SNL Reruns on E

Comedy Central, where art thou? I spoke about how much I love Mad TV a few months ago (and by love, I mean Mad TV fucking sucks). As you probably know, E! acquired the rights to SNL reruns, and Mad TV was CC’s answer. Now, I have no problem changing the channel from 61 to 34 to see the same skits I’ve seen 28 times already and will continue to laugh at for at least 13 times more. The thing is, I’m expecting my SNL to have Will Ferrell, Tim Meadows, Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Norm McDonald, and the immortal Phil Hartman. If there’s some crossover, and I get a little bit of Horatio Sanz, Darrell Hammond or Chris Parnell, I’ll still watch because they have their moments and are very much capable of making me laugh.

What the fuck, Jimmy Fallon does a decent Weekend Update too.

Now, the problem is, I’m not seeing Will Ferrell, Tim Meadows, Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Norm McDonald, and the immortal Phil Hartman. I’m seeing Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers, and a bunch of other guys whom I don’t know who the hell are. Now, once again, Fey is a great writer, Rudolph has her moments, Poehler might be the funniest female cast member I’ve seen, if only because I wasn’t around to really enjoy Gilda Radner, Myers is a Boston guy, and Keenan Thompson does a good Bill Cosby. My point is, there have been almost 30 seasons of Saturday Night Live. Why am I restricted to seeing the last two over and over again?

Mid 00’s SNL has been like the Red Sox of 2003. No closer. A bunch of overachievers doing something special until the end, when they just can’t finish it off and some great work has been ruined. After a while, the shows become unwatchable. Now the show is more like the 04 Red Sox. The people who had no business watching it 4 years ago became its biggest fans, and while the show is widely successful, it has underachieved through quite a bit of its season.

I hope the exit of Jimmy Fallon will cause the show to improve somewhat. There are only three instances that come to mind immediately when someone made someone else crack up during a skit. Chris Farley in the original Matt Foley skit (although Spade was able to hold it together), Will Ferrell and Tim Meadows in a lost baby skit that fell apart (there appeared to be no semblance of a relation to the script by the end of the scene), and Ferrell in the hottub with Rachel Dratch and Drew Barrymore. You know who else was in that skit? Jimmy Fallon.

Have you seen an episode from the past two seasons? Every single episode I can almost guarantee you Fallon will lose it even though he only appears in one or two skits a night. Because he goes off, the audience begins to laugh at him and throw off the other actors’ timing, thus causing them to self destruct too. I admit, it’s funny. But it happens in almost every skit with the asshole.

I’m no legit actor. I appeared in a few musicals and plays, usually stealing my performances and mannerisms from Tron Bonne, Futurama, or both. But I can see how a real actor works. I’ve seen footage of Michael Richards preparing for roles and ready to jam a fork in Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’s eyes when she flubs a line. This man is a disciplined actor. Will Ferrell was a disciplined actor. He could work a crowd and give off an air of both innocence and obnoxiousness. Dana Carvey is a comedic genius. He was literally a master of disguise, one of the best impersonators in TV history.

This cast, there’s no one who impresses me. There are a few funny people, like Poehler, but there’s no one who can make a skit that much more, someone who can make a sketch rise from the dead when the writers were unable to make it work. Maybe this is what fans of the Belushi-Aykroyd-Martin years said about the Murphy-Short-Piscipo years, and the Murphy-Short-Piscipo fans said about the Farley-Hartman-Sandler years, and the Farley-Hartman-Sandler people said about the Ferrell-Kattan-Oteri years.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

I have to rant about how much I hate pop music, but I’ve said too much today.

What’s there to do in Philly?

While I’m going to be thinking about the city of Philadelphia and their football team for the next two weeks, I saw a commercial for Philadelphia Cream Cheese that got me thinking, perhaps a bit too much. The commercial was a cute woman dressed like an angel and in, appropriately enough, heaven. She’s making a bagel, but something’s missing. Behold, there’s a tub of Philadelphia Cream Cheese floating on one of the clouds. She takes it, spreads it on her bagel, eats the bagel, and enjoys it, presumably much more than she would have if she didn’t have Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

1. Isn’t it depressing that an attractive young woman is in heaven in the first place? That’s not something that I look for in my commercials. I know it’s a fact of life, but why don’t you show some dead puppies and kittens while you’re at it?

