I'd like a list of whatever TV you keep up with, week-in, week-out, more or less. I'll lead off:

MON:
--> How I Met Your Mother (CBS, 7,00)
#  Watch HIMYM. It's as simple as that. Just do it. No other comedy is doing as interesting things with structure or content as HIMYM. Not every week is a home-run, but it's consistently excellent. The only three camera comedy worth it's salt.
--> The Class (CBS, 7,30)
# Lizzy Caplan is great. The rest of this show? Well, Lizzy Caplan is great.
--> Two and a Half Men (CBS, 8,00)
# Meh. Funny, getting old, though. Was a revelation when I first started watching it.
--> Heroes (NBC, 8,00)
# Simply awesome, whether you grew up reading comics or not. Leaves me breathless at times. Still need to write up full review for it. You should watch it.
--> Studio 60 (NBC, 9,00)
# Pedantic, at times, funny, at times, heartwarming and heartwrenching at times. Could be better, perhaps, but could also be, far, far worse. If you're missing your Sorkin fix, get it here. It's still worth your time.
--> What About Brian? (ABC, 9,00)
# Meh. If Marjorie really does leave, this show will not be worth watching. As it stands, a lot of the momentum that it carried at the start of the season's evaporated. It needs it back, desperately. In danger of getting dropped, by me.

TUES
--> Gilmore Girls (The CW, 7,00)
# I've just got to see how this all turns out. Better than last season, so far, though they are taking fewer chances.
--> Friday Night Lights (NBC, 7,00)
# I stand by my review. Every week is not the same revelation as that first episode, but it is still good and needs an audience. Watch it.
--> Help Me Help You (ABC, 8,30)
# Dear Life, I am sorry I watch 'Help Me Help You.' I do, really, I do understand that it is not good. But there are so few comedies, Life! I know, that's no excuse, but it is a reason, you know? Sincerely, Me.
--> Standoff (Fox, 8,00)
# Hopefully this show will be as good now that there's enough other TV on. I'm not sure it will be, but for being one of only three procedurals I watch every week, it's a nice change from all the continuing dramas.
--> Law and Order: Criminal Intent (NBC, 8,00)
# I stopped watching this after last season, but then they brought in Eric Bogosian (who is, essentially, Evil Eliot Gould) and Julianne Nicholson, the woman who was the best thing about Conviction last season.

WEDS
--> 30 Rock
# I guess. It's not so good. Maybe it will become good. Right?
--> Criminal Minds (CBS, 8,00)
# Catching serial killers? Count me in.
--> LOST (ABC, 8,00)
# I continue to be amazed. Big things are coming, you can count on it. The only TV-related web community I actually participate in.
--> The Nine (ABC, 9,00)
# The only new show to get multiple-leads right.

THURS
--> My Name is Earl (NBC, 7,00)
# More than good enough.
--> The Office (NBC, 7,30)
# Still the funniest (and most painfully awkward-making) show on TV. By FAR. Watch it, or we'll no longer be friends.
--> Grey's Anatomy (ABC, 8,00)
# Like I've always said, it's soap opera, but at least it's soap opera done right.

FRI
--> Men in Trees (ABC, 8,00)
# There's so little good weekend-content these days, I camel this bitch up and hope to make it through, though it's not particularly great in any particular way.
--> Las Vegas (NBC, 8,00)
# Soon to return.

SUN
--> American Dad (Fox, 7,30)
--> Family Guy (Fox, 8,00)
# That's right, I dropped The Simpsons. I'd do it again.
I'm not often thrilled with either of these, so far, this season, but it's something to watch Sunday nights when there's not football...

Shows I am not watching, that I watched once or once watched:
The Simpsons
Ugly Betty (review to come, I guess.)
The New Adventures of Old Christine
The War at Home
Brothers and Sisters
Six Degrees
20 Good Years
'Til Death
Happy Hour
Smith (and it got cancelled, too)
L&O: SVU
Crossing Jordan (even when/if it does come back)
CSI: Miami
CSI: NY
CSI:
Bones

//

What are you watching, or not watching?

