WORST. EPISODE. EVER.

You have to be SHITTING me.

The fucking Colts were DOWN BY 21 POINTS.

TWICE.

Down by FOURTEEN POINTS IN THE FINAL FIVE MINUTES OF THE GAME.

Say. Anybody seen the Buccaneers’ defense lately?

FUCK Tony Dungy. FUCK Peyton Manning. FUCK the goddam Colts. It wasn’t the way they played, it was the way the Bucs stopped playing.

Oh, the Bucs can still come back. They’re only 2 and 2. They could win the rest of their games and have a very respectable 14-2 going into the post season. But right now, I’m just wondering, do the Bucs DESERVE to go to the playoffs again? So far, every time this season Tampa Bay has had a real challenge, they’ve folded up at the last minute.

Yeah, the Eagles’ game looked hard before it started… big rivalry, they wanted revenge, the Bucs were playing on the road, the Eagles are a good team… but it turned out it was easy… Donovan McNabb just couldn’t get anything going that night and they never threatened. The Atlanta Falcons? Please. The Houston Texans could beat the Atlanta Falcons under Doug Johnson. Hell, the local high school team could most likely give the Falcons a good tussle under Doug Johnson, for that matter.

Up against teams that can actually play, the Bucs can’t seem to do anything. I mean, the Bucs are supposed to be the best defense in the NFL, and they give up THIRTY EIGHT POINTS in the second half of a game they had pretty much put away in the first half?

Yeah, yeah. The leaping call against Rice in overtime was shit. Maybe the Bucs would have come back and won if the refs hadn’t handed the Colts a do-over on the game breaking field goal. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But the Bucs had plenty of offensive opportunities late in the game (they won the toss! They had FIRST POSSESSION IN SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME!! And they didn’t do a goddam thing with it, of course) and didn’t do shit with any of them. And the defense simply decided to go on coffee break for the entire second half.

The simple fact is, the Bucs should never have been in that position, that game should never have gone into overtime, and the Colts should never have been able to score two touchedowns in two minutes. In point of fact, they made history by doing so; NO team down by 21 points or more with less than five minutes on the clock has EVER come back to win in NFL history... at least, according to the Monday Night Football commentary.

Until now.

I honestly didn’t think the Bucs deserved to lose the Carolina game. But this one was all on them. And if the Bucs can only win the easy games, I don’t think this is a going to be a particularly enjoyable season for us Bucs fans.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little harsh. The Bucs lost a lot of their best players over the course of that game to injuries… losing Brian Kelly early on was probably the biggest strike against Tampa Bay, since Tim Wansley simply was not adequate to contain the Colts brilliant wide receiving corps in Kelly’s position. But when overtime rolled around the Bucs were playing without a LOT of people… Pittman, Alstott and Stecker among them… and as Gruden noted “we just ran out of backs”.

Still, even with all that, there is no adequate excuse for letting any team score 35 points in two quarters to tie a game. And when you consider the most important 14 of those points came with less than two minutes on the clock, it’s simply ridiculous. The Bucs defense just decided they didn’t have to try any more, and the Colts… who I admit are good, but they aren’t THAT goddam good… ran all over them. It sucked. It PROFOUNDLY sucked.

Well, hey, at least the Bills won yesterday.

Although, come to that, so did the goddam Panthers and the goddam Eagles and the GODDAM Dolphins, so, all told, this hasn’t been a good weekend for football in Brown Eyed Handsome Man Land.

GodDAMNit. The Bucs should have won that game.

Oh, wait. I can’t close out without mentioning that seeing Snoop Dawg singing the Monday Night Football theme song is enough to make me wish the Unabomber were still at large.

OOGA CHAKA OOGA CHAKA

Checked out the WB’s Tarzan Sunday night. I most likely won’t do that again. I am, pretty much, a purist when it comes to adapting textual sources I’m fond of to TV or the movies, so the changes they were making already had me uneasy… but I think I could have gotten over that if they’d just done anything right in the show. Anything at all. However, nothing really seemed to work for me in this particular pilot, and especially non-functional was the central/pivotal relationship between Tarzan and Jane (whose present day reinvention as a drop dead gorgeous NYPD police detective simply makes me groan anyway).

