Animals are Dumb

Of course, as a baby, I too believed a cleaning brush was my mother.

Elwood Blues Has Tourette's?

According to this How Stuff Works article, Dan Ackroyd is one of a handful of famous people afflicted with Tourette Syndrome:

• Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, former NBA player
• Dan Aykroyd, actor
• Pete Bennett, “Big Brother” reality-show personality
• James Boswell, author
• Brad Cohen, award-winning teacher and author
• Jim Eisenreich, former Major League Baseball player
• Tim Howard, goalkeeper for Manchester United Football Club
• Samuel Johnson, 18th-century author of “A Dictionary of the English Language”
• Mozart, composer (this has been disputed, but it does make for good gossip)
• Michael Wolff, jazz musician

Hmm. Maybe "famous" should be in quotes, particularly when you have a teacher on the list. (Nothing against teachers, but the only "famous" teacher I can think of is the Mr. Holland's Opus guy, whose name escapes me at the moment.)

Interestingly, Wikipedia, that bastion of good research is unsure whether having Ackroyd on that list is accurate or not:

Aykroyd described himself (in a radio interview with Terry Gross) as having mild Tourette syndrome that was successfully treated with therapy when he was a preteen, as well as mild Asperger syndrome. The diagnosis of Asperger syndrome did not exist in the 1960s, when Aykroyd was a preteen. It is unclear if Aykroyd received the diagnoses of TS or AS from a medical source, whether he was speaking in his role as a comic, or whether the diagnoses were self-made. It was an audio interview, so the audience could not see Aykroyd's facial expressions, but the interviewer indicated uncertainty about whether Aykroyd was kidding.

My interest in the subject, besides adding to the already-huge portion of my brain devoted to useless entertainment trivia is that I had a friend with Tourette's in college, a fellow named Robert. I was at a friend's party, when the guy next to me repeatedly rolled his head. "Stiff neck?" I asked, stupidly. No, he told me, without a hint of malice or irritation, he had Tourette's, and went on to explain exactly what that meant.

Of course, pop culture focuses on the sensational elements of the syndrome, specifically the random foul language (coprolalia, which I believe translates literally to "shit language"). And, look, I'm not going to deny that that sort of thing isn't funny, sometimes. Discomfort in social situations is always a rich vein of humor - like when a kid points out someone's fat ass at the mall. But for a disease that's surprisingly prevalent (it's estimated that 1 in 100 have Tourette syndrome, with varying degrees of severity), but only 15% of sufferers have that symptom, and the focus on that one symptom undoubtedly causes some stigma for all the people afflicted with the disease.

Robert described his Tourette's to me thusly: He has these compulsions to do things that he can't ignore. The head-rolling was just one. He had also plucked out a good deal of his eyebrows.

Thing was, as so often happens, the better I got to know the guy, the less I even noticed these his tics. He was just a nice guy to hang out with.

I wonder what happened to him.

A Crotchety Guide to the Fall's New Shows

Lately, I've been weaning myself off of TV. I used to watch it damn near constantly when I lived alone, but with a girlfriend and now wife in the house with me, not to mention a house to maintain, writing projects to tackle, and cats to entertain, who has the time?

Mostly, though, nothing from this year's crop has caught my eye. The Bionic Woman caught my eye (in that obnoxious "The Twenty" that Regal runs before their movies) only because they seemed intent on making Michelle Ryan run around in tight, wet clothes for most of the preview. What else? I've heard rumblings about Reaper, and I used to be quite the Kevin Smith fan (he lost me around Dogma, honestly, although Clerks II was a nice return to form). But apart from those two, I know next to nothing about the upcoming offerings, I and I keep up on a lot of entertainment media.

So, I'm going to scan through the Zap2It Fall TV Guide and see what, if anything, catches my eye. Networks, take note.

First, NBC:

• Chuck: Cute premise, but McG gives me hives. I've always thought Sarah Lancaster was cute, in that "too damn attractive, no personality" cheerleader way.
  
• Journeyman: Lord knows I'm a sucker for time travel stories. I might give it an episode, but this looks to be a Lost-type exercise in drawing out plot revelations over five years. I'm already three years into Lost, so I'm more inclined to see that one through to the end than add another.
  