Continue reading "What are you watching?" »

So I decided, for once, to see a movie before everyone else in the world saw it and write up a review immediately so it could, you know, help people out. Plus, I've been primed to see Marie Antoinette for months now, for some reason. Perhaps it's because I was such a big fan of Lost in Traslation (the last film written and directed by M.A.'s writer-director, Sofia Coppola), but I doubt that very much, as I didn't expect them to be similar at all in feel or tone (though, strangely, they match a little, now that I think about it). I think it was because I like Kirsten Dunst, when she's in the right type of role, and the idea of Jason Schwartzman, a natural clown, as the incredibly restrained/repressed Louis XVI, well, that's worth investigating.

So let's take a moment, first, to talk about the, you know, actual Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette was sent to secure a lasting allience between the Austro-Hungarian Empire (ruled by her mother, Maria Theresa) and France. She was to do this, of course, by marrying, at the age of 14, the 15 year old French dauphin Louis-August. They were expected to produce an heir. You know what? It doesn't really matter--most of this is in the film and what's not I got from watching a PBS documentary about a month ago. The long and short of it is: there was nothing in the film that might not be accurate. There's some speculation (whether or not she actually had an affair with Count Fersen, for example) but nothing outright wrong, that I spotted. Then again, I am not a scholar of the French monarchy. And I think that gives the movie some weight. These are things the occurred, perhaps not how they are pictured, but they occurred. And it's interesting to see them so strictly filtered through Marie Anoinette's perspective: the focus lies in much different places than it does when watching something written by historians.

The movie itself is basically, like, 120 scenes that last between 30 and 90 seconds apiece. It's feels... chopped up because of that. Like a very long set of mood pieces. And as such, don't feel ashamed if you can't keep track of who each of the characters are. They come and go. As long as you've got a hold of Dunst and Schwartzman--both, it turns out, are INSANELY well chosen in their roles. Dunst looks the part, enough, but she does a good job playing the teenaged-queen who is in well over her head.

And being tiny mood pieces, they rely on the music to get the work done at some turns. There's been a lot of talk about how the music is modern music. Contemporary rock music, more or less, and how some don't think it squares with the period the film is set it. They're wrong. The shopping/decadant food montage set to "I Want Candy" would be brilliant all by itself. But the kind of rock that Coppola uses, generally, is well chosen--it's open and vaguely melancholic or excited in the same way both the structure of the film is and, somehow, the pictures themselves. Which are gorgeous, by the way. The colors are bright and the grounds of Versalle couldn't possibly be made to look anything other than amazing, particularly as the sun rises, which it does more than once over the course of the movie.

To return to the overlap betwixt this and Lost in Translation: there's very little. They both deal with alienation, yes, but in quite different ways. There's only one or two of the kind of stranger-in-a-strange-land moments that people complained about in Lost in Translation and those come at the very beginning (are are utterly germaine to what Marie Antoinette must've been going through). More interesting is the syntactical overlap. Coppola relies far less on conventionally structured scenes and story here--indeed, it's almost plotless, at times. Or, rather, threads of plot float in and out without any good indication of whether or not they'll be back or not. But she weaves the threads, the characters, the music in and out in a--I want to say impressionistic--sort of way. And that it's not rigorously structured might bother you, but it worked for me.

And that's probably a good way to sum up my views on the film at large: it might bother you, but it worked for me. Dunst does a spectacular job bringing to life all the very many different things that MA was (and was expected to be). Schwartzman is amazingly restrained (and seems to square almost perfectly with the real life Louis XVI). Coppola leans a little on the music, but it's very well chosen, so it's not a bother. It's a series of very small happenings, like a meal composed almost entirely of appetizers and when I walked out of the theater I thought that I may not have been satisfied, after having been fed like that, but as the day goes on, I find the images sticking with me and longing for that excellent combination of pictures and sounds to be rendered for me again. Very well done. Neither heavy nor insubstantial, like one of the well made treats she's presented with, time and again.

I may just go see it again tomorrow.

Oh, and Rip Torn as Louis XV steals every scene he's in.

