There Is Nothing New Under The Nevada Sun

When we were in Vegas, The Suz and I participated in a test audience for the new fall CBS lineup. The Suz and I, respectively, log a lot of hours in front of the television, and we thought it was time for us to Give Something Back to the networks.

Also, it was free, and we were dangerously close to losing the kids' college funds at that point in the week.

Well, except for the part where neither of us has kids.

The show we screened was called "Two Broke Girls." And no, it was not a reality show about The Suz and me actually going to Vegas. It wasn't even based on our lives back in the old days at the old apartment.

If it had been about either of those things, this show might have had a chance at being funny. It could have featured "The One Where Suz Kills a Bat," and "The One Where Suz Sets the Kitchen on Fire," and "The One Where Manda Has a Stalker" and "The One Where Manda Keeps Pet Swedish Fish."

This show was The One Where Two Stereotypes Meet and Wait Tables Together and One of Them Discovers Her Boyfriend is a Cheat and a Lie.

Being part of a test audience sounds like more fun than it is. We were hustled into a little windowless room with a few dozen other pasty Americans, some of whom were wearing fanny packs. In 2011. I kid you not.

We sat through about half the episode, then they showed us a series of previews of other series coming up in the fall lineup. One of them looked like a rip-off of "The Mentalist:. One of them looked like a rip-off of "House", but with ghosts. One of them looked like the bastard offspring of "Entourage" and "Two and a Half Men", somewhat sanitized but with an extra helping of stereotype and misogyny.

Then they showed us the rest of the episode, which ended with the two shrill and generally irritating "broke girls" sitting on the back of a horse in the backyard of and apartment in Brooklyn. Or maybe it was the Bronx.

I don't remember, and it doesn't matter because I'll buy a lot of things in my TV programming. I'll accept vampires, witches, werewolves, a good-hearted serial killer, a yogurt-eating ex-spy, a physicist who isn't all that good at math, a cranky doctor who wastes thousands of dollars in hospital resources and nearly kills every patient before he cures them, a friendly doctor who can cure a patient with a ball point pen and some gardening gloves. I'll buy a LOT of things. But I won't buy that a waitress in a diner can afford an apartment with a backyard in ANY borough of New York City and that said waitress might have any sort of ability to get and keep a thoroughbred in said backyard. That is just TOO FAR.

After viewing the episode, we got to answer questions on a computer.

CBS: Would you watch this sitcom?
US: I'm pretty sure I've already seen this sitcom. Many, many times.

Then the computer asked us questions about our interest in the preview shows. We were pretty sure we were already watching those as well.

Then there was a series of demographic questions, and then we and the doughy tourists filed out of the room and back into the land of slot machines. It was kind of like that time I took the GRE on computer, but less entertaining.

I'm not of the mind that the sitcom is a dead form. There are quite a few that I like very much. And they're actually mostly on CBS. I'm kind of obsessed with "How I Met Your Mother," even though it's kind of a rip-off of "Friends." It's got fun, likeable characters and sharp dialogue, and even though the writers tend to withhold plot points to the point of being infuriating at times, I think they have a good sense of where everything is going and they tie the pieces together well.

I also enjoy "The Big Bang Theory," although most of the geeks I know are better at math and science than the scripts show those guys to be. Not sure what I'm going to think of "The Office" without Steve Carell, but I'm willing to stick around to find out. And, to borrow a phrase from one of my work colleagues, "Modern Family" almost (but not quite) makes up for the loss of "Arrested Development" (which I still mourn).

So I'm not opposed to sitcoms. But I am opposed to generic rip-offs. I may not have great taste in pop culture. I like a lot of trash. But for the most part, it's at least sort of original trash.

Get Your Geek On

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm a fan of the series True Blood. It's a show that revels in its own cheesiness, and I dig that. The plotting-- whatever The A.V. Club reviewers might say-- tends to be more complex than that in the books that are the source material, and you've got a whole cast of ridiculously good-looking dudes who might take their shirts off at any moment. (There is some debate about the definitive rankings, but four out of five dentists agree the leading man is totally the weak link in this respect.) The crazy cat lady is not made of stone, people.

