Feeling Nostalgic

I'm listening to the audio version of Word by Word * and binge-watching  Detroiters via Comedy Central On Demand** and they're making me miss my old day job.

Kory Stamper describes the quiet hush of the editorial offices at Merriam-Webster, and I'm jealous that the marketing and sales staff are sequestered on a separate floor there. I remember the major shock to the system that occurred when those departments were added to the editorial and production departments' office space after the nuns retired and a new CEO came on board. Stamper also describes the antiquated technology and odd policies, especially with regard to coffee and to the procedure of circulating a memo instead of going over to speak with someone directly.  I remember my first months with the publishing company as being very similar.

I had another hit of déjà vu when I saw the office furnishings on Detroiters. One of the main characters has taken over his dad's advertising agency, and the office decor and amenities seem stuck in the '70s.... much like things at the Center when I first arrived. I would swear that the visitor chairs opposite the main desk (shown behind the characters in this GIF) are the same style and color as the visitor chairs in the front reception area where we were expected to take our morning and afternoon breaks from precisely 10 to 10:15 a.m. and 3 to 3:15 p.m.

@whoisJJSimmons pic.twitter.com/IuM0sFXCtQ

— Detroiters (@Detroiters) March 8, 2017

The credenza and some of the lamps in the background of this GIF also strike a chord.

West Coast, are you locked in?! #Detroiters is on right...NOW. pic.twitter.com/dfu4EWWJ6s

— Detroiters (@Detroiters) February 8, 2017

I'm sorry that I missed Stamper on her book tour, — the closest she got to me was Columbus earlier this month. She'll be in Pittsburgh in a few days, but I've got a trivia championship game that day, so I'm probably not going to make the road trip. Instead, I'll just do some discreet online stalking and catch up with news articles/radio appearances/her Twitter feed, etc.  The TV show has been renewed for a second season, so I guess I can look forward to more "I used to have one of those in my office!" moments next year sometime.




* It's read by the author, which I love in an audiobook.
** Not simultaneously. I multi-task, but not that much.

I Would Totally Vote for Them

Spotted on Facebook this week: Some t-shirts that cleverly straddle the intersection of art and politics.

I did order the Sharon Jones one, because the Daptone Records site was having a half-off sale.

The TMBG shirt reminds me of another viable slate of officers:

Speaking of Colbert: I wish that I could watch CBS shows on Hulu, or that the cable company was faster about uploading episodes of The Late Show to their On Demand channel, because I'm not a big fan of watching the little clips that get posted to YouTube. I have this (probably irrational) fear that I'm missing part of the show, or seeing it out of order or something.

Friday Timewaster: The Shipping Room Podcast

Last weekend I drove to Chautauqua to meet with a freelance client about our next project, and while it wasn't a long drive, I was unsure of the ability of Sirius XM to satisfy my aural urges. It seems like lately I just flip through all 30 of my preset stations without finding anything I can tolerate for more than a song or two, and that gets old quickly.

Rummaging through the bin of physical CDs that I kept after the Great Purge of 2013 (Drink!) and/or firing up my big laptop with the iTunes library and curating the perfect playlists seemed like too much work, so: Podcasts to the rescue!

The problem there is that I only listen to three podcasts on a regular basis (Car Talk, The Rachel Maddow Show, and The Big Podcast with Shaq) and I was already pretty much caught up with all of them before I finished backing out of the driveway. I had to cast my nets upon the pop-culture waters and see whether anything I could snare would hold my interest while navigating around the parade of orange barrels on I-90.

Luckily, while working through my backlog of Entertainment Weekly magazines over at my parents' place a few days before my trip, I came across a reference to The Shipping Room Podcast.