30 Rock (7,00C, NBC, Wednesday)
Can be funny. It can also be trying. It takes a while to get to its point, but when it gets there, it can be funny. What it really reminds me of, and while I hate comparing shows to Arrested Development because it gets done WAY too much, particularly with shows that aren't particularly trying to be AD-esque, but, really, this show's asking for it. It's got a cast of crazy people who make life hard for the responsible, sane one (Liz Lemon, played by Tina Fey, who just, really, I love. Lemon's the producer of "The Girlie Show," a sketch comedy show that's just had crazy movie star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) added to the cast.)
So, they make her life hard, but aren't really funny doing it. Alec Baldwin, as her new boss, is pretty funny, at times, and Tracy Morgan as Tracy Jordan is HILARIOUS--"See, it's messed up that Entertainment Weekly said I was on crack. I'm not on crack, I'm straight up mentall ill!" and "Affirmative action is just a plot to keep women and minorities in competition with each other, Lemon, while the white man puts AIDS in our chicken nuggets!"--long pause--"That's a joke."--and the stories the other characters tell about him are funny, too.
But Jane Krakowski is not funny. None of the writers, particularly Two-fer and the one played by my arch-entertainment-nemesis, Judah Friedlander, is funny either. So far, the first half of each show has been utter shit and the back half has been funny enough to justify the first half. But once they get over the novelty-phase, this show is DOA.
Grade: C+

20 Good Years (7,30, NBC, Wednesday)
20 Good Years = (The Odd Couple + 15 years) - funniness + Heather Burns + (utter scenery chewing from John Lithghow - humor)
It's painful. Grade: F

Sir Turley: it was like they combined a movie about a comedian running for president with a movie on how standardized-electronic voting could be bad
but did it by shuffling the pages of two different screenplays

italisizy: Now THAT's an indictment.
I like that.

Sir Turley: I wanted to Walk out

italisizy: Man, I may just have to see it to see if it's worse than Beerfest (there is no way it's worse than Beerfest).

Kottke pulls from the ether something I was wondering about two days ago: a map that shows who controlled which parts of the Mid East and when. It's gorgeous and astounding.

Bonus points to anyone who can give distinguishing features of all the empires between the Byzantine and Ottoman (without, of course, using the internet).

Minus points if you're confused about what a Caliphate is and why it's important. Large minus points.

Alright, thank you all for your responses to the last set of options--they've helped a lot in trying to figure out what exactly we should be looking at doing. I think we've got five options here that'll rock your world. They come in two basic types: City+Outside the city and City+City.

A word about City+Outside: Matt and I were talking about it and decided that long, multicity trips (in addition to being a bitch to plan and price) would just drive us batty because instead of relaxing (which is what vacation/travel's supposed to be about, yes?) we'd be worried and freaked out about getting where we were going and making sure to see a bunch of stuff and hit all the places we want and so forth. And there's been a wide enough response from people that we might end up getting a large group (6+ people) together. Which would be awesome, but would make a multi-city trip almost unimaginably difficult in a number of different ways. But the flip side of that is that with a larger number of people, the cooler/better it becomes to just hang out someplace.
So, we took that and ran with it and put together a couple of options that deal with seeing a major city for about 5 days then getting in a car (car rental rates are sane, it turns out) and driving to cabin/rental home and hanging there for a week. More about each of the individual options later, sure, but I just wanted you to understand the logic behind this decision. And if no one wants to do it, we won't do it--we'll pick one of the other options, but it could be remarkably awesome to get in both a metro area some chill/nature time as well. Also: plans of this stay-somewhere-the-whole-time kind save us money, as flying is expensive.

So, here are the current set of possibilities (with room, of course, for your suggestions as well):

A) Vancouver --> Cabin.
The most America-like part of Canada is easily British Columbia, and it's got the benifit of being amazingly gorgeous. Plus, it's north of everywhere, and hence cooler and more wooded. The downside to Vancouver is that cabin rentals are more expensive (in the neighborhood, maybe, of more like 50$/person/night rather than the 30$/p/n that I was hoping for). And if y'all's cool with that, then that's not a problem at all. Probably comes out to something like 900 or 1000 dollars/person, total, for structural costs (getting there, getting around there, sleeping).

