I have nothing to say

The good news is that I'm back from D.C. in one piece. The bad news is that I am not feeling particularly witty or articulate at the moment. I think I have blogger's block. I have nothing at all to write about. I'm still working on my Green Tea Raglan, but I haven't got around to taking pictures yet. I'm going to wash and dry the back tomorrow to shrink it down to its correct size, and I'll try to take a picture then.

And other than that, I have no news. I mean, I sort of have news. Here are some things that I have considered blogging about:

1. The new Cynthia Rawley "Whim" line of fun summer things at Target is full of adorableness. I bought pretty much the cheapest and not-cutest thing in the whole line, a lunch box for $3, and it was still pretty darn cute. I'm very excited about my lunch box. It's the perfect size to put a sandwich in to avoid the dreaded sandwich squishage problem. Every time I put a sandwich in my bag in the morning, it gets squished by lunch time. I think the whole point of the Whim line is that it's supposed to be goofy, non-utilitarian stuff, but the lunch boxes are actually pretty practical. And the goofy, non-utilitarian items are awesome, too, for those of you who are into that kind of frivolity.

2. As you may be aware, this has been a bad year for terrible mass death in the Chicago metro area. We've had university shootings and Layne Bryant shootings and a whole rash of horrible murders of school kids. And yet none of that has freaked me out as much as a stupid truck smashing itself into the Chinatown El station. Because the thing is, I can't actually picture Northern Illinois University or the Layne Bryant in Tinley Park (and in fact I have no idea where Tinley Park is), but that El station is totally part of my mental landscape. And apparently, that makes mass death much freakier.


3. It appears that pretty much everyone in my family, or at least every female member of my family, is obsessed with the terrible teensploitation show Gossip Girl. How could it be that a show could have such terrible ratings, and yet everyone I know could watch it? It may be that the audience of Gossip Girl is comprised entirely off people whom I know personally. And that's kind of weird, because I don't actually know any high school-aged girls at the moment.

4. I'm trying very hard to get into Battlestar Gallactica at the moment. I really should love Battlestar Gallactica. It has all sorts of things that should make one love it: its very thoughtful and deep and I'm nearly certain that the people who make it share my basic politics. And yet I'm not sure that I do love it. I think I might prefer Gossip Girl I'm going to reserve judgment until I've finished the first season.

Public Service Announcement

If you're American or have access to American T.V., you really should check out the PBS program African American Lives 2. (I'm sorry I missed African American Lives 1.) It's awesome. It's one of the best examples I've ever seen of using genealogy to put a human face on history. It's also just really well-made television.

I have seen the future of television, and it is crap

As I start this post, I have seen a grand total of nine minutes of Quarterlife, and I've already come to the conclusion that it is the worst thing that has ever been on T.V. I want to punch all of the characters. No, really. I want to bang their heads against their thrift-shop furniture. Is that supposed to be the point of Quarterlife, or is the idea here that we're actually supposed to find these characters and their "problems" interesting? This thing is supposed to be very revolutionary, because it was originally broadcast on the internet and has now made its way to network television. It's a shame that it's so unbelievably awful.

Here are some issues with Quarterlife:

1. Blogging about your friends' personal lives is really obnoxious. It's horrible, actually. If you can't think of anything to blog about other than that one of your friends gets drunk and sleeps around and that another is in love with his best friend's girlfriend, you really shouldn't have a blog. The protagonist's compulsion to share her friends' secrets with the world doesn't make her cool and artistic. It makes her pretty fucking appalling. And it's hard to build a T.V. show around someone who's kind of the scum of the earth.
   
