So, I watched that "Breaking Amish" Reunion Special

editor's note:  I don't think I've talked this much about TV or a reality show since I predicted in Season 1 not just the impending divorce of Jon & Kate, but exactly how ugly it would be for Jon.*  

Last night I posted the following to Facebook:

So, those "Breaking Amish" kids sort of played TLC for a trip to NYC and reality TV fame. Well played, Amish thugs, well played.

A few months ago I was on the elliptical and decided to spend my time watching Breaking Amish, one of several series on the cable spectrum that has launched in the past 10-12 years.  The series are, invariably, about Amish young adults leaving the fold and experiencing our world for the first time.  The shows have arrived in highbrow flavor from National Geographic channel taking a true documentarian's approach, to Fox "reality" shows pairing Amish 20 year old's with the worst reality-TV-type folks you can imagine and turning in a show about Amish people squirming uncomfortably as dopes try to ridicule them for not being awful people with subscriptions to Us Weekly.

"so... do we pretend we don't know what a bus is?"

Breaking Amish took several young adults from Amish communities (and one from a Mennonite community - where electricity and other conveniences are allowed), and dumped them into New York City. It was a TLC show, so it followed the formula of "come watch the weirdos we found as we walk them through something that looks like a heartwarming learning experience, but, I mean, yeah, obviously not really".  TLC is, of course, home to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

I didn't think very much about the show other than that it had the usual "well, this is all clearly 'stage managed'" vibe I get from all reality shows, and I didn't watch more than the one episode.

And then the internet happened.

Happy Turkey Week

I don't even know where to start...

It's that magical week of the year!  I'm not sure when you kids are checking out for the week, so I thought I'd just pop up now and wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving.

<festive> Happy Thanksgiving! </festive>

I'm feeling much better now than last Wednesday evening, and I seem to be a few degrees away from hail and hearty.  Much better way to enter the holiday than worrying about contaminating the yams.

This year Jason is headed off to Phoenix, homeland of his ladyperson, AmyD.   It's going to be a bit more quiet around these parts, and I'll surely miss having him around at my folks' dinner, but I guess I've been disappearing with Jamie for Thanksgiving for years and years at this point.  Fair's fair.

I anticipate no Thanksgiving madness.  The family may not be "sane" or "stable"- but they are predictable.  The only wildcard is my pal JuanD, who is joining us for dinner and who is smart enough not to get into a heated debate with my 15 year old cousin or throw a punch at Jamie's dad.

If it is looking like it's going to get rough, prepare mentally and physically and think:  what would Superman do?

Lois's dad is decidedly not fun to deal with

We're having a bit of a Holiday shindig on December 1 (sure, come on down), so I'll also be spending the weekend cleaning and decking the halls.  I still haven't been to Home Depot to see if they have a bear for the front yard.  I kind of want one.

Aside from that:  football.  Probably a movie or three.  I'm not laboring under any delusions.  It's a three-day weekend with a "workday" of consuming bird and pie tacked on to the start.  I work for a university, so I'm looking at the clock for when they shut us down from Christmas til New Year.

I am going to watch a VERY SPECIAL Christmas movie, so I look forward to posting on that.

Anyway, gobble, gobble, y'all.

For some reason, Formula 1 Racing Came to Austin

About two and a half-years ago, Austinites woke up to find that some deal had been reached to bring Formula 1 racing to our city.  Mostly, the news was met with puzzled stares.  This is not a motorsports kind of town, and F1 is something that takes place in Monte Carlo, not in our berg.

If you do not know (I didn't), F1 is monstrously popular everywhere but the US, and despite astronomically high tickets prices, tends to draw hundreds of thousands of people to each city.  Rich people.  Who supposedly spend money.

Signal Watch Watches: Skyfall (2012)

The trick with any franchise character is that, after a while, they can take the path* of becoming less a character and more a collection of quirks and ticks that become recognizable to the audience, but there's not really much of anything there behind the catchphrases, costume, etc...  It's pretty common in sitcoms.  And you can sort of tell when a character (or, heck, public persona of a real person) has hit this point when they become readily satirized and spoofed with a few tell-tale signs.

I think, in a lot of ways, Bond had become a sort of nebulous concept of "things that happen in a Bond movie".  Particularly during the tail end of the Moore-era and again in the Pierce Brosnan era, you can blame the actors to some extent, but the scripts and directing never sought to do much but move the Bond-shaped character through Bond-like situations that were pretty awesome when Connery brought it to the big screen, but by the time I was watching Pierce Brosnan driving around in a tank in a tux with perfect hair, I think I hung it up on Bond after GoldenEye.**

I'm not reporting anything new in remarking that Daniel Craig in Casino Royale completely rejuvenated the Bond concept for a lot of us, and despite many missteps that harkened back to the doldrums of circa 1980-era Bond, Quantum of Solace had its moments - even if it didn't live up to the promise of Casino Royale.

Signal Watch Watches: Toy Story 2 (1999)

By 1999, "Buzz" and "Woody" had become household names.  It would be another three years before I'd be skipping out on a day of a conference at Disneyland and stop short, realizing that the two characters were as cemented in the minds of most people as Mickey and Donald when 6'5" versions of Buzz and Woody wandered past me at the Happiest Place on Earth.

In 1999, the sequel to Toy Story arrived and was met with a sort of exclamation point of surprise that somehow - against all expectations - a beloved kid's movie had turned in a sequel that was its own story/ film and which pushed the characters forward with genuine narrative purpose.

