I Look Like A Monkey....

....And I smell like one too. That's right, today is my birthday. I'm 25 years old. I am officially no longer in the "MTV" Demographic. That's fine, really, because I haven't watched much MTV since "Beavis and Butthead" and "The State" went off the air (no, I don't watch the Real World/Road Rules Challenge...ok, it's on my Tivo because my wife watches it and I may be in the room on the couch at the same time...). I'm no longer in the key 18-24 demo. Of course, some people say it's 18-25, so I'm good for another year. Ah, who am I kidding? I'm a white male, advertisers won't stop caring about my opinions until I'm well past 50, and then the drug companies will start taking interest (if I see one more Cialis commercial, I swear...). It's nice to be wanted.

Everyone keeps asking what I'm doing for my birthday. The answer- Not a whole lot. I'll see Superbad this weekend, and we'll probably have a nice dinner or something, but my real gift is the MacBook, and I couldn't ask for anything more for my birthday. Really, things are pretty good right now. Here's to hoping that they stay that way for a long, long time. Cheers.

It's a Girl!

At least, I'm assuming it's a girl. It's all curvy and pretty and seems to have mostly "female" input ports. Of course I'm referring to my beautiful new Macbook! It's 13 inches diagonally, 1 inch, think, weighs 5lbs and is perfectly healthy! Cigars for everyone!

Seriously, though, I haven't had much time to play with it yet (I just went home at lunch to pick it up and plug it in) but I can't wait. The shipping was a little crazy on it. After Anchorage last night, it apparently flew to Indianapolis, then caught another flight in the wee small hours of the morning to make it to LA. For those of you keeping score, the final flight path looked like this:


Seems like Indianapolis was a little out of the way, but I'm not complaining. It got here in less than a week, which is a hell of a lot faster than I could get anything here from China. Maybe I'll put some pictures up tomorrow.

The only thing dampening this good mood for me right now is the fact that I have a splitting headache and no pain medication at the office. Looks like I've got something for the shopping list this weekend.

Working in the picture business

As I was leaving my parking spot recently, I noticed something strange hanging from the outside of the parking deck:
Intrigued, I decided to get a better look at it from outside. Imagine my surprise when I saw this:
For some reason, someone had re-created the head of the Statue of Liberty on my parking structure! I know CSI:NY films on my lot, but I can't figure out why this thing is there. It's not like it's got blue or green screen behind it to allow you to fake a scene there. Plus, there's nowhere to stand or anything, the actors would have to be hovering around it. And even more curious, the thing seems to get bloodier every day, like it was crying blood (yes, I know I said this happened "recently," but the head has actually been up for nearly a month now. I've just been too lazy to get the pictures off of my phone.). Just one of the perks of working in the biz, I guess. Where do you park? Oh, I park in the Statue of Liberty's bleeding head.

MacBook Update: As of posting time, my MacBook has made it on to the continent and is in Anchorage, Alaska! Some reports I've read say that it will come straight to LA from there, others say it might be routed through Indianapolis first (which doesn't make a lot of sense, it's apparently a FedEx sorting thing). This means that there is at least a small possibility that I will have my new laptop (I'm sorry....notebook) computer tomorrow!

Waiting is the hardest part...

Hey everyone. So, this past Thursday I ordered myself a shiny, new white MacBook. And now, I wait for it to arrive. I'm reminded of The Simpsons (once again), when Homer was going through the 3-day waiting period to buy his gun. He sits in front of the house watching things he wants to shoot go by as Tom Petty's song "Waiting is the Hardest Part" plays. That's pretty much how I feel right now.

It finally shipped out late last night, so now I get the pleasure of using FedEx to track the shipment. I track everything I order, even if it's nothing exciting. And, well, this computer is VERY exciting, so I'm tracking it obsessively. Here's what I know so far:

I live here:


The package has just left here:


Now, for those of you who failed geography and don't own a globe, this is what the trip looks like:


Hopefully the plane can avoid the giant dragon in the Pacific and get me my computer soon. I'm hopeful because when I ordered my iPod, it only took like two days to get to Atlanta from Hong Kong. And California is closer to China than Atlanta, right? Ah well. I'll have a new computer soon, things are good.

