After the last few nights when Katie fell asleep like a log, tonight's bedtime was more adventuresome. On the fifth or so intervention, I went into her room to find out what was wrong and was told quite earnestly that "Jet take rocket soup." Now, daisy_knotwise had been explaining to Katie that she was hearing jets from O'Hare. But what this had to do with rocket soup (jet fuel maybe?) was a mystery to me.

Until Gretchen explained that there's a character named Rocket in Little Einstein's and that they'd brought him soup on a jet.

Right. "Jet take Rocket soup."

Well, that makes more sense.

I hadn't seen any of Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show until just now. It was on in the background while I was following the Cards / Dodgers game on ESPN GameCast.

And now I think I can skip it from now on. :)

The Heroes season finale was last night. And despite Katie and Julie's best efforts, we did manage to watch it with a bit of help from our DVR. All this means that I'm able to make some serious spoilerish comments.
( Spoilers within... )

After one of our friends mentioned that Aardman Animations had a series of stop-motion animated stories about "Shaun the Sheep", I went hunting on the web and then on TV Guide On Screen to discover that the Disney Channel is showing these a couple of times a day as bumpers. So I set up the DVR to start recording them.

Katie loves them. Katie loves them a whole lot. When one finishes, she smiles, looks up, and says "Again!" Perhaps we should work on "Again, please!"

daisy_knotwise has observed that the big problem with these is that each one is about five minutes long. A recorded Tigger & Pooh is 25 minutes long, which is long enough for her to take a shower. Shaun the Sheep would require a level of precision bathing that the Gilbreth family would be proud of.

The really bad thing is that the title theme is catchy. Annoyingly catchy. And it gets into your head. And it won't get out. (I'd link to it, but the links don't appear to work in the U.S.)

Yes, not so much an earworm. More of an earsheep.

Although Katie is still quite happy watching Winnie the Pooh in his various incarnations, she has now discovered Wallace and Gromit. This could be dangerous...

Ok, I thought they'd made this up for an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

I was wrong.

For those Scrubs fans who may not have seen the news, the series returns tomorrow night at 8 PM CST on ABC with back-to-back episodes. That'll be the case for two weeks, then it'll be on regularly at 8:30 PM CST.

I must reset the DVR...

If you're an old Quantum Leap fan, you may remember how NBC inserted the card in the final episode indicating that Sam never returned home in their final flipping of the bird to the fans of the series. QL had been bought by a since-departed group of NBC executives; their replacements never liked the show and went out of their way to make sure it would have low enough ratings to be killed.

Flash-forward to recent years, where we have yet another group of NBC executives who don't like Scrubs, but are afraid to cancel it, because the folks who originally bought it are now at ABC and would be delighted to pick it up. God forbid they should make it successful. So instead, the NBC execs mistreat the series for the balance of its run.

This season was supposed to be the last for Scrubs. When the writers' strike was imminent, NBC asked the creators of the series to pen a quick finale where Eliot and JD would kiss at the end. They said no way.

NBC didn't order additional episodes to let them finish the storylines. The Scrubs folks are writing them and filming them anyway. Maybe they'll show up on ABC next year. Maybe they'll go direct to DVD. I'm sure I'll see them eventually.

But then there's the fiasco that NBC aired last night as the "finale". This involves spoilers, of course.
( And the spoilers are in here... )

Katie appears to have thrown off whatever digestive bug she had. This seems to have produced a hopefully short bout of kiddie constipation again, but daisy_knotwise is feeding her fruit and hoping that things move normally again shortly.

I spent a bit of time on New Year's Day down in the basement counting the inventory. The good news is that next year's count should take a good bit less time once I get rid of the tapes.

And tonight, I watched David Letterman's return to the air, complete with actual writers. Yay! Leno is on the DVR for later review. I flipped over during a commercial and it looks like a Q & A session with the audience substituted for a good bit of the monologue.

Letterman, on the other hand, had Robin Williams as a guest which usually guarantees that I'll hurt myself laughing. This included a clip from his USO visit to Iraq where he was rather non-plussed as the entire audience turned its back to him as the bugle played and the flag was lowered. As an Air Force brat, I got a good chuckle out of that, remembering how Scott AFB would stop moving as the flag in front of the MAC building was lowered each day.

And yesterday, I wrote and posted a new song, cleverly botching the cut tag so that all of the lyrics were invisible. *sigh* Proofreading is my friend.

We've been watching too much HGTV around here lately. Today's pithy comment from daisy_knotwise:

"I know this will never happen, but I'd love to see one of the houses on Designed to Sell show up on House Hunters so that the people there could say 'We didn't buy house number 2 because we didn't like the red wall and some damned fool painted the fireplace brick.'"

Spoiling nothing at all, I'm greatly amused to see that HRG has the same Samsung phone that I do (plus or minus it being a version for a different carrier), while Claire has the same phone in red. I must find my old horn-rimmed glasses... :)

Here's another post from the former Tonight Show staffer as he reminiscences about his time with the show.

It was late, SportsCenter wasn't on due to an excess of college football, and daisy_knotwise and I were looking for some brain candy on the TV Guide when I spotted 1 vs. 100, which I'd never actually seen a full episode of, and suggested that we watch that. It's actually fairly interesting, although it relies on having contestants who seem to have escaped from Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

The game has a series of multiple choice questions with three possible answers. If you answer a question correctly, you stay in the game, whether you're a member of the "Mob", which starts with 100 members, or the singular contestant. The contestant wins money for each member of the Mob that they eliminate and is allowed to leave with the money they've won at various points in the game. If the contestant is the last person standing, they win $1 million. If the contestant misses a question, the remaining members of the Mob split the accumulated prize money. Mob members who answer all questions correctly are retained to the next game and the Mob is recharged to 100 with new players.