It seemed to hit a few of my personal sweet spots -- which include but are not limited to watching a lot of television shows, having definite feelings about what does or doesn't happen on said shows, and talking about fictional characters at length and in great detail. (Once a co-worker interrupted a discussion I was having with another co-worker to ask if what we were talking about had happened in real life or on TV. I think that was the line, anyway -- it's been a while. You know how a piece of something that happens now reminds you of a tiny snippet of something you remember from almost twenty years ago and you laugh or otherwise react but if you have to explain to a third party why/how you made the connection and had that reaction it all falls apart because you can't quite supply enough of the context to make the remembered incident relevant/meaningful? Yeah, it's like that.)  

I'm only maybe ten or twelve episodes in to the podcast archives -- for whatever reason, I keep picturing them as the Delicious Dish duo on Saturday Night Live -- and I've got about 40 episodes to go until I'm caught up. So, even though I'm listening to them at double-speed, I should have more than enough material to get me through any jaunts around town/impromptu road trips in the foreseeable future.

HITG: TV Blogger Edition

As a fan of Television Without Pity  — the place I first read about "Hey, It's That Guy!"* — I feel I have to be a fan of Previously.TV  So far,  all I do is follow them on Facebook, and I rarely click the links to read the posts or go directly to the site to see what they have to say about anything.


Today, though, I spotted some familiar names in the link to A Closet Case: Reconsidering Entertainment Weekly's 1997 Fall TV Preview — I remembered them as hi-larious people who wrote for another tv-related site I used to follow, TeeVee.


Amazingly enough, I couldn't remember the name of the old site right away and had to do a lot of Googling, but that's ok because it led me to (a) discovering their podcasts on  The Incomparable and (b) learning that there's a chance that TWoP may be resurrected!

The AV Club: Television Without Pity has new owners and a relaunch in the works

I still have my TWoP "Spare the Snark, Spoil the Networks" t-shirt, but I think I got rid of my TeeVee shirt long before the Great Purge of 2013. (Drink!)

* I even got the book -- and  I still have the book, despite The Great Purge of 2013, aka the ruthless culling of my books, CDs, DVDs, and clothes that I conducted when I moved out of my apartment and which has become the basis for my own personal drinking game whenever I encounter a reference to something I used to have.    

Limbo

Hey there --

After five fun-filled months in Athens doing Bobcat things, I'm back in Akron doing slightly fewer Bobcat things and not really sure what's going to be happening next.

I should probably resume regular blogging, just to give myself some kind of structure. I mean,  I have months' worth of Pub Quizzes to document! However, it's much easier to be super-lazy and just post to Facebook. Part of it is that I'm on mobile devices more -- as opposed to having to sit at a computer with full keyboard for 8 hours a day -- and part of it is that there's other fun stuff to do on FB. (If by fun you mean "looking at the photos of random friends-of-friends for a few hours," because again: Sorta stuck in neutral.)  I guess I could do some digging to figure out the code for making blog posts appear on FB or vice versa, because I'm pretty sure I know some other people who make that magic happen, but ... yeah.

Anyhow: This week is the MAC tournament and St. Pat's in the Flats. I'm going to tonight's OU-Akron game, since I had to miss last night's win over Miami due to a freak blizzard. Watching it on the giant big screen TV at home was better than being stuck in a traffic backup, I guess.

I was reading some old posts about my tournament experiences, and it was kind of fun to look back. I've been doing a lot of looking back, because I'm trying to organize elements from the OU Women's Club's archives into a coherent display for the club's 75th anniversary celebration at the historic Silver Grille at the Higbee Building downtown. I really need to quit slacking on that, because there are a lot of other moving pieces that I'm in charge of, or in charge of finding other people to be in charge of. I'm still kind of worn out from all the craziness of my last two weeks in Athens (see FB for mildly incriminating photos!), but I've had a week at the 'rents (aka the best vacation spot ever, according to my almost-BIL) to kind of rest up and recuperate, so I'm running out of excuses to not get my rear in gear.

