Viva Laughlin

Viva Laughlin is an American version of a British show (Viva Blackpool) about the young upstart casino owner going up against the established casino mogul with a murder mystery thrown in. Being a British show gives it about 50/50 odds of success, since British imports have split evenly between being long running hits (The Office, Sanford & Son (née Steptoe & Son), American Idol (née Pop Idol)) and the really gigantic stinkers (Coupling, First Years (née This Life), Life is Wild).

It's got Hugh Jackman in it, which increases its odds, but it's also got Melanie Griffith, which decreases its odds by a slightly greater amount. So its odds are still about even until you learn it's a musical. To my knowledge, there has never been a successful TV musical, so you can just about count it out right there.

Don't get me wrong. I'm about the world's biggest proponent of the singing and the dancing and the musical theatre. But, I don't have a lot of hopes for someone to do a musical on the small screen successfully.

All of my worst fears were confirmed when I watched the pilot. It's not a musical like singing and dancing production numbers. It's only a musical in the sense that occasionally a song will play, and a character will sing along to it. Let me clarify. A song will play in its actual recorded version (Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", for example), and a character will sing the same words along with the recorded track (so you hear both him and Mick). It's almost as if CBS bought a musical, but then was too embarassed to actually show a musical, so came up with ways to shield the American public from all that pesky singing.

If CBS took out all of the music, though, what's left would be still unwatchable. It's easily in contention for the worst new show for this fall season. About the only thing the show gets right is the feeling one gets from the actual city of Laughlin. Laughlin, Nevada is Las Vegas's ugly stepsister, where you get all of the desperation and seediness of Vegas without any of the fun or character. It's decidedly second-rate, and you always get the feeling, no matter what you're doing, that it would have been better in Vegas. This show recreates this feeling by being a decidedly second-rate show. The acting, the dialogue, the sets, the costumes and everything seem like low-budget rejects from other, better shows which provides a good parallel to the city of Laughlin. However, that's not a reason to watch this show. There is no reason to watch this show.

Samantha Who

Samantha Who (formerly known as Samantha Be Good, formerly known before that as Sam I Am) is the new comedy with Christina Applegate as someone who got bonked on the head, develops amnesia, and then slowly discovers that the person she used to be is not really the person she'd like to be.

I never really watched Married With Children, so I don't have any previous experience with Ms. Applegate, good or bad. I find her to be kind of the right balance between cute and annoying in this show, and the show itself is almost funny. I really like Jean Smart, also, no matter what she's in. I'm not sure how long they can drag out the amnesia thing though, because eventually she either recovers, learns everything about herself, or forges a new life and grows to accept it. There eventually has to be an end to the finding her in embarrassing comedic situations caused by her not remembering some crucial element from her past.

Also, I don't understand why developing amnesia after a bonk on the head is such a problem. I learned from Gilligan's Island that it's easily cured by applying another bonk to the head.

Women's Murder Club

I kept seeing this one come up on the To-Do List on the TiVo and thought, "Oh man, I gotta watch this?" But, rules are rules, so I dutifully recorded it just to see if it was any good.

It's not.

It seems like with a title like Women's Murder Club you'd have a club of women that commit murders. Or maybe a club that murders women. Either would be more exciting than what it actually is, which is a club of women who solve murders. The club is comprised of a medical examiner, a DA, a cop, and a reporter. They solve murders and talk about boys. A lot. It's apparently based on a book.

The pilot had one of the weirder cold opens of any pilot this season. The woman cop is checking her voice mail, trying to figure out where the reporter is that she was supposed to meet when the reporter falls from the sky and crushes the car next to her. That was pretty cool, actually.

The rest of the pilot was just unbearable, though, because the hens in the club really did spend more time talking about boys then they did actually solving murders. Also, the DA lady's short white boy hair was just really repulsive.

Life is Wild

Life is Wild is about a woman and her kids marrying a man and his kids and then the whole family moving to South Africa so the man can be a vet at a game preserve run by his dead previous wife's estranged father. It's the most common premise around.

The show felt more like an ABC Family type show than an actual network show. It had the same sort of wooden acting and stock footage.

One of my pet peeves is poorly written little kid dialogue. Anybody who's spent any time at all around kids could easily tell the difference between what a kid would actually say and what some writer who's never been around kids would think they would say. Oddly, it usually manifests itself as dumbing down of the kids. I very rarely see kid dialogue where I think "No way would a kid of that age string together that kind of complex sentence structure and raise that sort of insight into the issue at hand." However, I constantly see kids on TV or movies that make me think, "why is that kid retarded?"