There's a certain existential undertone to the Toy Story movies that this film acknowledges, and which the 3rd film fully realizes: toys are a disposable part of a human lifecycle and toys are at the mercy of the giants above them.  Childhood doesn't last forever, and children one day put away toys.  The theme is tied in with the idea presented in the second installment in unwanted fourth wheel toy "The Prospector" who never had an opportunity to be loved by a child, sitting on a shelf somewhere, unsold.

But the toy that's been loved and abandoned?  It tells us that sooner or later, all toys meet a tragic fate of some sort or other.

Signal Watch Watches: Superman Returns (2006)

I had a lot at stake when Superman Returns arrived in theaters in 2006, and I was very disappointed it performed so poorly in the theater.  By "poorly", it made hundreds of millions of dollars, but it didn't make the Avengers-type dollars Warner Bros. was hoping for.  In fact, after the film was in discount bins on DVD, the then-president of WB said in court that Superman's value as a property was questionable.

The biggest problem with the movie, I suspect, is that it is not a movie about Superman trying to find a bad guy so he can punch him until he stops being the bad guy.  Ie:  It's not an action film.  I have no doubt this mis-step will be corrected when Henry Cavill puts on the cape in theaters this summer.  We're not going to see Zod in a movie without a pretty good slug-fest in the third act.  

Trying Not To Be Dead: I have been sick a lot this year

Well, I am sick again.

It's been a strange year.  It used to be that I'd get one bug for two or three days per year, then be back up on my feet.  The past twelve months, if I haven't been sick, I've been injured or had some other issue.  This go-round the symptoms appeared at a particularly bad time as I was about to get on a plane to Lubbock, then drive 100 miles to Canyon, TX, do a major presentation, then turn around and drive back to Lubbock, then present again this morning.

I pulled it off.  I have no idea what I said for the three hours I presented yesterday or during the meeting with Texas Tech today, but I think I kept it together.

Mostly I feel bad for the hotel staff who will walk into the Hot Zones I've left behind in two hotels I stayed in, and a bit for whomever gets the rental car I had.  Those things are germy time bombs.  That's not to mention the two airplane rides where I have no doubt I was patient zero.  Who knows when I was first contagious?  Maybe leaving Tallahassee.

Anyway, I will set a new rule for myself:  if I think I might be coming down with something like that, I'm rescheduling.  Sitting in a hotel room with no meds but NyQuil and Afrin and watching syndicated reruns on TBS is no way to be.

I do feel marginally better this evening.  I'm hoping a night of solid sleep that I'm hoping for will help.

I had already taken a few weeks off from working out with all this travel, etc...  and I was really looking forward to getting back into it.  But now I get to wait a few days again.  And then Thanksgiving...

Here's to figuring out how to stay healthier in 2013.

Signal Watch Watches: Toy Story (1995)

I straight up love the Toy Story franchise, and its taken no small amount of willpower not to start collecting the many, many Toy Story items one can buy at Target.

Yes, the animation from the first installment doesn't always hold up as well as I'd like, but everything about the script, direction and voice acting still works as well today as it did the first time I saw the movie.

Speaking of - so I was in film school in 1995, and my roommate had a bad Thanksgiving break.  I don't remember specifics, but she'd gotten into some tiff with the family.  We went up to the film lab to work on our project and then decided we'd go see this Toy Story thing as it was 9:00 Sunday night and the kids would be skipping that screening as school started in the morning.

The place was still packed.  Curious college kids and others were there, and it was a surprisingly great movie.  But in the mid-90's, there were a lot of surprises when it came to kids' movies.  This was right around when I was telling people "Y'all got to go see this movie, Babe".*  And I knew who Pixar was.  I'd seen some of their shorts.  I just had expected it to have that same hacky vibe one got from all of the installments in the The Santa Clause series.  Harmless, perhaps, but not exactly anything you'd actually recommend to anyone.

But Pixar got it right.  The movie had real character in its made-up world of talking toys, and real things at stake for the characters and even for the unsuspecting Andy.  And the great thing was - they didn't make sequels until they had something to say.  Toy Story 2 built on the world from the first movie and showed us the worst fears of a toy come to life - but kept Jessie's story startlingly human.  And the third film started with the scariest threat of all, only to find the highest highs in any of the three films.

Anyway, I'm a fan.  It's popular entertainment at its best.  We can save the technical discussion for another day.




*If you have anything bad to say about either Babe movie, I will fight you with a pitchfork

Thing not to do:

leave for a three day road trip when you wake up before your flight thinking "I might have a cold.  Oh, well, how bad could it get?"

TX Panhandle, TX Secession and the Freakout in Comic Culture over CosPlay Girls

For some reason, I am in the Texas Panhandle.

It's work related.  In theory, I should be home in 48 hours.

It is safe to say I am about done with the schedule I've been on for the past 6 weeks or so and the Thanksgiving Holiday cannot really come fast enough.  I could really use some time just laying very still while someone else makes cornbread stuffing and lets me silently appreciate the Rockettes during their number at the Macy's Parade.

if loving the Rockettes is wrong, I don't want to be right

TX Secession

I know it made headlines, but the petition sent to the White House and chatter about Texas seceding is all that it is.  Chatter.  The petition doesn't have enough signatures to fill half of DKR Memorial Stadium, and a whole lot of those aren't from Texas.  I expect that in the years to come "secession" will be the pouty rallying cry of Texans wishing they could take their ball and go home when things don't go the way of insignificant politians from scrubby, backwater towns in The Lone Star State (seriously, press, stop giving these people a megaphone).