obvious looking. But I believe in the Hair Fairy now. Because someone should.

Maybe I’d get my hair cut a little more often if I still had such awesome reasons to do so.

I admit I am kind of wary of looking up “Hair Fairy” in Google, however. I don’t even want to know where that could lead.

In other news, I took a trip across town to Future Shop today with intent to buy the latest season of the Venture Brothers and use up some of the many Future Shop gift cards I have accumulated over the last few years worth of Christmases and Birthdayses. The bad news is that there was no Venture Brothers season three (or any Venture Bros. at all, it is sad to say) but the good news is that even after a bit of a spending spree I still have eighty-eight dollars worth of gift certified at Future Shop. Not bad.

Haiku!

Captain Amsterdam!
A frog with a heart of gold.
And twice the power.

I have decided that there must be a holiday about index fingers. Perhaps a day when we’re not allowed to use our index fingers for anything, just to remind us how useful such fingers are. And people who have lost their index fingers can speak at big public events. And those foam fingers from sports can be made into decorations for our houses. Someone should get working on that.

Okay, I don’t think it’s really fair to point out flaws in educational cartoons for kids, but I just saw this one which I think was called Super Readers that had some things I feel like venting about, so… I will.

The main character is called Why. His baby sister just said her first word, which was his name. He told his family, but they didn’t believe him. Because of this, he summons his friends, the Super Readers to help him solve the problem. Apparently this is a situation that merits the intervention of superheroes. I thought that was kinda sad, but I figure this little storyland that these characters live in probably doesn’t have much in the way of crime, so I assumed they weren’t overly busy. If, after solving the problem, they hadn’t sang a song about how they “Saved The Day” I could have let it slide. A superhero calling in his friend superheroes to solve a terribly minor familial tiff doesn’t count as Saving The Day.

But the main problem is that, apparently the Super Readers solve problems by travelling into stories. This episode’s story was The Boy Who Cried Wolf. This is the classic story in which a young boy makes friends with a wolf and calls all his family to see, but the wolf had to go to the bathroom so he isn’t there when they arrive so nobody believes him. This happens a couple times until the family realizes they have to trust the boy and they wait around until the wolf finally shows up and brings them all flowers.

Except… That’s almost EXACTLY the opposite of what that story is. They changed the story so drastically that they didn’t really need to go into that story at all. Now a generation of literate, but misinformed children will never learn the moral of not lying about dangerous things or you’ll be eaten. I base my life around that moral! When was the last time I claimed to have seen a wolf? Not ever, I can tell you.

But really, though, they really did a number on that story. On the plus side, I was able to deduce the Super Story Answer after getting only two of the Super Letters. It was “Trust”. That made me feel pretty good. So good I didn’t even point out to Why that his sister’s first word could also be a sign that she’s having some sort of existential crisis.

I know I only get like six television channels, but I find it sad that Saturday morning gave me no good cartoons on any of them.

Can anyone tell me why there’s no robots in the White House? If it were up to me there’d be a high-tech android from the future answering phones. Or at the very least one of those car manufacturing arm robots should be in charge of defense.

Haiku!

With cybernetics
we find hope. Robots are here.
Let’s give them sprockets.

Are there really sprocket companies like on the Jetsons? I hope so. I want to live in the future.