Anyway, this show has that problem.

Pushing Daisies

For most people, it seems like it would be kind of hard to know what to make of Pushing Daisies. It's brightly colored (almost to the point of garish), there's some sort of supernatural or magical element, the sets are almost cartoony. I watched Bryan Fuller's other series Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, so I don't think this is too much of a stretch although it certainly is farther out there than either one of these.

It's got a lot going for it. There's Jim Dale. Kristin Chenoweth is in it (although the crocheted dress she wore in the pilot is hideous). Ellen Greene is in it. There are supposed to be some semi-frequent musical numbers. And, the pie shop is named The Pie Hole. That's brilliant.

However, there's one big problem with this show that keeps me from watching it. Ned brings Chuck back to life, which means that the slightest touch from him kills her. Dead. Forever. But Chuck and Ned seem to spend way too much time in way too close of proximity, taking unnecessary risks. They'll sit next to each other, sit in a booth across from each other, work in the same kitchen together. It makes me physically uncomfortable to watch.

If I'm holding my phone in my hand and walk into a bathroom where the toilet lid is up, I start to freak out because I'm sure that the phone will somehow slip out of my hand and fly across the room straight into the toilet. I have to move my other hand over and hold my phone in both hands to start to feel secure again. This is the same feeling I get watching this show.

Carpoolers

I absolutely loved the short-lived Sons & Daughters, so I'm really glad to see Fred Goss working again in Carpoolers. He's playing pretty much the exact same character, so that helps me like the show as well.

Another plus is that the show's created by Bruce McCulloch, so other Kids in the Hall will be present hopefully. Also, I think Fred Goss lived in three different houses in the first three episodes, so that helps keep it fun.

All in all, this show is silly more than it is funny, so if it were solely up to me I might not commit to it. However, Becki really likes it, so we keep watching.

Cavemen

Much has been already been written about Cavemen, from better writers than me. In case you don't know, this is the show based on the successful series of GEICO ads with the cavemen living among our time. It seemed like such a no-brainer, given the success of Mr. Whipple's World in the 70s, and the more recent successes of Noid Patrol and Where's the Beef Now?.

This was a very early candidate for worst show of fall 2007, but I'm pleased to report that the powers that be have managed to make a show that's actually not the worst of the year. (Big Shots, I'm looking in your direction...). It's not good, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. It pretty successfully sets a tone not at all unlike other comedies where a particular class of people, normally looked down upon, have to live among those who normally do the down-looking. Its closest analog is The Munsters, but I think it has just the slightest hint of Jeffersons.

It has a couple of things going for it. Nick Swardson was hilarious in the first episode, and the character of Nick is pretty funny. However, I don't understand why, with the bigger budgets that a series allows, the makeup's worse than the commercials.

Aliens in America

Aliens in America gets points from me for being a half hour sitcom, yet foregoing a laugh track. That's become more common recently, but is yet still too rare. It also has Amy Pietz, who I've liked in other things. But, the rest of the show just didn't click for me, so I'm not watching it.

Moonlight

Moonlight is about a vampire detective. Genius. Somebody somewhere realized people like detective shows, and they like vampire shows. It was an idea whose time had come.

Too bad it's not any good. I liked the reference to Hearst College, and I love it when a show uses really old stock footage, like the night shot of downtown Los Angeles showing the First Interstate Bank Building with its big sign on top (which hasn't been there since 1998).

The female lead is terrible. Just stunningly unwatchable. Even if the rest of this show was good, I would not watch it for that reason alone.

Big Shots

Big Shots has been often referred to as Sex in the City for men. Well, I didn't like that show, and thought there was probably a pretty good chance I wouldn't like this one either. Sure enough, less than two minutes in, I said out loud to everyone and no one in particular, "I hate this show."

I don't even want to write any more about it except to say that I loved Joshua Malina on Sports Night, but if this show stays on much longer he will be dead to me. Also, one of my pet peeves is people being pronounced dead too quickly on TV shows, without proper resuscitation efforts. This show had someone getting knocked over by a golf cart, someone else saying "Call 911!", and then another person just kind of leaning over the victim and saying, "You can forget 911". And that's it, the guy's dead. No CPR, paramedics, AED, nothing. Yes, I know it was important to move the story along quickly at that point, but come on, writers. What's wrong with knocking the guy over, then cutting to the country club the next day: "He died?" "Yes, can you believe it?" "Hit by a golf cart causing a sudden heart attack, wow!", etc. Doing it the way you did takes even slightly intelligent people out of the story.

