Rain on pavement

We've never had a president named Charles, Peter, David, Robert, Paul, Michael, or Joseph, but we've had presidents named Ulysses, Millard, Grover, Rutherford, Woodrow, and Dwight. And two named Franklin.

EDIT: And of course Abraham.

I like to watch "History's Worst Jobs" on the History channel. It's hosted by Tony Robinson, who used to play Baldrick in the "Black Adder" series.

In the Tudor episode, one of the jobs he investigates is "executioner." At one point, he's practicing, with a melon, which he chops, then has to hold up and proclaim "this is the head of a traitor!"

Fans of Black Adder will understand my compulsion to shout back "no it's not! It's a huge pumpkin with a pathetic moustache drawn on it!"

I wonder if that went through Tony's head.

We went to see "Wall-E" at the local drive-in last night. (Yeah, we still have one around here. Every year we wonder if it's the last.)

Made me cry really hard. Incredibly sweet movie. I liked it.

It's impressive to do so much, emotionally, with two characters who are 1) mechanical and 2) almost non-verbal...but if you can pull it off, there's a zen simplicity to it that's deeply moving. They pulled it off.

Swiped from crowyhead.

1. Post 3 things you've done in your lifetime that you don't think anybody else on your friends list has done.
2. See if anybody else responds with "I've done that."
3. Have your friends cut & paste this into their journal to see what unique things they've done in their life.

***

1. Accidentally dropped my keys 12 stories down an elevator shaft.
2. Kissed a famous rock star.
3. Drawn portraits of every U.S. president.

The funniest line ever from "home Movies" is, in my opinion, this one:

"The question was 'who wrote Hamlet.' You wrote 'the pope's cousin, Count Pope-ula, a magical monster with pencils for arms.'"

Yesterday, driving out to the ocean, we passed through Aberdeen, Washington, a town most famous for producing the band Nirvana.

I had not been there in a while, and was amused to find that the sign at the edge of town now says

ABERDEEN
Come As You Are

I reflected that this is possibly the only Nirvana song you could use in that capacity (although it was pointed out that "In Bloom" wouldn't be terrible).

Still, I wonder if they rejected any others.

ABERDEEN: Smells Like Teen Spirit
ABERDEEN: Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle
ABERDEEN: Rape Me
ABERDEEN: All Apologies
ABERDEEN: Breed
ABERDEEN: Dumb
ABERDEEN: Very Ape
ABERDEEN: Territorial Pissings
ABERDEEN: Downer
ABERDEEN: Something in the Way
ABERDEEN: Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through the Strip

Gladys: "Ha ha ha, yes, the cat's in the bag. Are you going to make that joke every single time I do this?"

I have recorded a cover of the American national anthem, and stuck a short rant in the middle of it about what *I* think American greatness would mean.

It's here.

Three more Simpsons episodes I like:

1. Bart Gets An F (season 2)

Bart faces the possibility of having to repeat the fourth grade  and has to buckle down and pass a test. It's funny to think that, once upon a time, that could be the plot of a whole episode. It doesn't veer into Bart alienating the government of Argentina or discovering uranium or becoming a supermodel. It's a relatable situation with relatable characters--the scene where Bart cries after getting another F is genuinely affecting.

2. Lisa's Pony (season 2)

Homer screws up and alienates Lisa, then wins her love back by buying her a pony and then taking a second job to pay for it. Homer demonstrates love for his children and concern for feelings other than his own. That's what I liked about the early episodes--the characters felt human. I miss that.

3. I Love Lisa (season 3)

Lisa gives Ralph Wiggum a sympathy valentine, and then he develops a smothering crush on her. Ralph, like Homer, got dumber and dumber as time went on--he's clearly the slow kid here, but he has thoughts and feelings.

Five more episodes I don't like:

1. Hurricane Neddy (season 8)

Flanders has himself committed, and it's revealed that he's pathologically incapable of anger. Never mind that he's gotten mad numerous times in previous episodes. This one was a sign that the characters were becoming gross caricatures of their former believably human selves.

2 and 3. Simpsons Bible Stories (season 10) / Thank God It's Doomsday (season 16)

I guess it just annoys me when they establish that, in the Simpsons universe, Christianity is true (non-Christians in the Simpsons universe, like Lisa, Apu and Krusty, might have something to say about that). Both of these episodes conclude with the world ending; Simpsons Bible Stories doesn't even resolve the issue, it just ends the world and has the Simpsons descend into Hell, and then in the next episode it's like nothing happened. I'm sure some people are not irritated by this stuff, but it bugged me.

