I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:Happy birthday, Smiley!
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
:-(
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
OMG: Twenty-five years ago today, Carnegie Mellon professor Scott Fahlman posted the following on a university bulletin board:
ONE DOOR CLOSES, ANOTHER OPENS: The Onion's AV Club now has a TV Blog for recaps and discussions of selected favorite shows, which may well fill the niche from which TWoP is inching away.
A CURSE WORD NORMALLY ASSOCIATED WITH FRUSTRATION OR DISGUST: Fox tries to explain its Emmy censorship, which gives me an excuse to link to the Family Guy song-and-dance which opened the show, as well as my favorite part of the show, the nominees for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program.
Monday, September 17, 2007
AND HE'D SAY "MAGGIE, DO YOU WANT TO DANCE?" AND I'D SAY "DADDY, I WOULD LOVE TO": Fourteen years after winning the Tony, three years after putting Baby in a corner, and ten years before becoming Emily Gilmore, here is Kelly Bishop on Phil Donahue (along with fellow original castmates Kay Cole and Nancy Lane) at the ballet. Enjoy.
A RECAP OF A SHOW I BARELY REMEMBER: Previously, on Prison Break: Linc went to jail for drug-murdering the Vice-President’s brother, except he didn’t. He only was going to, except it was already done. Brother Mike went to jail for trying to rob a bank, except he didn’t. He just wanted to go to jail, where he could try out the World’s Least Efficient Full-Body Mnemonic Device. Dr. Sara gave up her bad habits, except she didn’t. She left drugs behind, but still loves her the thrill of a dangerous man. Mike, Linc, sociopathic mobster Abruzzi (sounds fake-Italian; is real-Italian), hard-cheese-for-Tony Iraq scapegoat C-Note, K-Fed, omnivo-rapist T-Bag, saintly lovebird Sucre, and Bad Dustin Hoffman Impression, with help from DB Sweeney (no, really), Cousin Hurley, Dr. Sara, and the Jackpot of All Mail Order Brides, conspire to break out. They succeed, due in large part to the incompetence of CO and dirty cheater Bill Belichick and elementary-school craft enthusiast Warden “Pope Warden” Pope, fka coke-importing Mike Hammer. Portion of giant-ass tattoo used in escape: 2.5% (hex-bolt sizer; deltoid map; annoying upside-down number puzzle; rendezvous location). I suppose the other 77.5% will come in handy later.
Pursued by a crack team of law enforcers -- bounty-seeking Belicheck; his old, out-of-shape Man Friday; master extrapolator Agent Mahone, a pill-popping tormented bad-father rogue who shares an ex-wife with Detective McNulty; Secret Agent Young Dan Ackroyd; and the least-menacing Asian menace since Mickey Rooney (what, exactly, did Bruce Lee think?) -- the team, minus T-Bag’s hand, splits up. Impenetrable disguise of choice: generic ballcap, hunched shoulders. Methods of transportation to DB Sweeney’s loot: borrowed motorcycle (Sucre), rental car and spurned prostitute (Linc, Mike), kindness of strangers (C-Note), craigslist shared ride of love (K-Fed), killing spree (T-Bag). All reach the stash at about the same time. To create a diversion while they dig through a concrete foundation for the loot, they let greasy rubber-handed reptilian liplicker T-Bag sweet-talk the faded rose who owns the garage, which naturally results in a hostage situation with an off-duty cop-daughter. Hijinks ensue, whereupon T-Bag escapes with the loot and Mike and Linc, brain surgeons, escape with ten years of National Geographics. Agent Mahone catches up, kills K-Fed (satisfyingly), Abruzzi (abruptly), and Bad Dustin Hoffman (chattily).
The Vice-President kills the President to prove a point. The point is lost on me.
Belicheck and Man Friday catch up with T-Bag, steal the money, and feud. T-Bag catches up with Man Friday, kills him in the act of trying to get hookers to defecate on a glass table above him, and frames Belicheck. Belicheck tries to outsmart the local rube detective, and predictably buys himself a ticket back up the (Fox) river, where he bunks with giant Avocado in Mike and Sucre's old cell. Belicheck's face during that reveal: "prison rape, ay caramba!" T-Bag moves back in with his old nonconsenting family, using handcuffs and rope to take attachment parenting to its logical extreme. I can’t remember how he gets caught, but it involves church ladies, returning to the old abusive homestead, and nobody acting in a manner that makes any sense.