As I watched the episode creakily unfold, all I could think of was something I’d read recently… I don’t know where, probably on Mark Evanier’s weblog (he’s the only person I can think of who talks about movie stuff like this) about how directors or producers of a movie or a TV show will instruct a writer to create a ‘moment’ between a protagonist character and his or her love interest. That key ‘moment’ is where the two characters initially bond, where we see them connect, where a spark jumps and we, the audience, find ourselves believing that these two characters are really meant for each other.

Maybe it was on David Fiore's weblog, come to think of it. I just can't remember.

Anyway, crafting a ‘moment’ isn’t easy. A lot of times, writers cheat; they establish their main romantic couple as backstory… something that happened before the movie or TV series begins… which means they don’t have to convince the audience that, say, Doug and Carol (on ER) or Josh and Mandy (in the first season of West Wing) or Will and Deanna (on Star Trek, Jr.) are really right for each other with that one magical ‘moment’ where the audience sees them meet for the first time. All the writers have to do is find a couple of actors who have a reasonable amount of chemistry together, and give them some dialogue indicating that they used to be an item and still have some mutual attraction.

It’s the easy out.

Obviously, with Tarzan, the writers can’t do this. Tarzan and Jane cannot have, oh, met back in college and had a torrid affair before circumstances tore them apart; Tarzan, of necessity, grew up in the jungle, and Jane, of necessity, must be the first human female he has ever seen. That’s the core of their relationship – that neither of them has ever seen anything like the other one before, and although they are complete opposites, they find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is one of the most exciting writers who has ever put words on paper, but not a particular good one by most literary standards. Nonetheless, one thing he has always managed to do is write convincing romances; no one who reads ERB can really doubt that Tarzan and Jane adore each other beyond all sanity and reason, as do other classic ERB couples like John Carter and Dejah Thoris of Helium.

That, more than anything, is what this WB adaptation was riding on. Like Lois & Clark, or, the WB’s own teen version of that show, Smallville, this version of Tarzan absolutely requires that this relationship work… and to me, it never did.

Oh, I watched the writers and producers and actors trying (ineptly) to make me believe in the instant magnetism between Tarzan and Jane. I watched the two of them gaze into each other’s eyes, I saw the tentative, gentle face touching, I nearly gagged as Tarzan romantically sniffed Jane’s hair as he nuzzled her from behind in a moonlit Central Park. They had all the romantic trappings, they were desperately loading up on the non-verbal ‘fuck me now’ cues, they did their best to give us plausible romantic dialogue. None of it impressed me; I found the absolutely ridiculous romance between John Cusack and Kate Beckingsale in the appallingly bad Serendipity more convincing than the non-relationship between Tarzan and Jane on this particular show.

This adaptation failed for me other ways, although the Tarzan/Jane romance is the most crucial. Mitch Pileggi as Tarzan’s uncle is obviously meant to be the main villain of the series, but while I’m sure they were going for complex and enigmatic ambiguity in the pilot, I just found the guy boring. And, you know, all those great shots of Tarzan hanging from ledges or standing on rooftops with the big GREYSTOKE logo in the background certainly looked cool in the ads and the show both, but if there was a reason for the family corporation to be called ‘Greystoke’ in this particular TV show, I missed it.

I did enjoy the fact that some thought was obviously given to Tarzan’s fighting style, he actually looked feral and simian when he was jumping around whaling on people. However, the fact that early in the episode Tarzan went through an entire squad of elite, heavily armed troopers without breaking a sweat, and at the end of the show he was having a hard time with a single serial killer who was never defined as being anything more formidable than a nut with a can of bugspray, really struck me as ridiculous.

All in all, Tarzan seems to be the new Birds of Prey, and I can only hope it goes away even more quickly.

Oh, and when it does, if they could move Angel back to Sundays at 9, that would rock.

SECRET ORIGINS

The bright spot of this weekend was when I got really lucky Sunday evening at about 7:01. (No, Trinity, not that lucky.) Completely exasperated with the Redskins’ utter inability to hand the Eagles the drubbing they always richly deserve, I was flipping around the dial and I came across what was obviously the opening moment of a Smallville episode I hadn’t seen yet. I mean, there was Martha (the delectable Annette O’Toole, OH yes) and there was Bo Duke… er, Jonathan, and there was Lana’s bitch of an aunt being snotty while she sold them some flowers, and there was some adorable little girl in a fairy princess costume, and I was just wondering exactly which episode this was, when someone called the adorable little girl ‘Lana’, and I thought… “wait… could this be…?”