B) Denver --> Estes Park or Jackson Hole
Denver is one of the coolest large cities in the western US, with a world class art museum, some fantastic botanical gardens and three worth-seeing micro-breweries. Oh, and the Coors brewery, whose tour I could lead, should something happen to our guide. The beer's not very good at Coors, but it is exceedingly free. Anyway, that's Denver.
Estes Park is just outside Rocky Mountain National Park. Estes Park itself is small, quaint, touristy kind place, but it's got enough interesting stuff to spend time in/at. The bonus here is that it's close enough to Rocky that you can spend the day in the park then come out and eat at some fairly good restaurants in Estes in the evening.
Jackson Hole, Wyoming (a day by car from Denver), is about the same. The town's about the same as Estes, but smaller and less costly/fancy. It's just outside the Grand Tetons National Park, and, I tell you what, I'm not the kind of person who's impressed by mountains and lakes and such--and I haven't been since I was about 6--but everytime the lake just outside Jackson Hole kicks my ass in the very best of ways. Food for thought. Appx. same as Estes Park, just slightly cheaper and a bit further away.
Probably comes out to about 800$ in structural costs.

C) Minneapolis --> Cabin.
I don't think I need to sell you on MPLS, it's the best. The problem with this plan, in all honesty, is that the cabins in Minnesota aren't near anything interesting. They all seem to be an hour outside of Duluth, which = exactly nowhere. So... yeah. If you're confident in our ability to make ourselves interesting, then MPLS would work just fine. If you liked the idea of a Park in the day and a nice town at night, then this plan's not for you.
Probably comes out to between 700$ and 900$ in structural costs, which, again, doesn't include activities or food.

D) Chicago --> Buffalo/Toronto.
This plan takes advantage of the fact that we know people in these places. Chicago's got Michelle, who is cool and could show us all sorts of neat stuff (and hopefully let us stay with her) and Buffalo's got Lars. Well, Lars' in Rochester, which is an hour from Buffalo. And Buffalo's two hours from Toronto, which is supposed to be New York City but clean and nice. Oh, and there's Niagra falls up in there, too. This may turn out to be either slightly more expensive or slightly less expensive, depending on when and how we decide to fly to CHI and BUF.
Probably falls somewhere between 700$ and 1000$ in structural costs, depending on how many people and how much our friends love us.

E) MPLS --> Chicago.
Same advantages of Chicago trip, but into Minneapolis first. Flights probably only into MPLS then out of Chicago, so that's cheaper than plan d). Probably between 650$ and 750$ in structural costs, but that could go up or down depending on how we get to Chicago and where we stay in both places.

So, pick a letter in the comments or roll your own.

Coming soon:

Three detailed travel trip possibilites, this time with sanity!

Also: reviews of Heroes, 30 Rock, 20 Good Years. Updates on FNL, Six Degrees, Studio 60, etc.

Alright, so, while I've gotten good responses on the idea of going, as a group, to Australia, the particulars, such as the "date" and the "cost" have raised more than a few issues with more than a few people who were otherwise quite pumped about the whole thing. So, I've worked out a few other ideas, with more flexible dates / iteneraries. These are just ideas I've been kicking around with various people, so if you don't like any of them, feel free to suggest your own. Maybe we'll rock your trip this spring/summer. So, read on! (Personally, I think e looks pretty good. But that's me.)

a) Australia, as elucidated before. About 1500$ to see three of the largest, coolest metropolitan areas in Australia, staying in hostels and getting around by train, more or less. Downside: perhaps restricted to May, when some of you have conflicts. Also: fairly expensive. That 1500$ figure doesn't include food (which none of these cost estimates will, because food is a bullshit cost for me to try to include) or much of the "things we'd actually do in Australia that aren't free." Could be pushed to June, at a probable surplus of 150$ and the fact that it'd be 10 or 15 degrees colder there by then (that's their winter, you know). Food for thought.

b) The US Pacific coast. Starting south of San Diego, travel the entire US Pacific coastline up to Vancouver. Travel the scenic Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1), and see the wonders of California (Northern and Southern) as well as Oregon (they make delicious beer and wine there) and Washington (apples, more beer, more wine, coffee and the Experience Music Project).  Cap it off with a jaunt into beautiful British Columbia to see the wooded wonderland that surrounds Vancouver. Headlining cities include Los Angeles, San Fransisco, Eureka, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver.
Amongt the bunch of us, we know a lot of people up and down the Pacific coast, so if we could trick some of them into letting us stay with them for a night or two, that would bring costs signficantly down. This also has the benefit of being supremely flexible, time and itenerary-wise. Some of you are already familiar with some of the stuff up and down this coast-line, but seeing it all from sunny Mexico straight up to wooded Canada? That's something you don't get to do every day.