Oh, and the one slightly redeeming thing about the pilot is the frequent use of the phrase "tranny hooker", which is always funny, even on a crap show like this.

Dirty Sexy Money

The premise of Dirty Sexy Money is not one that would normally interest me. Spoiled rich people doing spoiled rich things. But, as with Gossip Girl, there's something else to this show.

For starters, it's got Peter Krause and Donald Sutherland. I loved Sports Night and Six Feet Under, so I'll give Peter Krause a chance in anything. And Donald Sutherland's just one of my favorite actors ever, so I'll probably watch him no matter what. If there was a series in development for next fall called White Pages in which Donald Sutherland read from the phone directories of major metropolitan areas, I would watch that too.

The characters are not all that likable, which is to be expected since they're spoiled and rich. But they strike the right balance of being unlikable enough that it's fun to hate them without being so unlikeable as to be repulsive. There's a little bit of a mystery thrown in, and at this point it's not entirely clear if Donald Sutherland's a good or bad guy. I'm really rooting for him to be good, because at this point, he's definitely the most likable person in the whole family, and it would be a shame for the show to lose that.

The pilot suffered a little from making already over the top characters even more over the top so that the audience could pick up quickly on the tone of the show. I'm sure that will smooth out over time, though. One of the best parts of the pilot is that it includes my new favorite phrase of fall TV 2008, "tranny hooker".

Life

The premise of Life is that a cop gets framed for a murder he didn't commit and then spends 5 years in prison until new evidence exonerates him. Then, a large settlement with the city also gets him his job back, and he solves crimes with some sort of new compassion for the criminals and some intuition he picked up in the joint.

This show seems to be targeting House, in that they both feature a main character who's fairly unlikeable and says completely inappropriate things. The things House says are actually funny, though. This guy's just dull. I can't tell if it's the writing, or bad acting, but the lead didn't seem watchable at all. I think it's something about his fairly high pitched voice.

The pilot was really annoying because they wanted to beat you over the head with the idea that everything's changed so much since this dude went to prison. So, we were treated with bits of dialog like:

phone rings
"Aren't you going to get that"
"Oh, the phone in my pocket? It's so small I forget it's there"

or...
"He sent an IM to the kid saying..."
"What's an IM?"

or...
"Can I take your picture?"
"How? That's a phone."
"It's got a camera on it. Where've you been?"

or...
speakerphone rings in car; car picks up
"How am I talking to you?"

Alright, we understand. He went to prison; the world went on without him. At this point it's like Unfrozen Caveman Detective. "Your modern devices frighten and confuse me." Tune in next week when we see the main character work on his Rubik's Cube and get completely flummoxed by a Starbucks.

The one good thing about this show is it has Adam Arkin in it, so I'll probably watch it once more, but it's long term prospects don't look good for me.

Private Practice

I didn't watch Private Practice. It's a spinoff of Grey's Anatomy, which I'm already not watching since I previously determined that the only point of the show was to demonstrate how many of the characters could have sex with how many of the other characters and in which combinations. Since Private Practice spins off of Grey's, it carries Grey's taint with it, which means it's exempt from my "must watch every new show" rule.

Bionic Woman

When I'm recording these fall pilots, I've gotten in the habit of starting all the recordings one minute early and ending one minute late, just to accommodate any network scheduling shenanigans. When I went to watch Bionic Woman, though, I noticed my recording started right at the end of a really pivotal scene where Starbuck, the original Bionic Woman, is getting shot.

I checked online recaps later and determined that I had started probably about a minute into the show, which means that NBC had started it a full two minutes before the scheduled start time. I could write pages on how much this bothers me, but for the sake of brevity I will limit myself to the following:

Networks: I don't care what time you start your show. If you want to start it at 8:57, that's fine. If you want to start at 9:14, that's fine too. I don't care that you don't stick right to the hour or half hour in an attempt to jump on other networks' programming. I have enough TiVos that I can keep up and still catch everything. All I want is for you to tell me what time the show starts and then stick to it. I see all sorts of things in my guide like shows starting at 9:58 and 10:02, and that looks like you're doing the right thing. However, if my guide says 10:02 and you start the show at 10:00, I can't watch it. If the guide says 10:00 and you start the show at 9:57, I can't watch it. I refuse to watch only part of a creative work that's meant to be enjoyed as a whole, especially when there's no good reason why I shouldn't be able to watch the whole thing. Remember, you're the ones who want me to watch your shows. Don't make it harder for me.

