attaching the electrodes of knowledge to the nipples of ignorance

Watching: Wild Boys, an Aussie western series about outlaws on the run from a corrupt copper. Pretty good season opener, hopefully it'll keep the momentum going, but the setting is intriguing if nothing else.
Homeland, which is fixing to be the new 24 by the looks of things. A bit predictable and the sex scenes are almost laughably unpretentious in their gratuitousness, but still watchable stuff about a CIA agent keeping her mental problems under wraps from her bosses while trying to prove her theory that a recently rescued POW was turned by Al Qaeda super-brainwashing.
Death Valley is the latest MTV reality tv show, following the cops of the small town of Valley CA as they go about their night shift one year after a sudden influx of zombies, werewolves and vampires. The cast don't really have the chemistry to make the material work and some of it is painfully unfunny, but I think I'm on the record as saying that I will watch anything with werewolves in it, so it might be good for the briefer visits to the gym.

You got shit shoes, yeh shit shoe bastard

Watching: my way through the CSI franchise from day one and got as far as CSI Miami season two and CSI season four, and once I finish the former I have CSI New York to get stuck into as well. They're a reliable old workhorse of adolescent cynicism masquerading as mature storytelling for the most part, but it's around this point in the franchise that they started to become overt parodies of themselves without actually lapsing into self-awareness, and the legacy is felt to this day in tv cop shows such as
Against The Wall, which is largely dreadful, but did a remarkable pull back and reveal at the end of the latest episode when the guy who is clearly who you'd pick as the true criminal going by standard tv form is revealed to be just a decent guy, making an open mockery of the CSI legacy of tv shows whose big 'reveal' is that the victim is the real guilty party and no-one is innocent and the world is cruel and wah-wah-wah.
Cynical in a different way is Combat Hospital, which is admittedly still funnier than the final season of MASH, but also a thick-headed and clunky series that doesn't try harder because it knows its audience and we just aren't worth that effort. It's a near-criminal waste of the always watchable Elias Koteas, who can make even the worst of his dialogue sound good, but with this show I suppose he gets plenty of practice.
Another character actor largely ignored but always reliable is Miguel Ferrer, utterly wasted in The Protector, a vehicle for the bafflingly successful Ally Walker, here cast as an unfunny Mary-Sue smartass cop doing cop show stuff and generally making people want to punch her in the face, which crucially they do not do. It's not great.
Royal Pains I was enjoying while it had the Fonz in it, but now it doesn't, so I don't so much. The Fonz' last appearance had Ed Asner as his dad, so there was that, but otherwise the show remains oddly fixated on super-competent and super-dull Hank as he saves the day a lot with fast music playing over his MacGuyvered medical exploits and never once does he display a hint of character. I can see menopausal single women liking this show, as hank is not very exciting and I can see them wanting to have someone as un-threatening as he is as their partner/son/whatever it is menopausal single women want in their lives apart from chocolate and more open affection from their cats.
Drop Dead Diva I am still watching, as for some reason it's my preferred hour-long show for when I'm in the gym and not in the mood for something as short as cartoons. I keep thinking they'll pull some of the mystical stuff back out of the hat and the main character will have to defend someone in a supernatural court where Satan/God is the plaintiff, like maybe Satan will call foul on all the disproportionate good she's done as a lawyer since returning from the dead, but if it doesn't and it just spins its wheels with the love triangle stuff I'm probably okay with that, too. Guess I should just book me my vagina attachment surgery now.
Can't recall what I was doing when 911 happened as I didn't think it was that big a deal at the time, but Dennis Leary obviously disagrees as Rescue Me - the closest thing he's had to a tv show that hasn't been cancelled - has been cancelled with a finale timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of 911, and by 'timed to coincide', I mean they stopped showing the last season halfway through and waited a year to cash in on the timing. Eh, it was reliable telly, I guess, if you can tolerate the deification of the main character by the rest of the cast, so noticeable in the last couple of seasons that it prompted my brother to coin the term "Leary Sue". Not great, but it had the occasional moment.

I don't just think outside the box - I TEAR IT UP

Watching: The Glades, which seems to depart from the traditional 'dick cop with a heart of gold' show by having actual clues to the weekly mystery of who dun what (usually a murder) sprinkled across the episode. Not a great cop show, but the mystery element is occasionally well done.
Suits - legal drama about professional exam cheat turned drug dealer Mike Ross, who ducks into a job interview with a suitcase full of Columbia's Finest to avoid cops and ends up so impressing smug super-lawyer Harvey Spector with his tale that he promptly gets hired at one of the country's top law firms, where he does the usual love triangle stuff while jumping through hoops to keep his past a secret from his colleagues. Some nice dialogue throwbacks to 1980s movies alongside the usual stare-offs make for an entertaining forty minutes.
Rookie Blue - which I watch because I like utter trash as much as the next man.