Meanwhile, I'm way behind on my TV watching. I've been having some nutty dreams again, which is what usually happens when I don't dull my senses with enough pablum from the idiot box. I'm trying to keep up with American Idol, although none of the contestants really seem to be grabbing me this season. Then again, there are two or three that I would be sorry to see go, but they're not super-impressive at this early stage. I am enjoying the new judging panel and reduced (on-screen) role of Randy Jackson, though, so it's not all bad.

I'm also behind on my spring training games. I listened to maybe half of Indians game using my MLB At Bat app, and I'm missing out on all the winning going on. I know the games don't really mean anything, but when it's going from 57 to, like, 7 degrees within a few hours, it's nice to hear Hammy call some home runs.

A Site after My Own Heart

I love it: "If for no other reason than it’s never too early to get excited for Fall...."




I'm going to have soooo much time to post to this blog/create my fall TV spreadsheets this summer, because by the end of this month I won't have that pesky day job sucking up all of my Interwebz browsing time.

I will have some freelance projects to keep me busy, though, plus I'll need to get some things in order to apply for what might be my dream gig (inasmuch as any job is ever a dream job -- there's always going to be some part of it that sucks) once the position gets officially posted.

I suppose I'll also no longer have any excuses not to clean my apartment.... That could take all summer right there.

Christmas (Story) Is Coming

Saw this in the TV Addict's December calendar and cracked up. I have it on DVD (hell, I have it memorized...) so it's not really necessary to tune in on Christmas, but I like it. And it annoys my dad, so ... double bonus!

In other news that makes me happy: I only have to come up with 11 more outfits to wear to work, and then it's pajama pants and sweatshirts until New Year's!

Is it lame that I'm so excited about staying at home for vacation? (Don't answer; I think I know.)

I don't have to stay home every day, though. Maybe I'll hit some area hot spots, like ... A Christmas Story House  and Tuba Christmas. I'll probably also go visit my parents and  my sister for a bit. Maybe my sister and I will take another holiday road trip. When she lived in upstate New York, we used to go down to the city for a few days. When she was in Georgia, we did some touristy stuff in Atlanta. Now that she's in southeast Ohio, I'm not sure what the destination would be . . .

OMG.

I was just on the Christmas Story House's online gift shop, and they have Christmas Story "comfy throws" (aka Snuggies).

Ha!! I think I know what my dad just bought me for Christmas!

Annoyed Grunt

Damn you, auto-fill . . . and my oversize fingers!

I was sending an e-mail to myself about some songs I want to download* and/or put together on a playlist, and I started typing in my other e-mail address . . . and then the auto-fill options popped up.

Being my usual lazy self, I decided to tap what I thought was the address I wanted and then hit send. Instead, I tapped the address next to my address and hit send.  Cue annoyed grunt . . .

I'm not even positive I know who that person is, or how I know her. I'm hoping it goes directly into her spam folder and she never sees it, because it makes totally no sense to anybody besides me. I don't compare anyone to Hitler, though, so I guess I have that going for me, which is nice.





* I finally got around to watching Outrageous Fortune last night  —after it sat around my apartment in its soon-to-be-vintage** Netflix envelope for at least a month*** — and a Bob Seger song I've managed to never hear before popped up on the soundtrack. It sounds like a Chuck Berry song, actually, which reminds me of another song, so I wanted to get the Seger song and put all three of them in this other playlist I'm building, but I assume that I will promptly forget about this so I wanted to send myself an e-mail about it . . . which I will probably leave in my inbox and never look at again, but at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I documented my great idea and can access it again at some point in the future.



**My mom made that joke last weekend about a Borders bag she was using to schlep presents to my cousin's birthday party. She told her brother he should keep it, because it may be a collector's item. She's a laugh riot, that woman.



*** I'm keeping the streaming video and one-disc-at-a-time DVD-by-mail plan, although the rates at which I've been watching either lately may call this decision into question. This is partly because I've been gorging on Hulu+, what with all the new fall shows.