So anyway, I was confused through the whole pilot, because I had missed crucial exposition. I'll probably watch the next episode, but if I feel even slightly confused by what I missed, I won't be able to really get into it, and will drop the whole series. So, it all comes down to that first minute.

As far as the review goes, Starbuck wasn't that good in the pilot, and the girl playing Jaime Sommers was pretty wooden. It had Miguel Ferrer in it, though, and he's cool.

Cane

Cane is an hour drama about Jimmy Smits and has family's sugarcane/rum business in Florida. Overall it was one of those things where it may be good, but it just isn't what I'm interested in. So, I dropped it. For future reference, here's the good and bad about Cane:

Good:

• It has Hector Elizondo in it.
• It has Nestor Carbonell (aka Batmanuel) in it.
  

Bad:

• Hector Elizondo's character's dying, so unless the sugarcane has magical healing properties, he's probably not long for the series.
• It has Nestor Carbonell in it, which means we'll have to make do with less of him on Lost.
• The daughter of the rival sugarcane family is played by an otherwise respectable British actress who puts on the worst Southern accent I've heard on TV all year.
  

Reaper

I didn't get to watch the pilot for Reaper. For whatever reason, my local affiliate started the show 15 minutes late. There was no sporting event that day or major news interruption. From what I can tell they just lost their watch or something. Starting 15 minutes late meant that the last 15 minutes wasn't on the TiVo when I went to watch it. If I can't watch the whole thing, there's no point in watching it at all, and if I can't watch the first episode, there's no point in watching the second or third.

If they were rerunning the pilot later that week, or if it had been offered on iTunes or something, I would have had a chance to catch it. But, since I didn't, it doesn't matter if it's the greatest show in the history of TV. I'll never be able to watch it. At this point, I'm really hoping it's a bad show and actively wishing for its demise so that I won't feel like I'm missing anything.

So, congratulations KWBA. Your incompetence lost your network one potential viewer of this show.

Journeyman

Journeyman chronicles the adventures of a man who leaps back in time in order to make right something that's gone wrong in the past. Along the way he's assisted by a dude named Al his former fiancee who was previously thought dead.

I liked Quantum Leap as much as the next guy, so I figured I'd probably like this. The pilot was good, with the right amount of suspense and mystery to keep someone wanting to come back the next week.

The pilot included a really sappy bit where the lead buries his wife's wedding ring under the porch while in the past so that he can dig it up in the present and prove to his wife that he's really travelling in time and not going off the wagon or something. In the scene where he retrieves the ring, music is swelling while he starts to bust up his porch. His wife gasps, "What are you doing?" He responds, "Saving my marriage". This is a fairly typical TV or movie climax up to that point, but then the writers have the wife respond with "Uh, not really", which took me by surprise and made me laugh out loud. Little things like that really go a long way with me, so thanks, Journeyman. I will watch you again.

Big Bang Theory

Big Bang Theory is a very typical laugh track sitcom. It's the other nerd comedy this season. After watching the pilot, I've got to stand up for nerds everywhere and say how insulted I am. The setup for the show is two nerds living together in an apartment discover there's a real live girl living next door to them, and it goes downhill from there. Most of the dialogue is taken verbatim out of some sort of "So You Want To Write A Nerd Comedy?" guidebook with all sorts of random science references thrown in every thirty seconds to remind the audience "See, these guys are nerds! Did you notice yet that they're nerds?"

The commercials for this series kept saying "A new comedy from the creator of Two and a Half Men". I didn't pay close attention to the commercials, but I assume they were saying that as some sort of warning.

Verdict: I hate this show.

Chuck

Chuck is the spy comedy about a guy who somehow gets the government's deepest darkest secrets downloaded straight to his brain, leaving the government to alternately attempt to destroy and protect him.

It's one of two shows this season that feature prominent nerd scenarios (the other being Big Bang Theory), and Chuck is definitely the less insulting of the two.

It's funny enough that I'll definitely watch it again. But what was most notable to me about the pilot was that the female lead (the cute blond CIA agent) had not one, but two extended scenes in her underwear. This indicates to me that the producers are very acutely aware of their target demographic, which does bode well for the long term hopes for the show.

Gossip Girl

Gossip Girl has got a couple of things going against it. One, it's on "The CW", which is bad enough. Two, I can't get a signal from the CW tower where I live, which means I don't get to watch anything on that channel in HD. Three, it's about, and kind of targeted towards, teenagers. I've watched high school shows before (most recently Veronica Mars), but I always have a tough time explaining to my wife why I'm spending so much of my time watching TV shows about underage girls.

