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I wonder if it was the “special ending” at the end of this instructional video that led a ninja on his costumed misadventure?

Even Batman made it look more real (was that from The Cult, I can’t remember): 5+ years as an addict and he’s over it in fifteen minutes, less commercials, then gets the chick. And the Chase-Cameron storyline has it looking like married life is harder. Besides, I liked having Amber around as an anthropomorphic—in science fiction, the kind that’s at least upfront about being out there, she’d be a hologram or whatever they were in Battlestar Galactica—representation of the brilliant mind’s emotional conflicts and deductive processes. What now, they explain her away as a figment of sexual frustration?

Electricity went out, quite dramatically, while I was watching the final episode of Life on Mars last night and stayed off for longer than what folks in this comfortable neighborhood surely must be used to. Even if I could continue on a laptop, there was no getting the disc out of the player. So I took a walk to see how far the darkness went, but turned back when I didn’t see a single family outside, and thought maybe I might be gunned down by one of these fucking McCain supporters with their AK aimed at the door.

Edison’s website didn’t acknowledge the outage for at least an hour—

When you think about it, Kuma—Kutner made the most sense, as one-dimensional they kept his character; lets House struggle with the unknowable mystery of another. The only person I personally knew who committed suicide was among my headbanger clique in high school (or was it stoner, I can’t quite remember the prevailing term, as much as the black T-shirt, tight jeans and Indian boots). I remember clearly the large Teutonic assistant principal making a veiled announcement of her passing over the PA in a broken voice. The Vietnamese girl who saw her parents murdered in front of her, she broke down often, but survived. Perspective reminds us that over 200 real people lost their lives in yesterday’s earthquake, and with every one of them also went a microcosm of experience and interpretation not even God’ll be able to sort out.

Has effectively replaced The Office for my Thursday night laughs. The tide’s finally turned against capitalism and overcompensated management like Michael Scott to put an end his 15-year tenure (fortunately only a third televised), which, while not the least bit funny, was well enough performed by Mr. Carrell. Quitting was his last act of incompetence, and this coming from someone who would know.

House has felt lacking this season, maybe because of the haste with which they’ve been dispensing with character developments—his breakup with Wilson lasted only a few weeks, and he shows as much remorse for his dead ex as George did for Susan; the romance with Cuddy, Cameron taking over, all wrapped up in under one—and an unmemorable episode sought to entertain during the usual life-or-death storyline with only a demonstration of his petulance when the plumbing went out at home. Anyway, turned out he caused the damage himself, and in a moment as close as I’d like to enter his world (wish for it, and I’m sure to be diagnosed with lupus), I racked up a $250 bill myself today for a house call of my own. Run the shower and the novelty head, installed as my first act of home ownership, leaks calcium onto the shiny new tub faucet …just like it did the old one.

What’s sad about this controversy is not that I’m actually siding with the object of rice-eater desire, but because its source hails from a country already notorious for fixing their faces, whose otherwise 우리나라만세 people are long deaf to the message of that forty-plus year-old episode of the Twilight Zone with the girl in the future questioning all her societal pressure to become the same as everyone else.

The problem with watching shows like House—which, ironically, is what 老婆 occupies her time off with now—you expect the same level of ability from your own health care professional, or at least a modicum thereof. And the local Kaiser department store sure ain’t Princeton-Plainsboro: regular physician diagnoses a persistent cough as allergies, and prescribes Zyrtec; two days later it’s still there so we return for a second opinion from someone else (Doctor “Do”, I’m not kidding), who says it’s bronchitis. Any pre-med dropout with a BlackBerry and Wikipedia access can read that antihistamines thicken the mucus she’s been trying to expel all this time. This must’ve been before the half-hour mark, when the gang from pathology realizes they fucked up?

This story was in the news when we were up there last week, and the angle on that particular program was the social implication of the immersed interactive gamer and the failure of parents to recognize it when removed. Not that I’d lay any guilt on them, of course; children were being grounded long before Xbox Live for bad grades and kept from their bonding activities, and our numbers haven’t suffered from too many of them freezing to death in the woods. Maybe a better solution for kids like these, if it’s so god-damned difficult to raise them with stronger ties to the real world in the first place, is to restrict the form of their online presence and kill the Call of Duty (by say, just swiping the disc) while allowing contact with their clans or what-not. Either way, human development’s making a profound transition here, what with the Internet and all, and it’s best that both passing and progressing generations be prepared.

Why the REM category then? Because I dreamed last night 老婆 and I had to refuel her dad’s truck, and to save on costs, went way out to the boonies. So far out there that, not only had we crossed the border, but the markedly Pacific Northwestern two-lane highway was littered with dinosaur carcasses. One roadside animal we saw prone was a green-furred saber-toothed tiger, which didn’t strike me until I woke later to exist anywhere in the recesses of my mind except in the form of He-Man’s sidekick.

Finally, some straight talk.