c) The coast-to-coast in 36hrs trip. An old idea, I know, but I'm still interested in doing it. We start in at the Pacific just outside LA early in the morning then get in the car and drive straight down I-10 to Florida, arriving before dark the next day at the Atlantic near Jacksonville. We see what there is to see, and slowly work our way back, hitting up New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, Las Cruces and Tucson on our way back. Mmmm... BisonWitches.

d) Trans-Canada by rail.
Just kidding. Maybe.

e) Great Lakes-ish. Start in Minneapolis, spend three days exploring the coolest city ever. Then bus or drive to Chicago, where Michelle will show us why it's cool and hopefully let us stay with her (days 5-9). Day 10 we fly to Winnipeg and check it out (it's boss, trust me). And then on day 12 we hop a train that runs the length of Lake Superior to Toronto. Day 13 and 14 are in Toronto and day 15 is to Buffalo / flying out of Buffalo (so it's a far cheaper domestic flight home). I really like this idea. Plus, the train runs through Thunder Bay. How cool is that? Appx cost for planes (to MPLs, Chi to Winnipeg, Buf to home) + train (Winnipeg to Toronto) + rooms (8 nights): 1100$.

e2) Chicago-->West. Start in Chicago and head west. See Mount Rushmore, the Badlands and Black Hills in South Dakota, see North Dakota, hit up Saskatchewan and Alberta (Calgary is like San Antonio but small and clean) then travel down through Glacier National Park (which is FUCKING GORGEOUS) and into Montana, which has some of the best country in the world. Or, alternately, Chicago, MPLS, Winnepeg, Regina, Edmonton, Calgary then either Montana or Vancouver. The Canadian canola fields are amazing in summer.

f) Some trip involving Iceland. Airfare in May/June to Iceland can be had for 550$ right now out of Minneapolis or Boston or New York or DC. So, Chicago, then MPLS, then Reykjavik? The upper-midwest then the tiny island nation with a love of disco dancing and hot sex?

g) Your idea! Leave it in the comments! We're looking at about two weeks in late May or June and we're trying to keep the whole thing under 1500$ (sans food, as stated above). Other than that, go nuts.

(9,00C, ABC, Wednesday)

The Nine revolves around the hostages of a 52-hour bank-robbery-turned-standoff. There's the bank manager and his daughter. The hospital social worker and her surgeon (ex?)boyfriend. The cop and the ADA. The teller and her now-dead sister. The man who was going to commit suicide but instead emerged a hero.

The first quarter of the pilot dealt primarily with how and why these particular people happened to be in the bank at the end of that particular business day. The cop's depositing his paycheck while placing bets. The surgeon decides the line at the ATM is too long. The ADA is there helping out her high strung mother. The suicide-guy is trying to get a boat loan, to get some spark back in his life. The daughter doesn't go down the street like her father, the manager, tells her to. Then we see the robbery begin.

Then we see the robbery end and find out that it's 52 hours later. The police storm the place, shooting and killing one of the two robbers and shooting and injuring the other. The teller's sister has been shot, at some point, and the surgeon is working on her. The suicide-guy tackles one of the robbers. The cop is handcuffed to a pole in the middle of the floor. The ADA's hair has been asymetrically cut. The manager is in a sort of fugue state, silently, unblinkingly shielding his daughter.

We then watch as these people try to deal with what they've been though, how they band together and fall apart. Social worker girl is pregnant, and she was going to deliver the news to surgeon guy at dinner (alright, this is easily the hokiest part of the show, I admit). The daughter can't remember anything that happened, and her father is afraid for what occured, because he wasn't with her the entire time. The teller is having trouble dealing with the death of her sister, who had just agreed to go on a date with the cop after a long flirtation. The police department tries to buy the cop into silence about an aborted attempt that could have ended the siege 24 hours earlier. The ADA is sleeping with her boss, but becomes distant. The teller, grief-laden, seduces the surgeon, and, being a party girl already, goes on a bender. Suicide-guy finds his new lease on life, but his soul-crushing wife just doesn't get it.

Of all the dense new shows with multiple leads that I've watched this season, this is the only one that gets it right. The characters aren't interconnected from the start but are brounght together. They then form their own subgroups and cross-talk between them. Things get messy, but they all desperately want it to be simple. And most of all: we still don't know what happened in that bank, a little more of which will be revealed every week.