• Life: Another Damn Cop Show (ADCS) with a cute gimmick, which means it may as well be Cop Rock.
• The IT Crowd: The original is one of those Brit shows on my ever-expanding list of "ones I need to watch" (Shannon just added The Mighty Boosh this week, bringing the list to an even thousand). Graham Linehan (Zap2It hilariously credits him as "Graham Lineman") has my semi-eternal allegiance for co-creating Black Books, and Richard Ayode gets major credit for being Garth Marenghi's sidekick Dean Learner. And Joel McHale is nicely Kilbornian (that simultaneously engaging and repellant combination of smarm and witty sarcasm) on The Soup. Still, the original is pretty broad, and regardless of the success of The Office, Americans don't have the best track record with importing Britcoms.
• Lipstick Jungle: Um, no. I'm happy to let the wife watch it, though, if it means she'll stop watching endless Sex in the City repeats.
• World Moves: I refuse to watch "reality" TV. If I wanted to watch "real" people be petty and self-centered, I'd go somewhere and interact with them.
  

CBS:

• The Big Bang: For people who think Two and a Half Men is too hard to follow, apparently.
• Cane: I get the feeling 90% of the episodes will end with Jimmy Smits looking out a window, with a pensive look. I would only watch this if Nestor Carbonell will don his Batmanuel costume on a regular basis. (Wait, did I just read that Carbonell is going to be in The Dark Knight? That's awesome.)
  
• Kid Nation: See World Moves above.
• Moonlight: Angel without the sense of humor. Or Charisma Carpenter. So, you know, no.
• Viva Laughlin: A reality show about Uncle Joey's wife? Oh, sorry. That's Loughlin. Still, not terrifically interested.
• Swingtown: A show about wife-swapping? With the guy from Coupling (the good, British one)? On... CBS? I get the feeling that this will wind up being Thirtysomething with kinkier sex.

ABC:

• Big Shots: Titus was funny, and Josh Malina has a lot of goodwill from SportsNight, but the description ("Four top executives have the world at their fingertips -- and all the same problem us working stiffs have: fidelity, fractured relationships with exes and kids, power grabs at the office.") sounds like Thirtysomething again. Or Love Monkey without the guy from Ed. (God, I miss Ed. Where are the DVDs, dammit?)
  
• Carpoolers: Without seeing any of the show (I said this was preliminary opinions, dammit), the title alone gives me visions of, I don't know, Yes Dear. But it was created by a Kids in the Hall alum, so it may have potential.
• Cashmere Mafia: Jeez, the creators of Sex in the City should sue. Except they're producing this one. Same comments from Lipstick Mafia apply here.
• Cavemen: I think it was Abe Lincoln who said, "That show gave me the worst headache."
• Dirty Sexy Money: Why doesn't anyone know how to use punctuation anymore? Anyway, this looks like The Firm: The Series. Despite Peter Krause (same SportsNight goodwill applies to him as to Josh Malina), I don't think I'm interested, sorry. No matter how you look at it, giving up an hour of your life to watch people be angsty and mean each week is rarely worth the time.
• Private Practice: Regardless of what all the women in America say, Grey's Anatomy sucks eggs. (As one friend put it, "It's Felicity in hospital scrubs.") This will, too. In ten years, kids will laugh at their parents for having watched it.
• Pushing Daisies: Okay, I take it back. I have heard good buzz on one show, albeit just a little. This sounds interesting and original. (Not always a formula for TV success, though.) I might give it a shot.
  
• Samantha Who? The plot summary sounds like Regarding Henry, only as a half-hour sitcom. I'll pass.
• Women's Murder Club: This would be a lot more interesting if the women killed people instead of solved crimes. The plot description sounds like Sex in the City crossed with Law & Order. (Where did all the SitC ripoffs come from all of a sudden? Didn't that show end three years ago?) Reminds me of the old joke: Take two, totally different occupations and add the phrase "They're detectives!" to the end. "She's an obese nun from the future, he's a deaf-mute half-man, half-poodle. They're detectives!" (I'd watch that.)
• Eli Stone: Sounds like a genuinely weird take on Joan of Arcadia. It has "the chick from Species (or, as she's known to absolutely no one, Natasha Hentsridge), though, so it might be worth watching to see if she puts on the occasional bikini.
• Miss/Guided: I don't do shows with punny titles. Doesn't Brooke Burns look like she was hatched from a pod?
• Oprah's Big Give: You get a car! And you get a car! And you get a car! And I get a headache!