Making good things better is the fact that Karl Rove resigned today. Granted, this is 7 years too late, after a career of causing irreparable damage to the world in every way conceivable, but better late than never. I'll be drinking to that tonight.

Bear with me on this one...

So, last night I was watching my DVD of Season 2 of The Muppet Show (which is fantastic, by the way) and the Rich Little episode came on. Now, Rich Little is pretty awful. He does a bit where he does impressions of Fozzie, Kermit, and Piggy and none of them are even recognizable (I do much better Muppet voices, thank you very much). His impressions are cartoonish and often way off base (how hard is it to do a Bing Crosby, for god's sake?). But that's beside the point. He did a number where he recreated scenes from classic movie musicals, and when he did "I Remember It Well" from Gigi I thought, "Hey, that's a pretty good Maurice Chevalier." Wait a minute, did I just think that? Where the hell did that come from?

I couldn't pick Maurice Chevalier out of a line of two people. Why did I know 1)Who this guy is, and 2) that Rich Little's impression of him was pretty good? I've never seen or heard Chevalier before, really. Well, that's not entirely true. I'm pretty sure XM's broadway channel plays his Gigi recordings fairly frequently, but I didn't know who he was when I heard them so they don't count. So why my sudden expertise on Maurice Chevalier? Then it hit me- The Marx Brothers.

Early in the week, my boss was out of town and I filled some of the downtime by going through some of my Marx Brothers collection DVDs. In Monkey Business, the brothers are stowaways on a cruise ship and apparently Chevalier is one of the passengers. They manage to steal his passport to try and get off the ship uncaught. In turn, all four of them (Monkey Business does feature Zeppo) imitate Chevalier to prove that it is their passport. Harpo's imitation, which involves a small phonograph, is especially memorable (not to mention the only time I had knowingly heard Chevalier sing). Seeing them all fake their way through "You Brought a New Kind of Love To Me" is a highlight of the film for me. But it apparently was also enough to make me an expert on Maurice Chevalier. It is an introduction to pop culture of the 1930s.

I love pop culture. Heck, I love all trivia, but pop culture is fun. This whole Chevalier fiasco (that should be a movie- The Chevalier Fiasco) has made me realize how much pop culture I absorb second hand. I can reference TV shows and movies I've never seen just because I'm pretty familiar with them. For example, I could pinpoint a scene from Citizen Kane or Dr. Strangelove on sight before I had seen them because I was so familiar with them from The Simpsons. And Animaniacs? Forget about it. I am a font of other people's knowledge. Thank you movies and television, for teaching me all about movies and television.

My First Earthquake (by Fisher Price)

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Last night I experienced my first earthquake. Granted, the epicenter was at least 20 miles away, but I still felt it. It was a terrifying experience, much like the Earthquake ride at Universal Studios. The gas line was spewing flames out of my stove and a truck came crashing through my roof! We were lucky to escape with our lives...

Ok, that's exaggerating things just a bit. It was only a 4.7 (apparently, that's pretty low) and I was awakened by a gentle rumbling at 1am. How gentle? I convinced myself pretty quickly that I had imagined it. Hell, Melissa slept right through it, how strong could it have been? The action figures that I keep precariously perched on my desk didn't even fall over. Honestly, my office is directly above the air conditioner for the building, so my desk and windows shake more than that on a constant basis. If an earthquake hit while I was at work, I might not even notice it.

Which brings up a fear I've always had- What if you're riding the Earthquake ride at Universal Studios and there's a real earthquake? You come out of the show building and see the world still shaking. Are you convinced that it's all part of the show and that Universal has really upped the production values? You laugh and take pictures while the rest of the town runs around screaming. You'd be woefully unprepared. These are the kinds of things I worry about all day. I think there might be something wrong with me.

