Plus Some Announcements

Time for some some social housekeeping, in order to avoid becoming totally selfish and reclusive instead of maybe 95% so.

1. I'm sure you know Chris Muir's sister passed away. You know that because you went to look at Day by Day and it wasn't there. Well, it's back, so resume your daily visits.

2. Richard over at It Baffles Science! is a pretty weird guy, but then so was Archimedes. You should read his blog once in a while. Today would be a good time to start. It appears that he has spawned. Congratulations, Richard! Say a prayer for his new daughter, everybody.

It's nice to be able to mention a hopeful beginning in this context. But:

3. Russ Emerson got the shaft from his employer. I have been meaning to blog this since Friday, when I found out about it. You never blog anything on Friday, if you want people to see it. Hillary Clinton told me that. It sort of looks like Russ has idiopathic hydrocephalus ("idiopathic" is doctorspeak for "We are too stupid to figure out what caused it"), and he has racked up a lot of medical bills. A bean counter in his company's hierararchy delayed getting him and others like him insured, and the VA has decided his problem isn't service-related, so he suddenly has a big debt to deal with. And he has a PayPal button. Which you can find at this link. I'm not mentioning this out of the goodness of my heart. I plan to hit him up for a commission. What? What's wrong with that? Hey, where are you going?

Self-righteous bastards.

To get back to me and my important life, I'm mildly encouraged today because it looks like the series Cavemen is getting a following. The ratings are okay, and it's actually a hit among male viewers. The show seems to get better every week, although that is not surprising, since A) the people behind it are very talented, and B) PC critics forced ABC to redo the pilot and revamp the show over the summer.

I know you're going to argue with me about the quality of the talent. Let's look at what we have. 1. Joe Lawson, who wrote the GEICO ads. He's good. No way around it. If you don't think "It's my mother. I'll put it on speakerphone" is funny, you are just plain stupid. 2. Producer from Office Space. 3. Nick Kroll in the cleverly named role of Nick; this guy has a dream character to play, and he's an exceptional comic actor. Had a career before the show, and will have one afterward. Does one-man shows. This guy is no Curt McNobody. None of these people suck as bad as the most talented person involved with The Half-Hour News Hour.

The show's big problems, apart from the thin concept, are the bad pilot and the conspiracy of the PC critics. Last week's show was a hoot, but obscure, lowly newspaper critics who aren't fit to lick Joe Lawson's butt persist in calling the show "dumb." If you've seen anything that came after the pilot, you know "dumb" isn't correct. If anything, the show is too hip and too smart. Stupid people will laugh at Gilligan falling out of a palm tree, but they won't even understand lines like, "What's it like to not like the Beatles?"

One bit of luck: the show is on ABC, which doesn't yank things off the air as fast as the other networks. Also, it's an ABC product. Not just bought by ABC but created and filmed by ABC. So they have a lot of motivation to make it succeed. They'll never distance themselves from it if it tanks. I think I'm right about their desire to make it work, because they're doing lots of PR stuff on the ABC site.

The show will probably be a little incoherent for some time to come, because they've had to make it conform to the standards of a bunch of far-left newspaper kooks who know nothing about comedy. And then there's the problem of coming up with material for a second season. Maybe it won't be as hard as I imagined. It was hard for me, because I was limited to prehistoric stuff. Had I been able to put cavemen in the modern world, it would have opened a lot of creative doors.

Of course, if it does succeed and it helps my book, I will be seen as a successful parasite. Hey, I can't be any worse than an insurance company.