The Man Who Wasn't There

My weekend ended on a truly bad note, which I won't get into here...sufficed to say it was bad. And while it wasn't a musical note, it was a note to myself. As Alanis has said, it is a jagged little pill. The weekend itself seemed to invite this jaggedness as it was, without a doubt, a pretty much wasted weekend. Don't get me wrong, I had a good time playing games with friends and watching TV, but for a long weekend, it felt pretty useless. I had been battling the flu all last week and by Thursday, the night of the Kelly Clarkson concert (which was a high point; awesome concert) I thought I was on the vestiges of it. Not so, as by the end of the concert, I had a horrendous headache and, I'm pretty certain, a fever. The fever continued off and on throughout Friday, causing me to cancel some fun times Friday night. By Saturday, the fever was gone, but the symptoms remained and I didn't want to infect anyone, leading towards a Halloween wasted in front of the TV. Then, came the phone call from my parents on Sunday (at 7 AM, I might add...) that my brother's plane from Hawaii to here was canceled due to a cracked windshield, which is something I'm glad they caught before flying over a body of water as large and deep as, say, the ocean. Finally, the weekend ended with the aforementioned pill that was jagged. It's not often you get something truly eye-opening as Sunday night was for me. But there you go. You live, you learn.

Hopefully.

That said, the one thing I did this weekend (and did well, I might add) was watch The Big Bang Theory. I started watching this show this summer, during reruns. It being a sitcom, I didn't feel any over-riding necessity to watch the episodes in order, so I partook of the season two episodes that were shown. When Season Three started, I continued watching it and somewhere along the line I started falling in love. So, since I was couch-ridden this weekend, I decided to catch up on the show and started from the beginning. The show is funny in a way that most sitcom's aren't. It's still attached to a laugh track (or live audience? I can never tell anymore), it still tosses out jokes by the second and, like every sitcom, whatever disaster that starts the episode is more likely than not solved by the end. It is a situational comedy, after all.

But what surprised me was how both accessible it was (to geeks and non-geeks alike) but also how the writers don't avoid complex vocabulary or references that could possibly alienate viewers "not in the know." It's a two-edged sword of comedy; it frequently revels in stupidity (like rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock), but it also isn't afraid to throw in complex words, concepts, ideas and, more importantly, it derives actual humor from these complex words. Humor that some viewers simply won't get (hence the laugh track signaling that yes, this is humor, to the uninformed). I found myself laughing hard at some of the more esoteric jokes or "in-jokes" (I loved the episode structured around Age of Conan). Some critic had compared The Big Bang Theory to Friends, saying that it is this decade's friends and while I can find fault in the argument, it also seems to be true, in a weird way.

I'm glad to see that Season Three has picked up new viewers, including myself. I hope that by attracting new members and gaining in popularity (it went from being ranked #42 in Season Two to being #17 so far in Season Three...not too shabby), the creators don't feel a need to dumb down the humor or make it more accessible. Accessibility is important to a point, and I think that over the last two seasons it has reached that moment. If you haven't given it a chance, do so. You might need to give it a couple episodes (I'd recommend searching for "The Barbarian Sublimation" for a good laugh), but I think it will grow on most viewers.

For people asking about my brother:

On Saturday, his flight from Hawaii to here was canceled because there was a crack in the windshield. Well, he went to snorkel at Shark's Cove which is named because when viewed from the sky, it looks like a shark's jaw. Here's a pic:



Well, apparently, really high waves that would eclipse a small building started coming in and Chris was underwater, looking at the fish when it happened. When he stood up, he saw one of his buds holding onto a jagged rock and, bam, Chris got yanked under water from the undertow. He managed to grab at one of the jagged rocks on his way out of the cove. Then, as the waves went in and out, he got slammed against the jagged rocks. Apparently, a really strong wave yanked him so hard that the piece of jagged rock he was holding onto broke off and he was yanked out into the ocean. Luckily, that was the last wave and he was able to swim back to shore. He showed me his hands, knees and arms and they are really gashed up. He had pieces of coral stuck in his hand, presumably from when the rock broke and he tried grabbing at whatever he could find.

Pretty scary stuff. I'm glad he's safe.

At the Kelly Clarkson concert, she covered a few songs. One of them (well, technically two) was a mashup of "That I Would Be Good"/"Use Somebody." It's a very well done mashup. I loved it. Here's a video someone took.



She also covered "Seven Nation Army" and it, too, was rocking. The DJ introduction was pretty cool, as well.