C-Note gets his wife arrested, his ailing daughter’s insurance discontinued, and his own self thrown in prison, where he makes a deal with Mahone that includes a friendly proposal that he kill himself. There’s Getting Past No, there’s Getting to Yes, and there’s the advanced course, Getting the Other Side to Agree to Kill Himself.
Sucre makes a huge deal about how he’s Puerto Rican. Then he goes to visit his dear auntie in Mexico. He loves a hot girl with dimples, which convinces the bus rider with the live chicken to give him a Volkswagen Bug. He shares a ride with a Federale to the airport. I'd tell you how he escaped all the Federales, but they didn't show us. They just let him hang around out of kindness, I suppose.
Mike and Linc pretty much can’t take four steps without bumping into their black-ops dad (until he dies), Linc’s idiot son (until he gets thrown in jail and then released and then kidnapped and then just says I want out of this show), Mahone (a definite catch-and-release fisherman), or Sucre, but to get to Dr. Sara, they need to employ an elaborate origami-messaging system. Also, the following APB apparently does not work: “be on the lookout for a steely-gazed college boy with short-cropped hair, a generic baseball cap, and a full-body tattoo.”
There’s all kinds of angst with Special Agent Young Dan Ackroyd, but it involves his sister and his love for President Wettig and homoerotic office politics with Non-Menacing Asian and zzzzzz. He teams up with Mike and Linc, and they kidnap their prime evidence, the President’s brother, but while they're obsessing over the fact that he only kind of looks like himself, they manage to let him kill himself. They neglect to try the Weekend At Bernie’s escape plan, which, duh, of course.
Dr. Sara goes to trial for her role in the escape, but Special Agent Young Dan Ackroyd testifies in her behalf, and although his story is twelve different kinds of craaaaazy, the judge tosses Dr. Sara’s case right then and there, and sentences Young Dan Ackroyd to interminable sexual tension with Addison Montgomery.
Sucre, Mike, Belicheck (who took a La Femme Nikita deal from Mahone, sans les yeux triste ou les jambes longues d'Anne Parillaud*), Linc, Dr. Sara, Mahone, and Agent Not-Menacing Asian all rendezvous in Panama, where everybody kills, frames, gets framed, gets caught, backstabs, loses the money, or resolves to end the cycle of abuse; each ends up either dead or arrested. If they’re in Group B, they all end up in a Panamanian prison whose motto is "like Fox River, only Medieval, and less helpfully similar to Mike's tattoo."
Will Linc and Mike team up with Mahone and Belicheck to bust out again? Did C-Note kill himself? Will Dr. Sara forgive and forget and re-conspire? Will this show make one single bit of sense at any point this season? Tune intonight next week tonight (whoops, missed it), I guess.
*Warning:8th-Grade French not certifiedFrench certified -- merci, D'Arcy
Pursued by a crack team of law enforcers -- bounty-seeking Belicheck; his old, out-of-shape Man Friday; master extrapolator Agent Mahone, a pill-popping tormented bad-father rogue who shares an ex-wife with Detective McNulty; Secret Agent Young Dan Ackroyd; and the least-menacing Asian menace since Mickey Rooney (what, exactly, did Bruce Lee think?) -- the team, minus T-Bag’s hand, splits up. Impenetrable disguise of choice: generic ballcap, hunched shoulders. Methods of transportation to DB Sweeney’s loot: borrowed motorcycle (Sucre), rental car and spurned prostitute (Linc, Mike), kindness of strangers (C-Note), craigslist shared ride of love (K-Fed), killing spree (T-Bag). All reach the stash at about the same time. To create a diversion while they dig through a concrete foundation for the loot, they let greasy rubber-handed reptilian liplicker T-Bag sweet-talk the faded rose who owns the garage, which naturally results in a hostage situation with an off-duty cop-daughter. Hijinks ensue, whereupon T-Bag escapes with the loot and Mike and Linc, brain surgeons, escape with ten years of National Geographics. Agent Mahone catches up, kills K-Fed (satisfyingly), Abruzzi (abruptly), and Bad Dustin Hoffman (chattily).
The Vice-President kills the President to prove a point. The point is lost on me.
Belicheck and Man Friday catch up with T-Bag, steal the money, and feud. T-Bag catches up with Man Friday, kills him in the act of trying to get hookers to defecate on a glass table above him, and frames Belicheck. Belicheck tries to outsmart the local rube detective, and predictably buys himself a ticket back up the (Fox) river, where he bunks with giant Avocado in Mike and Sucre's old cell. Belicheck's face during that reveal: "prison rape, ay caramba!" T-Bag moves back in with his old nonconsenting family, using handcuffs and rope to take attachment parenting to its logical extreme. I can’t remember how he gets caught, but it involves church ladies, returning to the old abusive homestead, and nobody acting in a manner that makes any sense.