4. Kill Gil Volumes 1&2 (season 18)

Gil is just one of those characters who should never, ever have an episode built around him. It's only a matter of time before Disco Stu gets a whole episode. Sigh.

5. E Pluribus Wiggum (season 19)

Ralph Wiggum runs for president and becomes a national phenomenon. This might be the single stupidest episode in the long history of the show. They are quite simply out of good ideas. (Bonus: they got Jon Stewart as a guest voice, then failed utterly to do anything interesting with him.)

Six Simpsons episodes I love:
(and yes, they're all Lisa episodes)

1. Moaning Lisa (season 1)

Lisa is sad because she doesn't fit in at school and she's an overlooked middle child at home, but with help from a jazz man she meets and a little understanding from Marge she feels a bit better. Simple, elegant first-season fare. The first time it aired was the first time I'd ever really identified with a TV character.

2. Lisa's Substitute (season 2)

A substitute teacher (Dustin Hoffman in an uncredited role) provides the sympathetic male adult figure previously lacking in Lisa's life. If I'm in the right mood this episode still makes me tear up a little bit. It's unapologetically sweet in a way the wankers who write the show today probably consider deeply unhip.

3. Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington (season 3)

Lisa wins an essay contest and wins a trip to Washington D.C., where she exposes a corrupt senator. It reminds me of a more innocent time in my own political life.

4. Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy (season 5)

Appalled by the sexist slogans spouted by her talking Malibu Stacy doll, Lisa creates her own feminist doll. This is probably my single favorite episode.

5. Lisa the Iconoclast (season 7)

Lisa discovers that the town's frontier hero, Jebediah Springfield, was in reality a murderous thug, but no one believes her.

6. Summer of 4 ft. 2 (season 7)

Stunned that being yearbook editor has not made her popular, Lisa uses a family trip to the beach as an opportunity to reinvent herself for a group of new friends.

Six Simpsons episodes I hate:

1. Lisa's Date With Density (season 8)

Lisa dates Nelson Muntz, the school bully. My guess is some writer was like "hey, I remember from school that nice girls often date assholes! Let's have Lisa date Nelson!" But Lisa Simpson is so not that girl. Every other crush she's ever had, before and since, has made far more sense. I like to pretend this episode never happened.

2. Homer's Enemy (season 8)

Homer is completely oblivious to the fact that he's driving a co-worker insane, eventually causing his horrible death; then all the other characters think it's funny that he snores loudly at the guy's funeral. This episode officially completed Homer's transformation from bumbling but basically well-intentioned blue collar guy to deranged sociopath.

3. The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show (season 8)

A whole episode the entire purpose of which is to argue with the show's internet fans. Both Bart and Lisa are given speeches that make them the writers' mouthpieces; Bart's, at least, is wildly out of character.

4. The Principal and the Pauper (season 9)

It turns out that Principal Skinner is actually an impostor and his real name is Armand Tanzarian, but at the end of the episode the town mandates that nobody can ever mention it again on penalty of torture. I know how they feel.

5. Saddlesore Galactica (season 11)

The Simpsons get a horse. Of course, they already had a horse, in an earlier, better episode. The writers know this, and so they have Comic Book Guy turn up and announce that they're repeating themselves about every five minutes.

6. That '90s Show (season 19)

Basically, the writers flush two decades of established Simpsons family history down the toilet and don't even manage to write a good episode in the process. This is the episode that finally caused me to give up on ever watching another new episode--I'll come back for the series finale, but that's it.

'Cause remember that time Gladys Knight got picked in the NFL draft? Wasn't that awesome?

I guess I knew it would happen one day. I think The Simpsons has finally jumped the shark for me.

I mean, I've been very tolerant. I've been a devoted fan of the show literally since the first episode; I was 11 years old. Those early episodes were simple, even clumsy, by the standards of thos even from a few years later, but I loved them. They were charming.

And, I suppose it's no secret that, as a confused adolescent, I found in Lisa Simpson a character I could relate to, and that was always comforting, because I didn't have many of those--it made me feel like less of an alien.