2. Miss Scum-of-the-Earth, the show's protagonist apparently doesn't realize that half of the city is reading her blog. In fact, she's under the mistaken impression that nobody is reading her blog. Have the old guys who made this show never heard of a site counter?
3. The characters on Quarterlife are unbelievably self-indulgent. 99.9999% of the earth's population would be overjoyed to have the "problems" that they whine about. Miss Scum-of-the-Earth is an editorial associate at a women's magazine. She is not artistically fulfilled. She is amazed that people at her job (at a women's magazine) care that she wears sloppy clothes. She appears to be upset that women's magazines care about selling tampons and prefer content that allows them to sell advertisements. She whines about her job's "inauthenticity." What this person needs is for someone to sit her down and explain the concept of professionalism. Actually, what she needs is for someone to fire her whiny little ass, because she appears to think she's too good for a job that she is, in fact, not really good enough for. Her guy friends, who just graduated from film school, have similar artistic integrity issues about a commercial they have just been hired to make. They've been hired to make a commercial, and they are worried that they're not being true to their artistic vision. What kind of a jackass would even consider that a problem? Nobody ever explained the concept of paying your dues to these people?
   
4. This show believes all the stupid stereotypes about Gen Y, and I kind of don't. I don't believe that people that age are that shallow, that entitled, or frankly that dumb. I don't even believe that the shallow, entitled or dumb ones are that shallow, entitled or dumb. I worked with a couple of people that age last year, and they were all pretty normal. They worked hard, they were not self-indulgent twits, and they had real problems.
   

So yeah, I will not be watching this show again, mostly because it's boring, but also because it's kind of insulting. I'm older than the generation this show is supposed to be about, but I'm still offended on their behalf.

Brief geeky interlude

I've been watching The Wire on DVD. I'm currently about two thirds of the way through season 2. And while I really like The Wire, I have been repeatedly, inexplicably irritated by one tiny aspect of the show. I don't buy Jimmy McNulty's taste in music. Jimmy McNulty, for non-Wire fans, is probably the closest thing the show has to a main character: he's a screwed up, arrogant jerk of a cop who happens to be very, very good at solving cases and kind of horrible at every other aspect of his life. Every time we see Jimmy McNulty out on a bender, which is fairly often, he's listening to early '60s Motown hits on his car radio. Now, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on Jimmy McNulty. He's supposed to be about my age, and he's supposed to be from the next city over from the city where I grew up. Had Jimmy McNulty been a real person, we probably would have bumped into each other at that Beastie Boys/ L7/ House of Pain concert that my friends and I schlepped up to Baltimore to see in 1992. And it bugged me to no end that we constantly saw him driving around listening to the oldies station. I don't believe that Jimmy McNulty would listen to oldies. What I do believe is that David Simon, the series' creator, listens to that music, and he identifies with the Jimmy McNulty character. Given his obsession with getting the minute details of his characters' lives right, it irked me that one of the show's main characters listened to music that in real life would be more appropriate for his parents.

I was thinking about this tonight, ranting about it in my head, as I was about to watch my nightly episode of The Wire. And then I turned it on, and in the first scene, Jimmy McNulty goes out and gets wasted, gets in his car, turns on the radio, and it's playing...

"Transmetropolitan" by the Pogues. Which, I have to say, is exactly what Jimmy McNulty would be listening to while he was driving around drunk off his ass. Someone clearly noticed the Jimmy McNulty music problem and fixed it.

And then when the episode ended, I checked the credits and realized that this is the first episode of The Wire that was written by George Pelecanos. I actually happen to kind of hate George Pelecanos's books, for a lot of reasons that are too complicated to go into. He's definitely one of the best writers about contemporary D.C., which is a sad, sad commentary about the state of writing on D.C. But you've got to hand it to him: he has an impeccable sense of his characters' musical taste. And some googling reveals that he was, in fact, responsible for fixing the McNulty soundtrack:

As story editor for the popular HBO crime drama The Wire, set up the road in Baltimore, he’s wielded a minor musical influence: in a scene last season Detective Jimmy McNulty, on a bender, seeks his own soundtrack. “When he’s drunk, he throws the Pogues in the tape deck?” Pelecanos recalls. “That was me.”

To which I can only say: thank you, George Pelecanos. You have removed one of the small irritations in my television viewing life.