That said, I thought the show was really well done. The characters that were supposed to be bad were almost mustache-twirlingly bad, but the characters that were supposed to be likable really genuinely were. The lead girl, Serena Van Der Something was very sympathetic, and I really felt for her and how difficult her (crazy rich) life was.

I was completely caught off guard by this show. I really didn't expect it to be any good at all. I don't know if I'll keep it for good, but I'll definitely move on to a second episode.

Back To You

Back To You is the new Kelsey Grammer sitcom set in a news room. It's a pretty standard laugh track sitcom that displays none of the intelligence that Frasier had.

The supporting characters are pretty well defined, which is to say each of their one notes are pretty clear. You've got the slutty one who'll use her body in any way that will get her ahead, the young nerdy guy clearly over his head running the news department, the old news veteran who's seen it all, the good guy that knows he could do it if he could just get his shot. I don't remember any of their names. I don't know if they have names. I think they're just referred to as their archetypes in the scripts.

The pilot's got a twist involving a bastard child that I figured out about 30 seconds in.

The important thing about a sitcom is not plot twists or character development, but whether or not you actually laugh watching it. Did I laugh at this show? Yeah, a couple of times, but not as much as I would have thought considering how funny it could have been. So, yeah, I'll watch this again, but I'm not holding out much hope.

K-Ville

K-Ville's claim to fame is that it's shot in New Orleans, and set in New Orleans post-Katrina. It's a gritty crime drama about a cop (Anthony Anderson) who practically wears a "I'm a good cop" t-shirt. He stuck with the force while everyone else was abandoning the city. He's a dedicated family man. He's sticking with the city during the rebuilding even though his family wants to split for higher ground. And then, there's his partner, officer Martin Guerre Somersby, who was in prison, but got flooded in Katrina, and then somehow got out and decided to dedicate himself to taking on the persona of a cop so he could make good or something.

I could tell from the pilot that the show had it's heart in the right place, but it suffered from Overreaching Pilot Syndrome, wherein the writers/producers feel compelled to throw way too much into the pilot to try to get people hooked in the first episode. There were something like nine deaths, some sort of shadowy corporate conspiracy to reflood New Orleans, lots of family strife and the Martin Guerre subplot all conveniently solved and handled in about 42 minutes single handedly by the main character. I thought it's entirely possible that future episodes could be better, but although it might be a great show, it just didn't seem like something I'd watch, so I dropped it.

Annual Fall TV Review

I love watching TV. I am not ashamed to say this. I think it's a worthwile pastime. Now, I'm not talking about the indiscriminate time wasting that people usually rail against. I'm talking about the TiVo-assisted selection of quality viewing entertainment, and the enjoyment of said selections.

rant ahead...

The idea of telling a story through a display of moving pictures synchronized with sound is something that's on the whole done better on television than by the movies nowadays. I'm highly disenchanted with the Hollywood studio system of movie making and distribution. Too much effort and money is put in to movies that have to appeal to the lowest common denominator just so they can justify the enormous effort and money that went into them in the first place.

There are good movies being made, but they're hard to find amongst the intelligence-insulting crap. If you're lucky enough to find out about a good movie, there's a whole world of pain in store for you as you try to go see it. If you're going to a theater, you've got to discharge your responsibilities at home (i.e. find a babysitter, feed your cats, etc.), actually drive to the theater (since we're talking about seeing a good movie, you're probably having to drive to the one place in town where it's playing), pay a ridiculous amount of money for you and your spouse/date/party, pay ridiculous prices for refreshments or be forced to smuggle in your own, then watch the movie in a dirty, sticky auditorium with uncomfortable seats from a scratched print with subpar sound (again, because we're watching a good movie, it's probably not at the newest fanciest theater in town).

If you opt to not see the movie at the theater, you've got other things to contend with. DVD's nice and all, but it means either purchasing (which gets expensive), or renting (which means driving somewhere, or using Netflix, which is definitely not on demand). Downloading movies illegally over the internet works well for those without a conscience. New technologies like Amazon Unbox, or Vudu, or Apple TV or things like that all hold promise, but still suffer from fatal flaws.

Contrast that to television: TV's full of crap; don't get me wrong. However, the sheer volume of stuff delivered through the TV means you can still find a lot of quality entertainment once you've filtered through the crap. The overall delivery process couldn't be easier since TV just falls into your house (at very reasonable prices considering the volume of stuff), and the filtering process of separating out the crap is so much easier now that we have TiVo and the extended word of mouth that is the internet.

rant over

Now that I've established that television is a good value proposition for your entertainment choice, I'll explain a little more about my TV watching. I've got a number of things I watch on a regular basis, and a number of other things I might watch more infrequently. However, I'm always on the lookout for something good to watch. I've had shows recommended to me in the past that I just couldn't watch because I wasn't able to see it from the beginning. I've got a compulsive personality that finds it hard to watch something without a continuing story line, and I can't watch something at all if I've missed any part of the story. That means I can't just pick up a TV series two or three seasons in. The few times that I've tried watching a series after it started I was forced to track down the previous episodes first, either in reruns or on DVD.