2. Assuming there is a heaven/afterlife, when you go to heaven and become an angel, do you assume the form of what you looked like at the moment of your death? Or are you cleaned up a little bit, so homicide victims are a little more presentable?

3. If the above answer is false, then do you get to choose what age you are when you’re in heaven? For example, there are plenty of people who died of natural causes. Are they really old angels, or can they revert to a younger form? I would assume the former, but when Anakin appeared at the end of Return of the Jedi in ghost form, he didn’t look much like the maskless Darth Vader.

4. Elves have immortality right? I mean, they aren’t invulnerable to being killed or whatever, but they don’t die of old age. Does an elf choose when they stop growing? Do they age exponentially slower? Do they just stop aging at a certain year? I would choose the first option, and I would hope others would too. I’d hate to see an old Deedlit from Lodoss War. She was hot the way she was. And while she’s not my personal cup of tea, a lot of guys liked Liv Tyler in LOTR… I hope she doesn’t look like her father when gets older.

Snow more, Mr Nice Guy

I opened my door and the snow obstructs half of it. At around 8 Pm last night, I measured about 8 inches with a ruler. At 10 PM, I wandered out and took a stroll to Walgreens for some candy. Snow is awesome when you know you don’t have to drive in it. My guess this morning is that the snow is at least 2 1/2 feet. I have no intention of leaving the house today. There’s gonna be two good games on today. Why should I?

I’m getting really fucking tired of this Mientkiewicz story. For anyone who’s complaining, let me remind you of something. THE RED SOX JUST WON THE MOTHERFUCKING WORLD SERIES FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 86 YEARS. PEOPLE WENT ENTIRE LIFETIMES WITHOUT SEEING THAT. So stop complaining about some stupid ball that wouldn’t have any significance if Shaugnessy didn’t do a story on it. The national opinion from the skeptics was that we’d just start complaining again after we won. I don’t want to be like this. I want to be like a late 90s Rangers fan. We won… just shut up for a while. And yet all I hear about is “Mien-thief-wicz!” “Ugly McLongName should give the ball back!” “Pedro took the money and ran!” Just shut the fuck up. I know you think Curt Schilling and David Ortiz singlehandedly won games 4, 5, 6, 7 of the ALCS and 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the World Series, but it was a team victory. Manny Ramirez is just as important as Gabe Kapler. Derek Lowe is just as important as Lenny DiNardo. I know the stats say otherwise, but that was the thing that separated us from the Yankees, just as the team concept is what separated the Pats from the Raiders, the Rams and the Colts. In four years, when the championship stigma wears off, then you can complain about it. But since I was braindead after game 3 of the ALCS, I didn’t get to enjoy the win when it happened, so let me enjoy this for a while.

I think I’m gonna email that to BostonDirtDogs.com. I think it’s a good website, with good pictures, but they’ve been hammering Dougie for weeks now. On second thought, maybe the fact that WEEI hasn’t mentioned the story at all since early last week means I am correct in assuming it is one of the biggest non-stories around, and they like to complain about everything. They also don’t consider BDD to be a reliable website (usually referring to them as kids in their mom’s basement). Maybe I’ll spare them my vitriol.

I’m not sure if I should play La Pucelle until the game comes on. RPGS and power outage possibilities don’t mix, although La Pucelle lets you save after every battle… hmm…

Well, that settles it.

My life is infinitely more interesting when I’m in Boston but not at school. I started classes on Tuesday, and I’m relatively satisfied with them. I’ve got kind of a wide range of professors. My history of music teacher is kind of like James Lipton, although a little less eccentric. My integrated studies prof is a big time hippie. I hate these classes. I hate philosophy and poetry, and this class is all about that, apparently. I’ll talk about this more later. My public speaking teacher’s a cool dude. He’s from Boston, and if you were to just listen, he sounds like Adam Sandler. He knows everyone and everything in New England. He knows Coach Funk, he knows everyone in the class’s home towns and areas of interest, and he’s had jobs in about every single profession outside of proctology. My requisite Russian/eastern European teacher is teaching Math, which really sucks because I don’t understand a thing she says. My english teacher is pretty cool, although she seems like she might be one of those poetry types with the beret and the drum and coffee houses and the like. In case you don’t know, I hate poetry. I don’t mind cute little limericks, or anything else that rhymes for that matter, but a bunch of hipsters talking about how… I don’t know… I never understand what the fuck they’re talking about. That’s why I’m saying “I Hate Poetry” and not “Poetry Sucks”, because I’m too shallow to understand what the fuck they’re saying. People tell me Yates is unbelievable, and I’ve read Yates, but it’s all gibberish to me. I can never tell what’s going on.

