Take it somewhere else, I run a respectable strip club here

I have invented a new game.  It is called Kill Your Liver, and the rules are simple: while watching any CW or ABC teenage programming:
1 - When someone says something expository you take a drink.*
2 - When someone says something that does not sound like something an actual human being would say, you take a drink.
3 - Every time someone says something that makes you think that the scriptwriters are convinced you are a moron you take a drink.
The alcohol-free version where you watch CW/ABC programming completely sober is called Kill Your Brain.

Until Monday, then, I wish a very good weekend to one and all.



* I do not advise trying this with the first episode of Ravenswood - you will be dead within the hour.

Call him a Welshman and move on

 

Dammit to hell, The Blog, you're insatiable.
Today I have been catching up with Almost Human, and ten minutes into episode 3 I am wondering why I do this to myself.  There are better things I can do with my time than watch something I know will be terrible to the point I am embarrassed on my own behalf to be viewing it, but I just can't help it: when robotman uses his fingers to take a phone call I honestly cannot decide if it is laughable or depressing that a tv show in the year 2013 has someone using a Gadgetphone with a straight face, but either way it's amazing.  Episode 2 had a voiceover commentary for the visually impaired (I downloaded the wrong file) and the first few minutes featured a man using a sex robot who was slowly undressing and it was quite possibly the sleaziest thing I've seen/heard in ages, this monotone voice describing "perfect curves" and whatnot, like Steven Hawking reading aloud from Reader's Wives.  It certainly doesn't help dispel my increasing belief that tv sci-fi is a super-skeevy genre for creeps.
I'm still watching it at the moment - Karl Urban's character and his partner are trapped in a hi-tech high-rise building of the future and honestly, I am not sure that it's deliberate.  It's that kind of show.

I think I liked you better without hope

Been playing GTA5 intermittently lately and it's a stunning bit of world-building that got me thinking about Los Angeles - that place Ice T recorded Power and a generation of poor people found their voices in anger and vocal disenfranchisement with the agencies of government that treated them like criminals, and when that voice went around the world and was heard in my neck of the woods... well, it's not like rap music was hard to relate to if you'd grown up in a poor Catholic area in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, what with its talking about the police victimising a section of the community and warring gangs etc...  It also helped that being poor was an international language, spoken then in loud and angry voices and through socially-conscious films that masqueraded as gangster culture to put poverty in people's faces.  The shortcomings of Los Angeles were everywhere in Western culture, and because we were actually talking about it, it felt like we could change things someday even if things were bad right now because we weren't hiding from the problem, we were running right at it.
Things have got better here in my neck of the woods what with the Good Friday Agreement and all, and I imagine the same is true for Los Angeles because now it's the place where Ice-T recorded Nash Bridges and a generation of musicians have come up singing about how much money they have, how many women they've had sex with and how big their pool is, and coincidentally rap also went mainstream around the time there was the switchover from angry poor people to successful capitalist - how weird is that?
I guess what I am saying is, going by the music I hear, the tv shows I see and the celebrities I read about these days, there aren't any poor people in Los Angeles anymore, and I think it's great the city has fixed its problems so its culture - and by extension ours - could move on to other things.

I recognise THOSE looks - they're the reason I stopped doing stand-up

I got to the end of the fifth season of the Twilight Zone and while there were some stone cold classics like Number 12 Looks Just Like You, Nightmare at 20 000 feet, and The self-improvement of Salvadore Ross, otherwise it was a pretty flabby 36 episodes - not unenjoyable because there's at least two starring roles for Robbie The Robot, but not as memorable as one might have hoped.
Tomorrow, it's backwards I go to the hour-long episodes of season four thanks to cheapo box sets from Poundland...

It's no dream house, but we get fed through our spines and the rent is reasonable

A hit and run post today because basically I am not very organised and it takes a lot of time to think of something interesting to say about an episode of Twilight Zone I watched on the internet in between videos about cats.

That is one crazy uncircumcised old man

I have literally no idea how Number 12 Looks Just Like You hasn't been turned into a film or tv series in the years since it was first broadcast while Steel has... actually, the latter was remade as a film where a robot has a fistfight with a bull so I can't really pretend I don't know why that happened.  "Your script has a scene where a robot punches out a bull, you say?  Well unless the central concept is holocaust denial we are shooting that mother."

Time for me to hit the booze and I wish you all a great weekend.

There's only one word for it: terrible and horrible.

Uncle Simon is utterly mental television.  On the surface, it's a blackly comic tale of one person being trapped in their own Hell (a recurring theme in Twilight Zone as recent as two episodes previous, in the Mickey Rooney one-man episode Last Night of a Jockey), but put it in the context of Rod Serling being the writer and it becomes a fascinating exhibit of someone taking the piss out of the theater of cruelty mentality because they don't particularly buy into the notion that this is how things work.
Serling's work, for me, is best viewed through the lens of his history as a man who willingly signed up for World War 2, saw death in it, was wounded repeatedly and then came home and wrote one script after another on the evils of racism, war, and the consequences of violence, and I prefer to use this lens both as context and because it helps dispel the oft-held notion that as you get older you become more right-wing, a concern for me personally and - I hope - humanity in general.  A right-wing nut may have played the lead role, but the writer of 1968's Planet of the Apes was anything but, and I find that quite heartening.

Plus Uncle Simon has a robot with a walking stick demanding hot chocolate while handing out - for the mid-60s - stone-cold disses.