A few years back, I made a commitment to watch every new series that came on TV, precisely so that if a show was good, I could be there to watch it from the very beginning. Over the years I've refined my technique and made up some rules for this endeavor which I will share with you now.

• I limit myself only to new series on the broadcast networks. There's really great stuff on the other cable channels, but most of the action's still at the broadcast networks. Also, there's just too many of those other channels, and no way to keep up with them all. If something good crops up on one of these other channels, I just assume that I'll either hear about in time, or be able to jump in on the hundreds of reruns.
• I don't include reality series. Again, there's too many of them. I'm not opposed to reality TV; it's just that all the series are (generally) the same in my experience, and I don't have time to add new ones when I don't watch the older ones. (I also reserve the right to skip a spinoff series if I already don't like the series from which it's spinning off.)
• Every show gets up to three chances before I have to make a commitment. I'll record the pilot episode for a show, and if it's just completely retarded, I'll give up on it right away. If I have any interest in it at all, I'll give it a second chance the following week. If after the second airing, I'm still on the fence, I can record it one more week. After three weeks, though, I've either got to give up on the series or commit to watching it until the end.

As you may tell, there's a lot of pressure on the TV series to really come on strong out of the gate. You may also guess that the end of September/beginning of October is a real workout for the TiVo. Summer is spent watching movies to try to clear space on the TiVo for all the new HD pilots coming up in the fall.

So far the system has worked well for me. Every fall I add a couple of series to my watching, and every spring, a couple of series end, keeping my overall TV watching load pretty constant. I've also been pretty confident in the decisions that I've made. I've only once gone back and tried to start over from the beginning watching a series I previously passed up on (24, which I ended up re-dropping halfway through the 3rd season). And, I've only twice given up on series that I had previously committed to (Prison Break and Desperate Housewives, both for reasons of getting stupid and boring).

One of the reasons for starting a blog that I didn't put in my manifesto was to have a place to keep track of this fall's TV series. I intended to write my reviews of each fall series and what I liked or disliked about it, and it made sense to stick it up somewhere.

So, dear imaginary reader, what follows will be my review of each of this fall's new TV series.

Orangutan

Here's a picture of an orangutan, inserted solely for the purpose of giving my profile somewhere to link to:

Disclaimer

I want to save some time and space by taking one post to provide all of the possible disclaimers that I might attach to the posts in this blog. The hope is that if anyone takes objection to anything I write, I can just point them here and say "well, you were warned".

So, here are all the things a reader needs to keep in mind when reading any post on this blog:

• I will not provide any guarantee that everything I write is true. I will not even guarantee that most of what I write is true. If you really pin me down, I might be willing to commit to standing behind 51% of what I write here, but no more. Even if something I write is true factually, I won't guarantee that my writing represents my true feelings on the matter, either now or in the future.
• This writing does not always represent my best efforts. It may not even represent something as good as a lazy, slip-shod effort.
• I am a bad person who has done bad things. My finding of fault in others in no way implies that I am a better person than they or that I would do whatever they are doing better than they would.
• I am self-centered and often don't think something through beyond how it might affect me personally. Therefore, there's a good chance that what I've written will not be carefully reasoned, nor give a fair shake to other views on the subject.

I'm certain that I will think of more things to disclaim in the future, and will be sure to update this master disclaimer in such an event.

Manifesto

Occasionally when starting a large project, I've found it to be helpful to write a manifesto first as a way to organize my thoughts and state my goals for whatever it is I'm doing. If I put what I want down in words, I'm more likely to acheive it. If I list my goals first, I'm more apt to remember what exactly it is I'm trying to acheive. And, if I don't get exactly where I want to be with the project, looking back at the original manifesto is an entertaining way to see where exactly the whole thing went off the rails.

So, that's why I'm writing a blog manifesto. It's potentially a large enough project that I should take some time to define its scope. And, I've held such resistance to this idea of blogging for so long that it's helpful for me to define exactly what my objections are and how to overcome each one.