I'm dropping some of those, though. I can't get in to New Girl — it's just getting on my nerves. I'm also refusing to watch any more of  2 Broke Girls, even though it is sandwiched between shows that I'm still watching. I didn't think the pilot was all that hi-larious, and after seeing the promos for the second episode, I decided not to bother. I'd rather have more episodes of  . . . well, I forget the name of it, exactly, except that I liked everybody in it: the American Pie guy, the second Becky from Roseanne, chubby sidekick on Reaper, and what'shername from a bunch of shows, including Arrested Development.**** I can't stand anybody in this Broke Girls nonsense. I thought I liked Kat Dennings because I liked Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, but that must have been the material and not her.



**** I'm trying to not let myself get too excited about Arrested Development coming back for a short season and a movie, but I'm totally watching it if and when it happens.

Fall TV: Meh

I feel like I'm totally behind on my fall TV spreadsheets. Checking my previous posts on the topic — I Might Need a New Couch,  In the Fall a Young Girl's Fancy Lightly Turns to Thoughts of Television, Anticipation — I see that (a) I used to be a lot more creative with some of my post titles and (b) I'm at least a week behind.

Ordinarily, I tend to get antsy sometime in August, waiting for the Entertainment Weekly fall TV preview issue to arrive. This year, though, I didn't get too worked up about it. In fact, I only read part of the preview issue last week and wasn't motivated enough to (a) finish reading it or (b) map out my viewing schedule.

I think it's because I'm not super-jazzed about any of the new shows, I'm already subscribed in Hulu Plus to all the stuff I liked last year, and I'm going to have to wait until October November for the premieres of some of my favorites. (I'm looking at you, Bones.)

Thus, I really only need to set the VCR for stuff that's on CBS or the CW, and if I don't get around to doing that for the first few episodes, I can still watch those online anyway.

So .... yeah. There's not a lot at stake here.

The Breaks

History of Rap Part 2 with Justin Timberlake — Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Between this and discovering how much I heart  BackSpin on Sirius Radio in my! new! car! </Rod Roddy>, I've been having quite the week in hip-hop.

Last night on my way home from Around the Corner, I heard Monie Love's "It's a Shame (My Sister)" ... something I had on cassingle back in the day. (Ok, full disclosure: There's a hundred percent chance that said item is in a shoebox in the hall closet at my apartment right now.)  Apparently I still know all the words to it, too.

Anyhow, I was singing along at a stop light, and when I looked in the rearview mirror at the people in the car behind me, it seemed as though they were singing along to the exact same song. So weird!

Very Groovy

I watched a giant slab of Velveeta Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe on Hulu last night. The whole thing was pretty much a nonstop shout-out to every Bruce Campbell catch phrase ever, with only slightly higher production value than The Man with the Screaming Brain, so . . . two thumbs up!

Today in Earworms: Friday

Gah. I watched Stephen Colbert perform "Friday" on Jimmy Fallon, uh, several times over the weekend, and now I can't get that damn song out of my head.

Friday, Friday . . .  Partyin', yeah! . . . Partyin', yeah! Cue the Taylor Hicks harmonica solo!

Click the link to get infected.

Stephen Colbert Sings ‘Friday’ with The Roots!

Click it! You know you want to. It's quite the spectacle. Stephen in a tux . . . pyrotechnics . . . the Knicks City Dancers (Whaa?!) Just watch it already.

I Totally Want This: Late Night Snack

Yfrog Photo : yfrog.com/hs70goxj - Shared by jimmyfallon

Hmm. Chocolate-covered potato chips in vanilla ice cream with a salty caramel swirl? I enjoy most of the things in that list, but not all mashed together like some kind of Best of Bootie mix. (Speaking of, I downloaded the 2010 edition over the weekend and added it to my iPod. It adds a little zazz to the workday.) But I am a fan of Ben & Jerry's flavors created for late-night hosts, so I'm sure I'll be sampling it at some point in the near future.

In other news, Emilio Estevez washed his hair. <--- That was my favorite of the many Charlie Sheen-related team names at pub quiz the other night. I have had several requests to get off my lazy a-dollar sign-dollar sign </Principal Figgins> and resume my recaps, so I will get on that forthwith. Right after I finish doing freaking math to update the suggested responses in this stoopid econ lesson on the CPI.