The show's well written, well acted (Tim Daly, Kim Raver, Scott Wolf and Jessica Collins, in particular), and terribly well edited. And best of all, I'm very curious to see how these people will bond and un-bond in the wake of this terrible trauma, in addition, of course, to being curious about just WTF happened in that damned bank.

Preliminary grade: A.

I'm hoping to get a soft count by the end of the week (13 Oct) and then go talk to some agents to see if we can do it even cheaper. Here's the basic outline of plan/cost so far:

Planeflight from LAX to Sydney and back, sometime in May: 950USD.

Sydney: nights in one of Sydney's apparently cool youth hostels. 24A$ a night. That's 18USD, probably for three nights. See the Sydney Aquarium, the oldest settlements in Australia, the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House, also the beach, if we so choose.

Spend night 4 on the train (or day five driving our rented car) to Melbourne. Train = 60USD. See neat stuff on the way. See neat stuff in Melbourne. Stay in one of Melbourne's youth hostels for three nights, spending between 2 and 3 days actually seeing Melbourne.

Take the train to Adelaide, City of Churches. Train is 60A$ (45USD), and will take most of the day (day 7?). See Adelaide for 3 days or so. Stay in Adeladian hostels for c. 28A$ (20USD) a night for three nights. Take the train from Adelaide to Sydney over the interior of New South Wales, I assume seeing things like kangaroos and such. Should take 24 hours to get from Adelaide to Sydney, so we can sleep on the train. Cost is appx. 175USD.

See anything we missed in Sydney, fly out on day 13 or so. Get back to Los Angeles four hours before we left Sydney.

*

Total cost for travel: 950 (plane) + 260 (trains) = 1210USD.
Hostels @ 20USD/night, 10 nights = 200USD

Hostels + Planes and Trains = 1410 USD
(And that's marginally cheaper if we decide to rent a car instead)

*

So, that's the cost plus activities (Sydney Aquarium will run us 25A$ (18USD)) and food, so... as little as 1500, depending on what you buy while we're there and how well we want to eat. And, of course, that's a rough number, but depending on how many we get, we might be able to bring that cost down.

1500USD to see Australia? Sounds pretty good to me. If you want in, let me know and we'll figure out dates.

(7,00C, Tuesday, NBC)

FNL, like the movie of the same name, is about highschool football and its importance to small (well, really, any-size--it's just that there's almost nother else in the small ones) town Texas. Having grown up in south Texas, in a small town that turned out en-masse for the Friday night football games, and spending plenty of time in high schools recently (teaching PSAT workshops), Friday Night Lights is equally cringe inducing for the stuff it gets right as the stuff it gets wrong.

Lets start with wrong, first, because, frankly, it's more fun. The problem with shows about high schoolers is that you've got to use actors that are older, most times, for a whole host of reasons, but that everyone can tell the difference. Alright, that's fair enough, suspension of disbelief and all that. Where FNL fucks up is that its actors that play the teenagers range in age from actual teenagers to a bit older than that. (Not quite 23yo. James Vanderbeek as HS Freshman fucked up, but still.) And so that's a little distracting.

And, lets face it, Texas (and Texans) get off on being up-tight and self-righteous. So when the fullback shows up the first practice half-drunk from the night before, he'd get tossed off the team. Making kids and their parents sign code of conduct forms before the start of the season is common, and there's just simply no way he wouldn't've been kicked off the team right then and there, for drinking at all, not just for showing up drunk. There's a lot of don't-ask-don't-tell that goes around in Texas for that reason, but if you show up drunk, there's no way coach can avoid it, particularly once a local reporter starts asking questions about it.

And no one actually toasts to 'living large in the state of Texas. Texas forever.' We get it, they're from Texas. Texas is more like background noise to Texans than something to be actively praised. Sure, you get it a lot out of older people, but they're people that moved here because of their idea of Texas or people who feel threatened by other states. HS kids simply don't have the knowledge of the world to be the latter, and they can't be the former: they didn't move to Texas out of their choice but out of their parents'. Anyway, my point is: Texas is something you're a part of and you don't get uppity about defending until someone starts slagging on it. It's like your older brother: he may not be the best, but fuck anyone who's going to say so. So no-one toasts to that kind of crap. Insignificant, I know, but it rankles.