So what could possibly drag me away from such riches as these on a Sunday night?

Bar trivia. Obviously.

I don't mean to brag-- okay, I totally mean to brag-- but I am a beast at bar trivia. Not only do I know a lot of useless crap, but I am smart enough to surround myself with other people who know a lot of other kinds of useless crap.

When I worked summers at Nerd Camp in Durham, N.C., we used to assemble a dream team of graduate students and professors to take on the local rubes for Tuesday trivia night at the James Joyce. Guess what kind of bar that was.

And in Durham, the local rubes are mostly graduate students and professors, so the fact that we rarely paid for drinks at the Joyce attests to the group effort.

So I made my bones, trivially speaking, at an early age.

And so it happened that Sunday night I said a quick prayer to the TiVo gods-- I didn't have time to sacrifice a live chicken or anything, but you do NOT want to mess with the TiVo gods-- and hustled off to play with the three-dimensional people at a TGIFriday's in a strip mall in suburbia.

The drink special was something called a Hemingway Daiquiri. It tasted of citrus. It reminded us of the rain. We sipped our drinks and thought of Havana.

On the way over in the car, Mr. C. (who is the younger brother I never had), NayNay, and I started quoting from Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Why? What's the significance? I DON'T KNOW!

No. Wait. I do know. We decided to name our team "The Alamo's Basement." Which you'll get if you know this movie. If you don't know this movie, then I'm just sad for you.

We thought this was a clever name-- and you get points for clever names-- until we heard the some of the names of the competition:
"No James, you can't have my daughter's number; she's 19."
"If my girlfriend gave it up as much as John Lackey did, I'd be a happy man."
"My girlfriend called me a pedophile. That's a big word for a five-year-old."

I'm not making this up, but I am worried about how that last team name is going to turn up in a Google search and if that means I'm going to end up in a file somewhere that I don't deserve to be in.

At any rate, we dominated the field of competitors with their stupid vaguely creepy team names. NayNay knew all the celebrities on Dancing With the Stars. Mr. C. breezed through the state flags competition. And I got us 8 points for knowing Zooey Deschanel played the main character's older sister in Almost Famous.

NayNay and I noticed that the musical selections playing between rounds were oddly familiar-- we think the trivia guy and our kickboxing sensei might be in league with one another. I had the oddest urge to try for 60 jumping jacks in 60 seconds when trivia guy played AC/DC, but NayNay talked me out of it. Doing jumping jacks in a bar attracts the wrong sort of attention.

Before the final round, though, trivia guy clearly parted ways with our sensei and played "Sweet Caroline." I hate this song. Always have, even before I broke up with the Red Sox (but we still talk from time to time).

NayNay agrees with me on this, and she has not broken up with the Red Sox. This validates all my beliefs.

"It was on the 'Do Not Play' list at my wedding... and my Bat Mitzvah," she said. "Along with 'Oh What a Night,' 'Old Time Rock n' Roll,' and 'Brown-Eyed Girl.'"

This is why NayNay and I are friends.

She can also do math and history at the same time, as she calculated that the Korean War began four score and seven years after the delivery of the Gettysburg Address.

We went into the final round with a commanding lead over the creepy, creepy competition.

And we blew it. We tossed around the correct answers (Manchester United and Tina Turner) but second guessed ourselves right into fourth place.

Fourth. Place.

Oh, the humanity.

And so, almighty TiVo, please safely record the season finale of True Blood next Sunday night, because clearly this insult cannot stand.

The Suz's Summer Reading Challenge Wrap Up: Don't Judge Me

For those of you just tuning in, just before Memorial Day, the Suz issued a challenge to her friends: read 50 pages a day (any book) every day between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Now that it's Labor Day, I feel compelled to provide a page count and some kind of rationalization.