C-Note gets his wife arrested, his ailing daughter’s insurance discontinued, and his own self thrown in prison, where he makes a deal with Mahone that includes a friendly proposal that he kill himself. There’s Getting Past No, there’s Getting to Yes, and there’s the advanced course, Getting the Other Side to Agree to Kill Himself.
Sucre makes a huge deal about how he’s Puerto Rican. Then he goes to visit his dear auntie in Mexico. He loves a hot girl with dimples, which convinces the bus rider with the live chicken to give him a Volkswagen Bug. He shares a ride with a Federale to the airport. I'd tell you how he escaped all the Federales, but they didn't show us. They just let him hang around out of kindness, I suppose.
Mike and Linc pretty much can’t take four steps without bumping into their black-ops dad (until he dies), Linc’s idiot son (until he gets thrown in jail and then released and then kidnapped and then just says I want out of this show), Mahone (a definite catch-and-release fisherman), or Sucre, but to get to Dr. Sara, they need to employ an elaborate origami-messaging system. Also, the following APB apparently does not work: “be on the lookout for a steely-gazed college boy with short-cropped hair, a generic baseball cap, and a full-body tattoo.”
There’s all kinds of angst with Special Agent Young Dan Ackroyd, but it involves his sister and his love for President Wettig and homoerotic office politics with Non-Menacing Asian and zzzzzz. He teams up with Mike and Linc, and they kidnap their prime evidence, the President’s brother, but while they're obsessing over the fact that he only kind of looks like himself, they manage to let him kill himself. They neglect to try the Weekend At Bernie’s escape plan, which, duh, of course.
Dr. Sara goes to trial for her role in the escape, but Special Agent Young Dan Ackroyd testifies in her behalf, and although his story is twelve different kinds of craaaaazy, the judge tosses Dr. Sara’s case right then and there, and sentences Young Dan Ackroyd to interminable sexual tension with Addison Montgomery.
Sucre, Mike, Belicheck (who took a La Femme Nikita deal from Mahone, sans les yeux triste ou les jambes longues d'Anne Parillaud*), Linc, Dr. Sara, Mahone, and Agent Not-Menacing Asian all rendezvous in Panama, where everybody kills, frames, gets framed, gets caught, backstabs, loses the money, or resolves to end the cycle of abuse; each ends up either dead or arrested. If they’re in Group B, they all end up in a Panamanian prison whose motto is "like Fox River, only Medieval, and less helpfully similar to Mike's tattoo."
Will Linc and Mike team up with Mahone and Belicheck to bust out again? Did C-Note kill himself? Will Dr. Sara forgive and forget and re-conspire? Will this show make one single bit of sense at any point this season? Tune in
*Warning:
WELL, THAT'S ONE WAY TO GET OUT OF A PRENUP: Look, I know "PopoZao" was an awful song, but that's no reason for someone to take out a contract hit on Kevin Federline.
SPARE THE GENERIC DESIGN-BY-MIDDLE-MANAGEMENT-COMMITTEE MAKEOVER, SPOIL THE CORPORATE WEBQUISITION: Long ago, there was a little web site devoted to Dawson's Creek recaps, then it expanded to the much-loved MightyBigTV (subtitle: Television Without Pity), then it almost folded a couple of times before shadowy white-knight types rescued it, then it got some sort of cease-and-desist letter and promoted its subtitle to title, then it started writing 35-page recaps and became the most powerful outsider (non-network, non-mainstream journalism) TV site on the web and Miss Alli bought herself the tallest most rickety soapbox in the entire world and they started willy-nilly banning commenters for bizarre reasons, and then Bravo bought it. Through it all MightyBigTV/TwoP had a remarkably consistent look. I think I remember exactly one major redesign, coinciding with some massive software upgrade to handle the forum traffic. Simple banner masthead, simple horizontal color-distinguished rows for the most recent stories, teaser box at the right-hand-side, navigation links at the bottom, all thematically integrated with Glark's clever little show icons -- hyperliteral interpretations of show titles, done in thick black ink against bright-colored square backgrounds.