I'm looking for Ray Finkle. And a clean pair of shorts.

So you had a drunken threesome, join the club - we’re villains, you crybaby! We swing.

Okay proportion - you don't like me and I clearly don't like you, but let's just get these last couple dozen pages in the bag and we'll go our separate ways, okay? I'll go learn to draw in an anime style or something, something cartoony and not even vaguely acquainted with human anatomy and go chase me a job on a Marvel teen book, and you and perspective and tone can go fuck yourselves cause we ain't gettin' along, son.

I'm done with Bond movies so now I have to move onto some other marathon re-watch and the obvious candidate is Godzilla movies, though that'll take time to arrange given the rarity of some of those, so it looks like I'll be doing a Star Wars marathon of the six SW flicks, the two Ewoks outings, the CGI Clone Wars and the Samurai Jack dude's original CW movie/series in the meantime, and oddly what I'm looking forward to most is the Ewok movies. Funny how life goes.

...and I'd like to thank Seth McFarlane for not singing. Or telling any jokes.

Much as I enjoyed Casino Royale, it's not the reinvention of the Bond franchise many have claimed as much as it is an extension of concepts and ideas already present in the series - particularly Timothy Dalton's short-lived run in the role - but then recycling is nothing new to the Bond movies anyway. I'd argue that 24 is a greater influence on this one than the more obvious Jason Bourne movies, but apart from that I have few actual complaints. They move the goalposts whenever a new actor takes the role and with Craig the intention seems to be to make Bond less verbose and more of a focused hooligan character in keeping with Craig's looks - not saying he's ugly or owt, but he's no oil painting - although there's the odd moment where Bond does come across as more of the old-school character, particularly in the exchanges with Eva Green's Vesper.
I also enjoyed Quantum of Solace a great deal more than I expected given it once again rakes over the coals of the Bond Seeks Revenge plot, but its biggest problems are more the confusing mess several of the action sequences are reduced to, though maybe I'm alone in thinking that when you're watching an action movie the action sequences should be what you look forward to rather than something you endure until the plot kicks back in again. Whatever the case, the car chase at the start, the end of the free-running chase where Bond scraps with another agent in a greenhouse (or whatever it was), and intermittent sections of the plane attack and boating chases are just visual noise rather than visual narratives and they really got my goat. Luckily the story is pretty good, with Olga Whatserface being one of the better Bond girls by dint of having something going on apart from looking grumpy and playing hard to get until the end of the second act.
Bloodstone I played out of a sense that videogame stories have come a long way and it'd be worth a look to see some more of Danial Craig's take, but the script was shockingly poor and I'm more or less certain that it was held over from whoever was making the Pierce Brosnan games, as stuff like M's open adulation of Bond is out of place in the Craig era, as is the groan-inducing addition of Joss Stone as a supercriminal mastermind, which is hard to swallow for anyone who's ever heard her give an interview, though my biggest gripe would be that the story revolves around a secret organisation trying to fund the development of weaponized Anthrax as I'm pretty sure that they have that already. Away from the awful script, the gameplay is pretty linear and unimaginative third-person stuff where you can at least gleefully replicate the feeling of being Craig's Saxon murder machine by sprinting around the levels and hammering the square button to instant-kill anyone in your path, but the driving sections... man, the driving sections, they are just horrendous like you wouldn't believe. The physics alone are appalling, but it's liike the makers never played another racing game in their lives - maybe I've been spoiled by the fantastic Split/Second's bizarre approach to videogame racers in that it dispences with the idea of realism in favor of being enjoyable to play, but Bloodstone's racing levels are the very definition of awful, and in one particular level you can't tell the difference between ice (which you can drive on) and water (which kills you instantly), reducing something which should be entertaining to a confusing and unrewarding barrage of noise and visual chaff that instills only feelings of frustration and confusion - it's basically like playing the action scenes from Quantum of Solace. A good indicator of what a mess it is would probably be the baffling name, as the story has nothing to do with conflict diamonds or precious stones of any sort, making me think the high visibility of diamonds in the opening credits and the title are a throwback to an earlier script or game draft - again, hinting that it's a holdover from a different Bond project whose space-age levels are ill-fitting with the current tone of the films.
It's a game I played through in less than four hours, but I only paid a fiver for it so I don't feel I've been cheated terribly, though someone paid near fifty quid for this once upon a time and that can't be right.

Run along, dear. Man talk.