I know I didn't read 50 pages every day, but I read a total of 13,101 pages. By my best count, that's 13,101 pages in 98 days, so my average was 133.7 pages per day. Not too shabby, even if The Suz did beat me by 3000 pages.

Now, The Suz has an edge on me and most of my fellow readers. She's a big fan of serial fiction. She's into at least four series that I'm aware of, and probably more than that, because she's always waiting for the next book by somebody.

I try to stay away from serial fiction for the same reason that I don't buy potato chips.

I will eat them. All. As quickly as I can. And then when there's no more left, I'll spend a week trying not to get my hands on more.

In the case of potato chips, of course, there are always more, so it takes a colossal effort not to run right out and buy another bag.

In the case of serial books, though, I'll plow through what's there and then spend a week in withdrawal, sometimes poring back over the editions I have to try to soothe the pull. And eventually I settle into a low-level craving as I wait out the months-- or years until the next installment.

Seriously, J.K. Rowling almost killed me. Which is ironic, because there was a short period there when my greatest fear in life was that I might die in a freak accident before I got to read book seven.

The thing is, I do this even when I don't even like the series in question. Nobody who has seen my living or working spaces would ever accuse me of being even a little bit Obsessive Compulsive. I have embraced the chaos, baby. But serial fiction activates whatever OCD or addictive impulses I have lingering in my reptilian brain, and I will finish what I start.

Case in point: The Twilight Series (I refuse to call it a saga). Two years ago I borrowed the first two books from my cousin because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and because I've had a thing for vampire books for as long as I can remember.

Not only did I not understand the fuss, but this series fundamentally changed my philosophy about reading in general. I used to think that any reading was worthwhile. After reading Twilight, I decided that my time would have been better spent watching re-runs of something more cerebral like Jersey Shore. Or Fox News.

But that didn't stop me from picking up the third issue of the series on a routine trip to Target the day after I finished the first two installments. This wasn't an impulse buy. And the trip wasn't entirely routine. Sure, I needed cat food and toilet paper, but I could have gone to the supermarket. It was just easier to lie to myself about my true intentions if I went to the bog box store.

And the day after that, having chewed my way through the third book, I ended up at Barnes and Noble, with all the shame and self-loathing of a junkie cruising Chinatown at two in the morning.

And all that was for a series that offended my sensibilities on so many levels I'd need charts and graphs to document them all. Imagine what happens when I get my hands on a series I actually like.

But, oh, we don't have to imagine.

The Suz first recommended Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series to me well before HBO bought the rights and gave the world True Blood. It sounded like something I'd dig because there were vampires (that don't fucking sparkle) and Elvis. For a girl like me, what's not to love there? But I got busy with other tasks, like naming my pet Swedish Fish, and never got around to it.

But somewhere between the cerebral readings of June and July, I read the last two installments of J.D. Robb/ Nora Robert's In Death series (Back in 1999 I set the record by devouring the first ten installments of the series-- also a Suz recommendation-- in a grand total of four days. Even now that they've become kind of predictable-- the culprit is always the third person Dallas interviews-- I love these characters enough to stick with them.), and I remembered the joys of serial fiction.

I went for the old standby first, making myself a sub-challenge to finish the seven Harry Potters in seven days. It took me nine. Then I decided that rather than continuing to ask The Suz how the books compared with the TV show, it was time for me to tackle Harris's take on vampires and Elvis. I got through the eleven available installments in about ten days. Even though I like the TV version better-- even if they don't include Elvis-- I certainly don't have the sensation that I was robbed of my time.

I think about how I started this summer reading books about the nature of good and evil, about domestic life, about Big Ideas. And I ended by rediscovering fiction, but not cerebral book-club fiction. Closer to pulp fiction, really. And now I can't quit. I just started the Las Vegas mystery series. And I picked up a few more new (to me) mystery series at the used bookstore today. And I know, as I have known about so many of my mistakes, that this doesn't end well. It can't.