Several people have asked me "Do you have a blog?", "You're one of those internet people. I bet you have a blog." and "Surely you have a blog." I've always said "No", and then proceeded to lay out whatever objections I could think of to the very idea of me blogging. Over the years, they became more and more ridiculous. Here, in its entirety, is the list of every objection I've ever had to me having a blog:

• It's feels pretentious to assume that anyone would want to read what I wrote. The very act of me putting words to paper (or web page, as it were) assumes that there's someone out there who actually wants to read what I wrote. It feel that it's the height of hubris for me to just put articles out there assuming that there's a large contingent of people who have been spending their whole lives up to now just waiting for me to grace them with my witty word.


• I wouldn't be able to come up with anything interesting enough to hold the audience that I was so pretentious to assume existed. My writing would be boring, and since it's somehow a reflection of me, I would be boring. Anybody who was interested in reading would no longer be, and I would be talking to myself.


• If I said, "This blog's for me, I don't care if I'm talking to myself", I would still be hurt to find out that no one was actually reading it. I would then have to resort to sensationalism to get readers. I would be so dependent on seeing positive comments to ensure that people were actually reading articles that I would start writing just to get a reaction. I think this is the problem with many blogs that I've read, and quite frankly, with much of people's writing, period. Quite often, something is written in such a way to elicit a reaction in the reader, which is quite fine if you're trying to bring the writer around to your point of view, or if you're trying to evoke a specific feeling in them. However, a lot of the things I read on the internet are written just to get someone riled up or inflamed, and not even in a particular direction. It's just written to get someone to keep reading or make a comment (usually, so that the writer or their site can get more page views or more ad impressions). It's not honest writing, and I'm afraid I would find myself so desperate for attention that I would quickly head down that path. Either that, or I would have to stoop to things like announcing I would cut off my own toe and "liveblog" it so as to assure a large mass of readers.


• It's nerdy. Let's face it, maintaining a blog is still a pretty nerdy thing to do. Yes, it's true that nobody would ever mistake me for anything but a huge nerd. However, there's still this little part of me that tries to deny it, and assumes that people like me because I'm cool and not because I can fix their computer or do their taxes. I'm also still holding out hope that somebody, somewhere, will only like me for my body.


• I was... "involved" with a writer once. It didn't really end up as a positive experience for either of us. It took me a while to realize that she was living her life as if she were writing it in real-time. Thus, all of her actions and the choices she made were geared towards whatever would look best in words. This usually resulted in doing whatever would garner as much sympathy as possible from her imagined audience.
  I don't think the same problem would befall me, but I have noticed strange changes in my thinking and consciousness when I write. If I'm writing something big, or preparing to write something and thinking it through, I've noticed that my thinking will change. I will no longer think thoughts and feelings; I think sentences and paragraphs. I noticed even in the last couple of days of thinking through this manifesto my thought process changed as if I was narrating my thoughts instead of just experiencing them.
  This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It could definitely help me become a better writer, because when in that mode my ability to experience feelings is constrained by my ability to articulate what I'm feeling. It provides a built-in incentive to improve the process of constructing thoughts in the form of sentences. So, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is weird, and feels funny. If it just affected the way I thought things, no big deal, but if it started to color the way I experienced things, or made me think of something in a different way than I would have otherwise, that has the potential to be bad.


• I don't know if I want to spend the time. Frankly, I have a lot better things that I should be doing. My house is perpetually falling apart, I'm constantly behind in my work responsibilities, and my kids require constant attention. If I do have free time, I don't necessarily want to spend it writing.


• I can't think of a catchy title or theme. Sure, a name doesn't seem that important. So I do need to pick something as an address, and the title will be the first thing that readers see on every page. So, I'm trying to think of something good. I've never had a nickname that stuck or anything particularly identifiable about me. So, I can't use anything like that as a name for a blog. I don't have a particular theme in mind, so I can't really pick a name based on a theme.
  Any halfway clever names that I could think of are already taken, although without fail, every name I have checked links to blogs that haven't been updated in years. The most recently updated one was from 2004, and everything else hadn't been updated since 2002 at the latest. Fully half of the names I looked for linked to blogs that only had a single post, usually of the form "This is my new blog. I'm totally going to update it all the time and keep everyone up to date on me and my life." I just really wish there was some sort of blog eminent domain that would allow me to just take over one of those completely useless sites for the greater benefit to mankind.