Who Watches This Crap?

While I'm sure there is no shortage of rambling phillipics on the sad state of entertainment in America today as a result of reality television, I'm also sure that most of them don't refer to themselves as "philipics." So, I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway.
Today, they're apparently shooting "America's Got Talent" on my lot. Fine. Whatever. Unfortunately, this means the area surrounding my office is crowded with slack-jawed idiots. You can pick them out from a block away. They're the ones wandering around like they've never been outside of their homes before, staring and pointing and driving 3 miles an hour down Venture Boulevard. They walk across the street at a leisurely pace, gaping and gawking, hoping to see some minor celebrity at the McDonald's, all the while oblivious to the traffic they are blocking; every driver about 3 seconds from running them over. They are either dressed pathetically sloppily or WAY too nice to be going to a television taping, like this is the biggest event of their lives. These are the people who are not content to sit at home and waste an hour of their life watching a crappy reality competition on TV, they have to take an entire day of their lives (a Monday, mind you; most people are working) and watch the same crap sandwich in person. And to make matters worse, I was told when I came back from lunch that my RESERVED parking space may not be available because apparently these morons can't follow simple directions and park in the general spaces on the 4th and 5th floors. Apparently, they just think they're at the mall and can't be bothered not to park in the first space they see, regardless of whether it says "SPACE RESERVED FOR E. SELZER- CW FILMS." Thankfully, no one had taken my spot or I would have left a rather nasty note.
I believe that these people are not fans of reality television, they are products of it. Networks like to make a big deal of the fact that they are putting out terrible reality programs because people watch them. I think this gives people too much credit. If you took every reality program off the air, people wouldn't stop watching television. If every network made the blanket decision to stick to scripted shows, the overall number of people would not change. People will watch what they are told to watch. So, I see reality television as a vast conspiracy to dumb down the American people. If you want to keep a civilization in submission, the first thing you do is keep them from getting educated. Intelligence is the main enemy of tyranny. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first season of Survivor was the year that people allegedly elected George Bush president. I'm just saying.
Now, I'm not one of those people who claims that television used to be a golden font of entertainment and it's all gone to hell. There's always been crappy TV. And, to be fair, there's a lot of REALLY good TV on right now (The Office, 30 Rock, Lost, Heroes, anything on HBO). But reality isn't just bad television, it's stupid television. It talks down to the viewer and removes any critical thinking that standard storytelling evokes. It tells the audience that they must personally get involved to affect the outcome of the show. You don't have to think about anything, you just have to feel something. "I like that guy better than that girl! I want that suitcase, not that one." When was the last time anyone turned off one of these shows and said, "Wow, that really gave me something to think about." Art (and yes, I'm including television as art), should be a thought-provoking reflection on society. If reality TV is a reflection of society, we might as well just kill ourselves now. I don't want to believe that we're all such vapid, greedy, fame whores. I try to give the average citizen credit for having some amount of intelligence. And yet...
Do me a favor. Go watch an episode of "Dora the Explorer" or any current children's show. The obsession in the industry right now is to make these shows more "interactive" for kids. Dora (or Mickey or whoever) will address your kids directly; they will ask questions, ask for help, and praise them whether they actually do anything or not. The idea is to get the kids involved in the show, and for the six and under set, this strategy makes a lot of sense. But this is basically the same strategy they use with these reality shows, specifically, the reality competitions. "Call in and vote so YOU can change the outcome of the show! Hooray! You did it!" With your toddler, it's cute. But isn't it insulting that major television networks think your brain is essentially the same as that of a six year old? I'm insulted, and I don't even watch. Create characters that get me involved in your show. Don't pander to me and tell me that my watching has an impact on the show (Spoiler Alert- It doesn't. The networks pick the winners and then manipulate the shows so that you feel the same way that they want you to feel. And that's assuming that they even look at the votes; which, in fact, they probably don't). Please, television networks, start treating us like adults and put some damn effort into your programming.