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Brain vs. Zed pointed me to this site fantastic collection of onomotapeia from the old Batman TV series. My favorite is "ZGRUPPP!". I need to find a way to figure it into casual conversation. All the time.

Mike "Creator of Hellboy" Mignola's The Amazing Screw-On Head was a bizarre little one-shot comic that was weird, even for him. It told the story of Screw-On Head, a robotic secret agent with interchangable bodies working for Abraham Lincoln, and his battle versus the evil Emperor Zombie.

It was awesome.

The Sci-Fi Channel recently made an equally weird half-hour animated special out of it, with the potential for a series, I think. It is possibly even more awesome, thanks to Paul Giamatti and David Hyde Pierce lending their vocal talents to Screw-On Head and Emperor Zombie, respectively.

You can watch the whole episode online here. Watch it. Love It. Fill out the survey and ask for more.

I was going to write a coherent article on Super Bowl ads & such, but it's 9:30 and I'm tired & lazy. Therefore, I'm posting my colon-heavy notes instead (short version: McGyver--Yay! GoDaddy.com--Boo!). Enjoy. Or not.

Franz Ferdinand's "Do You Want To" is what I always figured DriveSHAFT sounded like.

I used to love Law & Order. I used to watch it religiously back when it first started. After a while, however, the whole “Sam Waterson rants about what the correct moral standpoint on the issue of the week is” thing got a tad old. And, even worse, the plots became more frequently “ripped from the headlines”, which I read as “easier to write ‘cause we don’t need to make stuff up”. (NBC’s website summarizes this week’s episode—I kid you not—as “GOVERNOR IN TROUBLE WHEN WIFE IS MURDERED AND HIS AFFAIR WITH BUSINESSMAN LEADS TO GAY MARRIAGE SHOWDOWN”. I’m sure James McGreevey is flattered with the homage.) Needless to say, I haven’t been watching it recently. And I’d never seen either of the spinoffs. Until tonight.

TiVo is a fabulously wonderful invention. If asked, I can burble on happily about for more time than anyone really wants to hear about it. I love it to bits and I find it really hard to watch TV without being able to pause, rewind, or (most importantly) fast-forward. It is the greatest thing to happen to television since cable.

But, I’m realizing, this luxury comes at a price—and I’m not just talking about the $12.95 a month for the program guide. I will illustrate this hazard in a small play I call “TiVo Guilt”.

For those of you wondering what new prime-time TV to watch this fall, Josh is doing his best TeeVee impression by watching & reviewing as many new shows as possible. Being the person who helped him get a TV and influenced his decision to get a Tivo, I feel oddly proud.

So, I happened to be listening to the local pop station yesterday and Kelly Clarkson's "Miss Independent" came on. I wondered why it sounded familiar, then remembered: the WNBA used it mercilessly in their ads during the post-season last year. But now that I've heard all the lyrics, I'm not so sure it's the best song to illustrate the "girl power" themes the ads were trying to get across. I'll let you be the judge.

Combining this with other WNBA ads we've seen recently (like the oh-so-wonderful "Aren't our players sexy?" ads), I think it's time the WNBA found a new marketing company.

While I find most reality shows to be simply irritating, this strikes me as just flat out disgusting.

Colonial House, starring my friend Jeff Lin premieres Monday night on PBS! Watch it!! You will not be disappointed!!!

With the wild success of the first two Harry Potter movies, the anticipated success of the third, and the success (to a lesser extent) of kids' books like Holes and Ella Enchanted, it appears studios are ready to mine any and all popular chidren's book for The Next Hit Movie.

Case in point: Tonight at 7PM CST, ABC is showing an adaptation on A Wrinkle In Time on "The Wonderful World of Disney". I have hopes, but I'm prepared to have them dashed, if for no other reason than the actors look nothing like the characters I'd always imagined--Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit being the prime offenders, but I keep looking at their Meg and thinking "But where are her glasses???". It's shallow, I know, but there you go.

Over on the actual movie side of things, Disney's decided to produce The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Now, I know it can be done: the BBC (or someone over in the UK) put together miniseries of the first three books, and they worked all right, as long as you didn't mind the Dr. Who-esque special effects. My main curiousity is whether they actually do plan on adapting all seven books. Given the way that "The Chronicles of Narnia" is included in the title and the movie industry's joy in franchises, I'd say so. Which begs the question: What will they do with The Last Battle? Is Disney prepared to put a dandied-up version of the book of Revelations onto the big screen nationwide? Only time will tell, I guess.

Finally, in case you were wondering, there are no signs yet of new adaptations of Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain. Whether this is a good thing or not, I leave as an exercise to the reader.

I've got a friend who's been in Teen People! For those of you who don't know, one of my old coworkers at Retek, Jeff Lin, is part of PBS's latest reality show, Colonial House (if you look here, you can find him under "Voorhees House"). Well, the magazine did a bit on one of his costars and Jeff (or rather, Jeff's back) is in the background of one of the photos! How nifty is that?

Oh, and for those of you wondering, it's premiering May 17th. Everyone should watch it. After all, how often do you get to see your friends (or even your friends' friends) on TV? Also, the "House" shows have been uniformly fascinating, so you should watch it even if you don't care who the heck Jeff is.

Another Superbowl Sunday has come and gone, and, being the sick person that I am, I sat there and watched the whole damn thing, all four and a half hours of it, in pure defiance of my TiVo.

Joan of Arcadia is the best new show in the 2003-04 television season.

For the last month or so, I've been saying to myself, "Oh, I should write that up in my blog" over and over and over. And have I? No. So, I'm going to get all of it all out my system in one fell swoop, review everything in three sentences or less. And away we go...

Without a Trace is a great show. The stories are interesting, the ensemble cast is excellent, the writing is great, often with subtle characterization that you don't find on most other shows (especially crime shows).

The problem is, someone on the show has musical tastes very similar to mine. Which is wonderful, independent of the show--it's always great to have someone agree with you.

But when that person decides that David Bowie's "Something in the Air" would be the perfect song to play while a jealous lover is murdering his fiancee or that Moby's "One of These Mornings" works chillingly well as a prelude to a woman being kidnapped by a copycat killer, it's not quite as wonderful anymore.

Rod Roddy died last night. I've been watching The Price is Right for as long as I can remember and Rod Roddy's been an essential part of that show for almost as long. I'm really going to miss him.

Usually, I fear 80's-retro stuff like the plague. Radio stations that claim the 80's was the greatest decade ever give me the willies. But my mom told me I should give VH1's I Love the 80's a chance, so I did. The basic premise of the miniseries is this: every hour is dedicated to one year of the 80's. They then get celebrities to reflect on trends, music, and events of that year. The part that makes it great is that the celebrities are funny. Folks like Mo Rocca & Hal Sparks you expect his from, but even people like Kevin Sorbo, Traci Lords, and Darius Rucker have some really amusing things to say about "the greatest decade ever". VH1 has discovered irony & it's the best thing that ever happened to'em.

I have just, due to some morbid fascination on my part, sat through an entire episode of Stripperella. For those of you who don't know this show, here's what you need to know:

1. It's a superhero cartoon about a stripper who fights crime.
2. It stars the voice of Pamela Anderson.
3. It's on TNN, which has gone from being The National Network to The First Network For Men. Which means it shows exactly as many Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns and Bond movies as it used to, but now with added reruns of Blind Date and American Gladiators.
4. It's apparently trying to be "satire", which means that the cheesecake and the Freudian imagery is "smart" rather than "bizarre and groan-inducing".
5. It's created by Stan Lee.

Four words I never thought I'd hear together: "Herbal Essences Halftime Report".