• Everybody's doing it. Notwithstanding the scores of abandoned blogs I encountered, I still know of lots of people, companies, animals, and inanimate objects that have their own blogs. I still try to fancy myself as some sort of trendsetter or rebel or iconoclast, and I'd be hurting that by jumping on the blog bandwagon. In fact, what I'm trying to do is position myself at the forefront of the Great Blog Backlash, should that ever take place. Then I can say, "Oh, the rest of you all just started not blogging when not blogging became trendy. I've been not blogging for years"


• I don't particularly like the word "blog". I actively dislike some of the related words, like "liveblog", "vlog", and expecially "blogosphere". I'll use the word "blog" or "blogging", but that's about it. I also don't particularly like that there are a lot of misconceptions about what a blog is, or arguments about what a blog should be.
  There is a huge collection of people that think a blog is a political commentary site on the internet that espouses some far-right or far-left view, since that's the only context in which they've ever heard the term. There are people who define blogs as meta-commentary on the web or the user-driven foundations of Web 2.0 "leveraging the mutificiencies of social networks", or "using the meta-synergies of the blogosphere's anthropotopography to inspire an new generational parashift" or something that's only really apporiate for Wired magazine or some such. I'm not even sure what stuff like that means other than they imagine their "blogosphere" as one gigantic circle of one person writing something, another person linking to that and commenting, a third linking to the second and so on. Yeah, that happens, but that's a small subset of what I see out there. Still others would assume that if someone has a blog it's nothing more than that person's online journal. Yeah, that's true in some cases, but not nearly all. Some people have discipline and only post interesting things. Some people are much less discriminating than they would be with a real journal. I'm not going to attempt to define what a blog is, other than to say it's a collection of crap thrown up on the internet that someone may or not read. In other words, pretentious wankery.


• People will assume they somehow know me just from reading the stuff on my blog. I still have this impression of myself as a terribly complex person. I fear that someone who reads my blog as a way to get to know me better will either make incorrecty judgements because they weren't getting the full story, or assume they have the full story when they really don't. That would be unfortunate. What would be more unfortunate would be for me to find out that no, I'm really not that complex, and yes, you can derive every bit of my personality from a few postings I made on an internet site somewhere.
  I read an Onion article a while back called "Mom Finds Out About Blog". One of my favorite quotes in the article was the blogger, Kevin Widmar, saying, "With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am." Yes, that's terrifying. Believe it or not, it's actually a great concern of mine that someone reading my blog will try to assemble an accurate picture of who I am and then fail, or worse, succeed. (When I was setting up the blog, I was overjoyed to find a help file in the Blogger help called "What to do if your mom discovers your blog..." that addressed this exact situation and even quoted the same Onion article! The weird part is that between the day I started this manifesto and the day I finished it, the Blogger link went dead, and no amount of searching brings it up, although it's still in the Google cache. Hmmm.)


• Someone will hold it against me later. As a corollary to the above, it's possible that I may miss out on some future job offer or something because someone somewhere Google's my name, reads what I wrote, and thinks I'm a dork. I much prefer to keep that little bit of information secret until later.

So then, if I have so many objections, why am I doing this now? Well, it turns out that a lot of those objections are not good ones. Who knew? It also turns out that anything else that's left can be fairly easily overcome. Some of my objections require just a little bit of rationalization on my part to overcome. Some require viewing things from a bit of a different perspective. Some require just a bit of stubbornness in the other direction. So, I can get past all of these objections, but still, why blog? Why take the time?

I can think of a few good reasons:

• I need practice writing. I'm not as good of a writer as I ever was before. I can't articulate my thoughts clearly and succinctly, and I have a hard time getting the exact meaning of what I'm saying to come across in text. I need a reason to write occasionally so as to keep what little skill I have.


• I don't remember things very well anymore. I still remember my name and things like that, but I don't remember the fine details of things that happened years ago. My hope is that if I write more about them, the act of writing will cement them better in my memory, as well as providing a published narrative to remind me what I was doing or thinking at the time.


• I quite frequently come across some thought or problem and hit Google to see what other people on the Interweb might have done about said thought or problem. Sometimes I'm alarmed when I can't find anyone else reporting on the same experience, and in those cases, I begin to feel all alone in the world. I decided that if I have a blog, everytime I search for something on Google and can't find it I can post what I know about the topic to my blog to assist anyone who might be looking for said topic in the future.


• I don't keep in touch with people well. I don't write letters, and I don't call often. However, I want to keep in touch with my friends and loved ones; I'm just not good at following through for some reason. In recent years, I've really come to depend on other people's blogs so much to keep me up to date on whatever they're doing or thinking. This is a line of communication that's pretty much one way, though, and it's time that I do my part to give back to those who give of themselves.

I'm sure I can think of more good reasons as time goes on, but those are enough reason to get started.