In the meantime, may this fulfill any tiger blood needs you have:

(I haven't actually watched it yet, but it was highly recommended to me over lunch. I saw Jimmy's tweet about how much he looks like CS, but I will wait to watch the episode in its entirety on Hulu later tonight. So, you know, something to look forward to . . . )

Guilty Pleasure

I set my VCRs yesterday to tape American Idol tonight and tomorrow. Squee! Of course, I also had to set it to tape the finale of Life Unexpected. I'm kind of glad to see that show go, though. It started out okay, but then some of the plot lines/characters got a bit annoying.

I'm actually using my VCRs less now that I have Hulu Plus via Roku — I can subscribe to a bunch of shows and watch them either on TV or online. Some shows, however, it's still easier to tape.

In other news, I think I bit off more than I can chew in terms of library books. I put in requests for about 30 books from my could-be-fun-to-read list — you know, fluff:

• some YA novels, like the two sequels to Adam Canfield of the Slash
• some mysteries, like Michael Connelly's Reversal
• some light nonfiction, like We, Robot: Skywalker's Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact

and about 20 of them came in at once. Doh!

Plus, last week I went to a different CCPL branch than I usually do (Somehow it feels like cheating or being otherwise unfaithful to my usual branch, but then again sometimes I like it when the checkout clerks don't know me.) and they had a bunch of DVDs and graphic novels on display, so I ended up with a handful of those, plus two more volumes in a YA series I had been reading and then lost track of: Shadow Dragons and The Dragon's Apprentice. (I talked about the first book in the series in Book Report: Volume 5.)

One of the DVDs I picked up was the second season of Frasier. Hi-larious! I especially enjoyed the translation scene in "An Affair to Forget" that was stolen from an homage to the "Paris At Last" episode of I Love Lucy. Now, of course, I have to request the complete first season and then watch all the rest of the complete seasons because I'm apparently a bit of a compulsive completist with too much time on her hands. But I think you already knew that.

For Reals, Yo

I usually make a spreadsheet this time of year to track my viewing plans, but I could never come close to the attention to detail shown by this guy: The New Fall Season - The Ultimate TV Spreadsheet (UPDATED).

My spreadsheet is only broken down by prime time (shown below; click to embiggen) and late night (Stewart/Colbert, Leno/Fallon, Ferguson, SNL).

I'm kind of cheesed that Human Target was moved to Wednesdays; I was using Wednesdays to catch up on Monday and Tuesday's shows. And since I've had to triage Thursdays at 8 and watch Community and Bones online,  I cannot wait for Hulu Plus to come to Roku.

Unexplained Absences

Oof. I haven't posted anything in almost a month?! Yeesh. What the heck have I been doing with myself all August? Working, I guess.

I was pretty busy with the day job, plus one of my freelance clients is, uh, "transitioning to a new business model" and there was a lot of work to do with that. My other freelance client is also transitioning to a new business model in that she's going to be retiring in about ten months, so I keep telling myself that this time next year I won't have to be doing [fill in the blank with whatever task is eating into my slacking off time].

Ah, yes, slacking off time: You know what's awesome for that? The iPad. I'm using mine to compose this blog post. Mostly I use it for ebooks, email, Facebook, music, Web surfing. . . All stuff I could do on the iPod touch, but with a bigger screen. Then again, my laptop has a much bigger screen, but it takes a few minutes to boot up and it's too big to hold in one hand. So, iPad FTW, I guess.