The duck was sitting tranquilly in the pond.
Then, like the power of the raging monsoon
The duck rose, and declared “No!!!”
And the fisherman grew weary
As he knew he couldn’t tell this maelstrom of hate
That it was enough to be loved
And not the one who had forgotten

Every poem I read looks like this, and yet everyone around me can interpret it and accurately state what the author meant by it. How the fuck do people consider this shit romantic? Maybe that’s why I don’t have a girlfriend. Maybe it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m poor, unattractive, and live in my football coach’s basement 5 miles away from the school. That must be it.

I started La Pucelle Tactics last night. It’s pretty good. It’s gonna take a while to get used to the battle system, though, if only because the grid is a 3-D view, and pressing up moves you right, pressing right moves you down, pressing down moves you left, and so on, albeit it’s relatively unavoidable since I’m conviniently omitting the word diagonally. The walking-around-town system is pretty neat, though. It’s 2-D and on a single plane, so you move right across town passing doors and people that you can enter and talk to respectively. Fun fun.

We ah duh Nu Yoak Yunkees of futbal.

I’d hate to say I told ya so, so I won’t. If only because I was dead wrong about everything except the Pats winning. No shootout, no dominant Colts O, a 17 point deficit, Roosevelt Colvin being relatively quiet, and Vanderjagt touching the ball twice throughout the entire game.

Either way, victory is sweet. I kinda feel bad about being this happy though. This must be fantastic for those who rooted for the team when they sucked (which is about 37 total years of their 45 year existence). I am the definition of a bandwagon fan. I didn’t give a rats ass about them until 2001. In fact, I claimed I was a Bears fan if only because of the SNL skit and Superbowl shuffle, although in actuality I didn’t know a goddamn thing about football.

So I’m going to enjoy this as much as I can. While I’m sure this isn’t as exciting as the 80s Celtics, I at least have a dynasty of my formative years to tell younguns about.

Of course, we still have to beat Pittsburgh and Atlanta/Philly, so this dynasty talk may be a little premature.

Whatevuh.

Disrespect

I’ve found out that I have no respect for my alarm clock. After going to bed at the early hour of 1 AM, I set my alarm to go off at 10 so I could go to the bookstore and sell off my wares early. Of course, this wasn’t going to happen. I hit the snooze, and five minutes later, I turned it off. I ended up leaving the bed at 11:30.

Poor Jets fans. Poor Jets. This is the autumn of shitty kickers, at least in college, so hopefully Vanderjagt will continue the pro streak. It was good to see Roethlisberger play like Eli Manning. I’m starting to wonder if Pennington is just a tad overrated. He had that miracle season in 02 (including a total dismantling of the Pats, which turned out to be the last time they have lost at home), then came out flat after the injury in 03. Then he struggled through this season and barely made the playoffs even while handing off to the rushing champion (although Herm Edwards certainly didn’t help him much). I dunno… maybe I’m just kicking him when he’s down.
I’m not as worried about tommorrow as I was. Peyton Manning will probably run all over the defense, but at least the Pats have shown that they are capable of making a big stop or forcing a big turnover. Meanwhile, the Patriots have a pretty damn good offense on their own with a QB who doesn’t make stupid mistakes provided he’s not playing in Miami or Washington. The Colts also don’t have a defense that has proven that they can make a big stop or force a big turnover. They have a decent DE, and that’s just about it. This combined with the assumption that a poor field will hurt a pass rush. My prediction? Pain.

Seriously, though? Ummm… 34-33 Pats, with the difference being a missed or blocked extra point, the former by Vanderjagt (obviously) or the latter by Rosie Colvin. I know it won’t happen, but if it does, I look like a genius.