Today's TwoP brings us the most radical redesign in the site's history, and I greet it with a hearty "yuck." Without the Glark icons, the site is just busy and frayed, with floating banners, mastheads, and top-story boxes rattling against each other. The photos replacing the Glark icons eschew humor for dry, legally-cleared identification, which only serves to underline the site's insider sponsorship. Sure, there are some changes that at least some here will welcome (weecaps for sitcoms, for example), but I question the wisdom of buying one of the most do-it-yourself success stories on the web and then bleaching out all of the idiosyncracy. I know that I tend to disagree with the professional web designers -- I love the McSweeney's look (which Blogger will helpfully allow you to rip off) and I have hated every single one of the bi-weekly ESPN.com redesigns that I've seen since I started reading that site in 1994, when Starwave published it (hey, remember when ESPN's layout was just a top story and then a grid of recent headlines, grouped by sport, with "more..." links if you needed them? How did we ever survive without auto-loading ESPNMotion screeching whenever we wanted an update on OJ's most recent felony?). Sometimes, all you really need from a web site is refined, economical simplicity.
Then again, I still lament the loss of the pixellated roll-over-for-photo pictures that the killed-by-acquisition Fametracker used to use instead of the imdb links.
Edited to add: (1) It has come to my attention that the icons may not be Glark-created (though it's not clear to me). I had just assumed that given that Glark was the design maven at TwoP, and I assumed he designed both the Glarkware t-shirts and the icons. Maybe, maybe not.
(2) Sars and Miss Alli are all over the technical forum saying, notwithstanding assumptions there and in the comments here to the contrary, that the forum is to identify technical issues and to request features (e.g., "wider this; drop-down that"), not to shit all over the redesign, lament the loss of our collective tv-obsessive innocence, or attribute motives to the choices made. You can read this either as "we're tired of the criticism" or "our new bosses made us do it over our strenuous objection and there's no going back, so stop creating friction." Whatever the reason, it isn't going to help TwoP's rep as a site that gleefully dishes it out but refuses to take it.
(3) A few months ago, Miss Alli started dropping statements like "when I was a lawyer," etc. She's now listed as a Head of Programming. So it looks like she's a full-time Bravo employee now. Wonder if she got a piece of the purchase price.
(4) Come to think of it, if TwoP is now part of a bureaucracy, does that mean they're going to have less latitude to piss off the audience with random banishments?
Today's TwoP brings us the most radical redesign in the site's history, and I greet it with a hearty "yuck." Without the Glark icons, the site is just busy and frayed, with floating banners, mastheads, and top-story boxes rattling against each other. The photos replacing the Glark icons eschew humor for dry, legally-cleared identification, which only serves to underline the site's insider sponsorship. Sure, there are some changes that at least some here will welcome (weecaps for sitcoms, for example), but I question the wisdom of buying one of the most do-it-yourself success stories on the web and then bleaching out all of the idiosyncracy. I know that I tend to disagree with the professional web designers -- I love the McSweeney's look (which Blogger will helpfully allow you to rip off) and I have hated every single one of the bi-weekly ESPN.com redesigns that I've seen since I started reading that site in 1994, when Starwave published it (hey, remember when ESPN's layout was just a top story and then a grid of recent headlines, grouped by sport, with "more..." links if you needed them? How did we ever survive without auto-loading ESPNMotion screeching whenever we wanted an update on OJ's most recent felony?). Sometimes, all you really need from a web site is refined, economical simplicity.
Then again, I still lament the loss of the pixellated roll-over-for-photo pictures that the killed-by-acquisition Fametracker used to use instead of the imdb links.
Edited to add: (1) It has come to my attention that the icons may not be Glark-created (though it's not clear to me). I had just assumed that given that Glark was the design maven at TwoP, and I assumed he designed both the Glarkware t-shirts and the icons. Maybe, maybe not.
(2) Sars and Miss Alli are all over the technical forum saying, notwithstanding assumptions there and in the comments here to the contrary, that the forum is to identify technical issues and to request features (e.g., "wider this; drop-down that"), not to shit all over the redesign, lament the loss of our collective tv-obsessive innocence, or attribute motives to the choices made. You can read this either as "we're tired of the criticism" or "our new bosses made us do it over our strenuous objection and there's no going back, so stop creating friction." Whatever the reason, it isn't going to help TwoP's rep as a site that gleefully dishes it out but refuses to take it.
(3) A few months ago, Miss Alli started dropping statements like "when I was a lawyer," etc. She's now listed as a Head of Programming. So it looks like she's a full-time Bravo employee now. Wonder if she got a piece of the purchase price.
(4) Come to think of it, if TwoP is now part of a bureaucracy, does that mean they're going to have less latitude to piss off the audience with random banishments?
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