I was showing it to my parents the other weekend, and they were pretty much like, That's nice, dear. My dad said something about it seemed like a way to waste a lot of time. I'm like, Have you *met* the Internet? Wasting time is its middle name! And you have 800 cable channels, so Pot, meet Kettle. My mom couldn't get the finger-swipe gestures down at first — I think perhaps she was using the nail instead of the pad of her finger, and then somehow she was tapping it too hard/too long? Whatever. I'm not sure exactly how she was doing it wrong, but she was doing it wrong. Then she got the hang of it, pretty much, and was on Facebook looking through some photos/videos of the kids of someone she had in her first grade class about twenty-nine years ago. She couldn't stop laughing about the deja vu weirdness of it, since apparently his kids look and the act the same way he did when he was their age. After that, I freaked out my dad and my grandma by showing them how Google Earth can home in on your exact location. Fun!

At any rate, to maximize the time wasting capabilities, I signed up for a Hulu plus account. However, I'm having second thoughts because I'm not sure there's enough content available for iPads to make it worth $10/month. Most of the stuff I want to see is only available through the Web site, which is free. That might change once the fall season starts, though, so maybe I'll give it another month or two before I cancel it.

Speaking of fall TV, it's almost time for me to make this year's giant spreadsheet of the shows I'm going to be watching/taping/viewing online. I already know that Thursdays at 8 are going to be a train wreck: Community vs. Bones vs. Big Bang Theory. I'll probably tape Bones and Big Bang, and watch Community online. So, that's one hour of prime time scheduled; now for the other twenty!

Slow Jammin'

Catching up on my TV watching  ... I'm supposed to be doing all kinds of other chores around the house right now in preparation for probably going to Akron this weekend, but I'd rather rearrange the contents of my iPod and watch last night's episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. 

Speaking of: I love it when BriWi shows up. He's a hoot on The Daily Show, but the fact that he actually does this skit with Jimmy and the Roots cracks me up.

Fried and Melted

I'm going to Melt for dinner tonight — for the second time this week. Score!


I have been thinking about what to order all day . . . well, okay, between meeting several times with a freelancer about pesky layout issues in a new series of books and sending a preface that will appear in all twelve books in said series back to an editor for revision, among other tasks that have pretty much fried my brain. 


Anyhow, after poring over the menu, I am 90 percent sure that I'm going to go with the Westside Monte Cristo:

For the uninitiated, It's a ham and turkey sandwich with Swiss and American cheeses that is beer battered and fried. I saw some kid at the next table have one on Tuesday, and I have been a fan of the whole Monte Cristo concept ever since Nicole made Luke take it off of his menu. 


(In other news, Scott Patterson is supposed to be in some show on NBC this fall. I'm semi-intrigued, but not squee-ing yet.)

Unspoiled

I fell behind on my television watching last week — a mixture of frenzied cleaning early in the week, followed by frenzied cheering late in the week — and am still not caught up.


I did manage to locate all of last week's American Idol episodes — something that would be easier on a DVR, but I'm still not getting one. Old school all the way! — and watch those last night, because I was finding it more and more difficult to remain unspoiled about who got the boot last Thursday. (For example, I had to not read any of my many RSS feeds related to AI, which put a severe crimp in my goofing off at the office.)


Anyhow, apparently some people are upset about the results, but since I don't really like anybody except Crystal this year anyway, I can't get too worked up over them. Okay, okay: I am a smidge bummed about the boys, but my overwhelming joy at never seeing creepy Lilly again makes it totally worth it. Besides, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Lambchop Mullet and Todrick were not going to win anyway. I would, however, have preferred seeing them again and not one-trick-ponies Latino Neck Tattoo and Lee. 


Meanwhile, back at the ranch: I think I'll continue wasting time this morning by watching the latest Idolatry videos on EW.com. 

I Would Totally Watch That

Twitter Users Save NBC! | the TV addict

Twitter users took pity upon the network by banding together in an attempt to help it come up with something . . . well, watchable. 


The idea was spearheaded by @DustyTrice, who kicked things off with a tweet saying, “NBC will greenlight any show pitched. We need to develop a show for @NBC. Right now. On Twitter.” What followed was a slew of suggestions . . . . 

My favorite?

@davesund: Kanye West hosts IMMA LET YOU FINISH.