Fox:

• Back to You: The ads give the serious impression of yet another schticky sitcom. Don't care.
• K-Ville: The Zap2It page references the (joke) Simpsons spinoff Chief Wiggum: PI. 'Nuff said.
• Kitchen Nightmares: Shouldn't this be on the Food Network where I can safely ignore it?
• Nashville: Do I look like a 13-year-old girl without access to to MTV to you?
• The Next Great American Band: Well, I guess having bands of actual musicians is an improvement over the obnoxious oversinging contest that is American Idol, but it's still reality TV, and most likely music I would hate anyway. So, no.
• Canterbury's Law: Yet Another Lawyer Show (YALS). People watching TV outside of this country must think we're all doctors, lawyers, cops, or budding singers.
• New Amsterdam: Yet Another Immortal-Who-Solves-Crimes Show.
• The Return of Jezebel James: Parker Posey, on TV? Interesting. Not interesting enough to watch, but still interesting. It's another Amy Sherman-Palladino show, which means two hours of dialogue packed into an hour. It will be mildly clever, but you will end up hating yourself for watching it.
  
• The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Anything Terminator without James Cameron, in all his pompous glory, is basically pointless.
• Unhitched: Thirtysomething as a comedy. Who would have thought that, twenty years on, that show would be the most influential thing on TV? After Sex in the City, of course.

Before I do The CW, I would like to point out that they canceled Veronica Mars, one of the better-written shows on TV recently, to put on a show about singing strippers. And not even real strippers, but the lame kind that don't actually get all the way naked. Admittedly, a show about singing hookers has some potential (America's Next Singing Whore I might actually watch), but the Pussycat Dolls show sucked, and I didn't even have to watch it to know that. So I'm going to mark any shows on the network down by several points from the get-go. They would have to resurrect Arrested Development to win back my goodwill at this point.

Anyway...

• Aliens in America: A show about a Pakistani Muslim attempting to integrate into American culture could be a truly groundbreaking show about national identity and all that crap, but most likely it will center on easy jokes about strange headgear and McDonald's.
  
• CW Now: Fuck off.
• Gossip Girl: The Veronica Mars connection has me intrigued, but it looks like a fictional version of those awful MTV reality shows where spoiled brats cheat on their boyfriends. It would only be worth watching if they took a page from Heathers and incorporated the occasional ironic murder, and even then I would probably still rather just watch Heathers again.
  
• Life is Wild: 7th Heaven with lions? Bite me, CW.
  
• Online Nation: I said fuck off.
• Reaper: Well, there you go. I might actually watch this.
• Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants: I swear to God, I'm going to hit you.
• Farmer Wants a Wife: Christ, if you would have told me Survivor was going to spawn all this bullshit, I would have spent my youth inventing a time machine so I could go back and smother Mark Burnett in his cradle.

That's it for the networks. Fortunately, we still have cable, and the few remaining good shows that weren't axed by overzealous network executives between heaping helpings of cocaine.

Twice the Size of Texas

Good lord. This has to be one of the most depressing bits of environmental news I've heard in a long time:

In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. [...] The area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean.

The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas.

When we moved into our house last November, Jana discovered that Portland participates in a "Master Recycler" Program, where they collect all the plastic that curbside recycling can't (or won't) take. So we started socking it away in the garage. Currently, we're weeks away from the next event, and we have eight good-sized boxes full of the stuff. Stuff that we would normally have to throw away.

Now multiply that amount by about 110 million (the number of households in the US, give or take), and ponder that probably 1% have access to programs like this (and, I would imagine, a fraction of that percentage actually uses the program). The rest of it has to go to the landfill. Or, I guess, into the ocean.

Most people don't think about where their trash goes. I certainly try not to, although I try my damnedest to minimize what I do consume. Still, I'm no angel, and I love shiny gadgets (which come in plastic packages, of course) as much as the next American. But the majority of the plastic we create, use, and throw away doesn't go away. Not on any time scale humans can appreciate.

Plastic is cheap and convenient. I get that. But we're thinking in the short term here, and we can only dodge the bullet for so long.

What can be done? I would venture this: Nothing. Not that we shouldn't try. But, damn, when you have huge islands of plastic floating in the Pacific, and you see people pitch the crap out of car windows without a second thought, you have to wonder.

Nihilistic? Absolutely. But how can you read this sort of thing and not be?

A little Carlin (although that video will probably be gone before anyone reads this) to brighten up an otherwise abysmally depressing post:

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole.

Good Morning, Pingpong

I just wanted to welcome Seth Rogan's (fake) adopted baby Pingpong Applesauce Rogen into the world. Mostly because the name makes me laugh every time I read it.

Oh, and the same goes for Matt & Kelly Sue's new (totally real) baby, Henry. Welcome, little man.