Alright, now lets talk about what the show gets right: yes, Texans are that obsessed with HS football. Not every team has a chance to win state, but that much talk does go into the ones that do, particularly the ones that are also in the middle of no-where, like Odessa-Midland.

And, yes, high school kids are that stupid, petty and vain. That's just the way they are. And the way we were when we were them. Don't deny it. It might not be pretty, but it's the truth. The part where the coach's daughter shoots down the backup quarterback and his friend's lunch invitation? Oh, man. That brought me back.

And, yes, when the QB gets injured, whether superstar or not, whether it happened on the field or not, everyone goes to the hospital. Everyone. And there's a pall over the school for days. Days. I know this 'cause my sophomore year, our quarterback got in a car accident and for two days almost everyone involved in atheletics or Mormonism was down at the hospital, 24/7. And most other people that even vaguely knew him came and went during that time.

And they do pray, all the time.

And Connie Britton did turn out to be awesome as the formerly-slutty-seeming coach's wife. So very well done.

And finally, the hilarious bits: the town mayor advises the superstar QB to listen to early Black Sabbath, because it will make him mean. Hilarious.

The sheer volume of things this show gets right makes it a little uncomfortable for me to watch. But, so far, at least, if you'd like to know what it's like to HS in South TX? Watch the show.

Preliminary grade: A-, but I am, I think, the target audience.

(9,00C, ABC, Sunday)

Brothers and Sisters stars Calista Flockheart as a right-wing TV host who, really, really, really believes in those conservative ideas she spouts on TV, y'all. She really, really does, ok? Really. Even though she's from a (mostly) staunch liberal family, she really, really believes in those conservative ideas. Like the rest of 'Merica that's not rich white people from Southern California like her family is. Oh, wait, those rich white people are usually conservatives, too? So what's the champion of the masses thing she's doing? Yeah, I don't know either.

Also: Sally Field is horrible as her distant mother. And from the moment Tom Skerrit came on screen as the father in the first episode you could tell he was going to die. Dave Annable (of Reunion non-fame, though he was awesome) is pretty good, but drew the short-straw, character-wise (Afganistan vet with a drug problem). Ron Rifkin is the sleazy family accountant who was helping Skerrit cover up the fact that they have no money. (And he was quite transparent, too.)

But that brings us to the best part of the show: a blond Rachel Griffiths as the married sister who co-runs the company fruit-business and is trying to get the bottom of why they've got no money (or, rather, why Rifkin is hiding how much money they have). She does a fabulous job. Too bad the plot sucks ass.

Oh, and there's Callista Flockheart, whose conservative talk show lady must decide in the opener between the job she's always wanted ('cause she really believes in those conservative ideals, y'all, no matter how bad her family mocks her for it) and the man she thought she loved but turns out to be self-obsessed. Whatever. Don't care.

The show's big on ideas about how families do and should interact and short on actually being interesting. Other than Griffiths mom-character, trying to negotiate her failing marriage, the fact that she's not doing what she loves any more, and the strangeness of the accounting at her family job, the show's almost unwatchable.

Preliminary grade: D.

May is the cheapest time to fly to Australia. Assuming May travel, the follow is true:

Airfare from LAX (or San Fransisco) to Sydney and back: 950USD.
Three or so days in Sydney.
Car rental for drive down Australia 1 (the coastal highway) from SYD to Melbourne: 50 AuD (35USD), split 4+ ways. (Or by train from SYD to MEL, 75AuD (60USD), so add 25USD to totals)
Two days in Melbourne.
Train from MEL to Adelaide: 60AuD (45USD).
Three days in Adelaide.
Train from ADL back to SYD (diff. route): 225AuD (180USD).
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Total cost of travel: 1200USD.
+ Hostel stays, 8 nights, 25AuD (17USD) / night: 136USD.
-----------
Planes, Trains and Beds total: 1336USD.

Add in admission to the Sydney aquarium and trains in the cities themselves. And food.
Another, say, 164USD, say, for the sake of math.

Spending 12 days seeing three of Australia's largest cities (and a chunk of its countryside) with some of the coolest people you know? 1500USD, apparently.

If you want in, let me know and we'll start hammering out exact dates.