I’m thinking ‘no’, because I never get lucky this way and just stumble onto something I’ve always wanted to see, right from the start, by accident… hell, usually I find out something I want to see is going to be on, and then I forget about it, or I have to go out karioking with Paul that night and totally space on the fact that I wanted to watch, like, Joan of Arcadia until it’s too late.

So I’m watching this episode of Smallville, thinking it can’t possibly be the episode I’m hoping it is, and about a minute further on, a car pulls up, and a couple of people get out and they’re waving to Lana from across the street, and Lana says ‘Hi, mommy, hi daddy’, and then, KA fucking BOOM – METEOR STRIKE!! Good bye Mr and Mrs Lang! Hello, scorched and smouldering body parts raining down for the next ten minutes!!

And I’m going “oh my GOD it’s the pilot episode of SMALLVILLE!!”

Which I had never managed to see, but heard so much about, and had always wanted to check out.

It was actually pretty cool, just watching all this stuff that I’d only previously heard referred to by various characters, and seen brief bits of in flashbacks. However, I have to admit, if I’d watched this thing from the start, I would probably have liked Lana even less than I do now (and I don’t like her at all now). I mean, my God, hang all over that asshole Whitney much?

I also just sort of had to groan and give them a pass on the way they got the chunk of Kryptonite around Clark’s neck. I mean, Whitney sees Clark looking at Lana’s necklace and decides to put it around Clark’s neck? What the hell? Who would DO that? But, never mind, it was cool to watch the show… much cooler than watching the Eagles refuse to take the asswhipping they badly, badly needed.

THE BEAUTY WAY TO GO, EH?

Nothing is happening around here. Well… Paul and Scott apparently ran into some woman named Jessie a few weeks back whom both describe as being basically psychotic, and lately she’s been hanging around the Circle K bugging on Paul, and now the husband of the woman that Jessie is friends with, and who owns the house where she is currently crashing, has offered to teach Paul to play guitar for nothing, so Paul may start hanging around over there. And when I said, “you know, if this Jessie is hot for you, which it seems like she is, and she’s good looking, which you say she is, eventually you’re gonna do her.” To which Paul sighed and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t even put ‘eventually’ in there.” So Paul’s life may be getting more interesting.

For my part, I’ve simply told him “NEVER tell her where you live,” so I should be okay.

Beyond that… hmmm. Haven’t won the Lotto. Haven’t had any interesting email in the last couple of days. Haven’t had much in the way of comments here (although I’m not yelling at anyone about that, that’s just how things are sometimes). Haven’t even TALKED to a chick lately, much less had anything remotely resembling positive attention from one.

Oh, the bathroom was getting grungy again, so I cleaned it today. Yay me.

Oh, yeah, I was just watching some late night show (Jimmy Kimmel Live, actually) because Teri Polo was supposed to be on it, and she was, and she was apparently really drunk or totally coked up or something, because she acted like a shrill, semi-hysterical idiot, so, gee, that’s one more media crush shot to hell the first time I see the woman in question behaving like herself in an interview situation. (This has happened to me a lot. I recall one interview I saw with Claire Danes in which it became obvious almost instantly that she has the IQ of a sack of Pepperidge Farm Savory Sage Stuffing. Not a small sack, mind you. One of the great big sacks you buy for Thanksgiving dinner when the whole crew is coming over.. you know, grandma, grampa, Aunt Bess, Uncle Charlie, all your cousins… the whole deal. Similarly, I recall a Sci-Fi Channel interview with Winona Rider I saw once in which it became pretty clear just about as quickly that Winona… well, let’s just say, if she and Claire Danes teamed up to fight crime, Winona would not be the one who figured out where the Riddler was going to strike next by deciphering his cryptically worded riddles. Of course, Claire would not have figured it out, either, but I suspect she could have at least read the riddles without moving her lips… although I could be wrong there. But to be fair, I don’t think Winona would team up with anyone to fight crime, unless it were a condition of her parole…)

I must be bored. I’m saying mean things about beautiful, talented women I do not even know. Well, I blame Jon Gruden and the Bucs. I’d be in a much better mood if they’d actually played during the second half of tonight’s game…

I'd probably be in a much better mood if I actually knew any beautiful, talented women, for that matter. At least, beautiful, talented women who wanted to have carnal knowledge of my aging, corpulent form...

Well... it's late. You're weary. Your plans don't include me. So, you know... take off, you hosers.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.