And yeah, I know it's "just television" and it's wrong to take it seriously, or so I'm told any time I say stuff like this, but there's a categorical difference, I think, between a show that exists entirely to make me laugh--if they made an episode of "Family Guy" where all the characters died, emotionally I would feel nothing--and a show that actually makes its characters people, makes you empathize with them. It's obvious that The Simpsons has at least sometimes tried to do that.

But then there are the episodes where the writers seem to be punishing you for caring about any of the characters. Longtime fans know the ones I mean. There have been more and more of those for a decade or so now.

It's not the same show it was in the best years, and I suppose there's no way it could be after almost twenty years. But I've stayed with it until now.

But, they finally got to a bit of retconning I can't overlook. A bit that screams "this is not the same show you loved when you were a teenager, anymore." In such a way as to (accidentally, of course) strike at me personally.

They gave Homer a retconned bit of personal history: they declared that he had been a twentysomething grunge musician in the 1990s.

There are few things I know with more certainty than this: Homer Simpson is not a member of Generation X.

I know this in part because it's been established VERY SPECIFICALLY within the show itself. Homer's been shown as a teenager in the 1970s, and as a young adult in the early 80s. His favorite bands are acts like Grand Funk Railroad, KISS, Mountain, and Bread. There was an entire episode that centered around Homer's angst over no longer being cool because he wasn't familiar with acts like Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, and Nine Inch Nails.

Marge, meanwhile, who is the same age as Homer, grew up painting portraits of RINGO STARR, because "the Beatles were very big then." I will not accept the explanation that she liked him because of the Beatles Anthology. I refuse to.

What's more, for me, The Simpsons are, and will always be, one of my fond entertainment-based memories of the 1990s. In high school I used to have big Simpsons parties with my friends where we'd watch the show for hours. There is, quite simply, no way that, while this was going on, Homer Simpson was a twentysomething slacker in a hip rock band. It is impossible on multiple levels.

I've overlooked a lot of bad episodes over the years, even a few that I found personally insulting, but none of them screamed "it's all downhill from here" like this. I don't know if it would be different had this season not sucked so much, but that's hypothetical. As is the question of whether I would feel this way if the show and characters had not, over time, become self-conscious, too-ironic-by-half winking self-parodies of themselves.

I'll always love the old episodes. I'll be watching my DVDs for years of The Simpsons at its purest--when Homer was not a psychotic, remorseless idiot man-child, merely a bumbling blue-collar oaf. When we had not yet been subjected to Gil, Disco Stu, Duffman, or Frank Grimes. When Principal Skinner was unequivocally Principal Skinner. When the idea of Lisa Simpson ever kissing Nelson Muntz was obviously absurd on its face.

I am now convinced the show no longer has anything meaningful to add to that legacy, and I don't want to watch them tear it down.

Yeah, I take cartoons seriously. Was that ever in doubt?

So of course I have the new REM album, "Accelerate." The buzz about it has been that it's their "best in ten years."

I don't know about that, because I really liked "Reveal," which I suppose puts me in the minority. (I didn't even think "Up" and "Around the Sun" were bad albums--they both had some good songs, and really I'm always just happy to have new REM music.) But "Accelerate" is really good.

And I think it got the buzz it did because it sounds more like classic REM than anything they've made since Bill Berry left the band 11 years ago. Jangly guitars, poppy hooks...many of the songs would not be out of place on "Life's Rich Pageant" or "Document." It's good to hear that again.

And here's a gratuitous photo of Gladys staring out the back door.

Although it's Saturday.



Gladys is adjusting to her new surroundings much faster than I had expected.

We here seem to have decided this is the funniest Fry and Laurie sketch.

Recorded two songs this afternoon, "Forgiven" and "Bird in the Hand".

I heard an NPR call-in show where people were listing the songs they would always associate with 2007...so here are ten of my own. (Some were new in 2007, others were just new to *me* this year.)


1. Foo Fighters, "The Pretender"
2. Elliott Smith, "Angel in the Snow"
3. Eurythmics, "I Saved the World Today"
4. Rogue Wave, "Lake Michigan"
5. David Gray, "The One I Love"
6. Electric President, "Snow On Dead Neighborhoods"
7. Thom Yorke, "Black Swan"
8. Editors, "Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors"
9. Fountains of Wayne, "Supercollider"
10. Iron & Wine, "Boy With a Coin"