The contestant gets three "helps". They can "Trust the Mob" and accept the consensus answer. They can "Poll the Mob" and see how many Mob members picked a particular answer. They can "Ask the Mob" in which case one member with the correct answer and one member with the incorrect answer will be picked randomly and the contestant can ask them why they picked that answer. (The Mob answers are usually pretty uninformative, which is somehow not surprising, since they're playing for the same pool of money.)

Of the questions we saw in the two games, there was only one that I couldn't immediately answer and -- as it happened -- I picked the right answer, although I would have definitely asked for help on it. (Which of these three band members was not married to Heather Lockyear? Ack! Not my cuppa...)

The first game ended with 25 Mob members left standing; the second with only 7. However, the 7 still there were pretty good, including professional poker player Annie Duke. There were a number of other celebrities in the Mob, including David Eckstein, Wink Martindale, and Bob Eubanks.

My suspicion is that the folks who select the contestants make sure to select the brighter ones into the Mob. I didn't see the Mob make any money, but there may be some lovely parting gifts I suppose. :)

And it's an interesting game.

Here are more reminiscences from the former Tonight Show staffer that I linked to earlier.

Let's start by saying that I found this to be a very solid episode. Then let's dive into the spoilers.
( Spoilers in here. Got it? )

I'd made plans to work from home today, because I had a doctor's appointment at noon. This turned out to be just as well, because I'm still having (unrelated) intestinal upset. I had a burger again for lunch, but dinner's going to be another round of soup and rolls. Better part of valor and all that...

Music and Lyrics was not -- as daisy_knotwise observed -- "Laugh out loud funny", but it was fun to watch. And Hugh Grant's character kept reminding me of unclechristo. I think it was the hair and eyes. The writers obviously had a lot of affection for 80s pop music and videos.

Tonight, we'll be watching How I Met Your Mother's season finale (which might be the series finale -- apparently, there's danger of cancellation due to low ratings), followed by the next to last episode of Heroes for the season.

daisy_knotwise and I watched the first two episodes of this NBC series tonight. Our first thought? "We could do that." Of course, we've been doing improv comedy for over 20 years, so if we're given any sort of survivable script to fall into, we'll probably succeed -- at least in our own minds! :)

The gag here is that everyone else has the script for the bit except for the guest actor who needs to figure out what he or she is doing. And, of course, you're greeted on your entrance with "Thank God you're here!"

There was one completely non-survivable script that was given to Monique. She was in a situation where there was no possibility that any answer she would give would be correct. For example, she was the co-host on a TV game show and was told to introduce the three contestants. Now, there was no reason that she needed to be contradicted, as it was completely immaterial as to whether they were Heather, Bob, and Sue or Jane, Dick, and Spot, but contradicted she was. It was poor sport and I suspect was the reason she was declared the ultimate winner for the night.

The other nine sketches (four solo sketches and one group sketch per show) were survivable and most of the guests did pretty well. However, much like the Game Show Network commercial where the viewers are shouting "Marsupial!" at the screen, when Dave Foley is the show's judge and you are playing Miss Caicos and are asked who your dream date would be, the correct answer is always "Dave Foley". Not Chewbacca. *sigh*

I'm going to put this behind a cut tag, just because...
( It's pretty disgusting, actually. )

I realized tonight that most episodes of Medium are missing the scene at the end where the criminal is being hauled off to jail while complaining "And I would have gotten away with it, if not for that meddling psychic!"

Ok, I know that many of you have given up watching ER. But, for those of you who still do, wasn't that the most amazing collection of cliffhangers tonight? You'd think it was the end of the season and there were tricky contract negotiations coming up.

Update: Spoilers in comments...

catalana is back from Germany and will be listening to the 11 out of 16 mixes that I posted for her. Katie is fussing, apparently because she wants to be held (which shouldn't be a great surprise), and daisy_knotwise and I have seen the first five episodes of Heroes which I recorded some time back and -- unfortunately! -- the last two minutes of last night's episode.

The nice thing about being a Legion of Super-Heroes fan watching this series is nicknaming the characters. I mean, there's Duplicate Boy, Saturn Lad, Flight-Ring Kid, Dream Boy...

And what I can't cover there, I can mostly get from the X-Men: Professor X, Wolverine (who appears to be split between a couple of characters), the Vanisher...

Of course, the way that Marvel's been treating the Professor lately, I'm not sure if he's not supposed to be the guy in the glasses. But call me in another half-dozen episodes.

And skip the spoilers, ok? :)

This show is in its second season now and continues to be as much fun as any sitcom that I've seen in recent years. Along with the writers' entertaining insistence on putting the act breaks where the story calls for, as opposed to where the commercials are supposed to fall, the ensemble is good, the writing is sharp, and the sense of humor is just demented.

Take, for example, this week's episode:
( Mild spoilers inside )

By way of Mark Evanier, these Jay Ward commercials starring Quisp and Quake.

Now, you've got to understand that I have no real interest in South Park -- it's just not my thing. But there's been a bit of a fuss going on since Isaac Hayes announced that he was quitting the show, because of the way that it made fun of religion. I understand that Hayes' character, Chef, once punched out Jesus in a boxing match on the show, which apparently was not a problem for him. Making fun of Scientology, however, was beyond the pale.

Rumor has it that Tom Cruise pressured Comedy Central's parent, Viacom, to pull the scheduled rerun of the Scientology episode, which the network did. The response from the creators of South Park is here.

You'll enjoy it. I did.

According to TV Guide On Screen, tonight's second episode of Scrubs (8:30 PM CT) is a rerun of an episode that I missed last year. However, daisy_knotwise saw it and tells me that it was hilarious. It seems that the second act involves J.D. imagining his life as a situation comedy.

I'll be looking forward to finally seeing it.