Quick Thoughts

I really liked The Office Super Bowl episode. The cold open featuring Dwight intentionally creating a fire to reinforce his safety lessons had me hoarse from laughter. I also got quite a kick out of him cutting the face off the CPR dummy. The Jim-Pam stuff (which loomed over much of the episode in the "I hope they don't do what I think they're doing" way) was pretty cute. The only thing I didn't really like was the fake movie/excuse to shoe-horn guest stars into the show. (Although, you have to admire Jack Black's willingness to do anything for a role. I can't even come up with a figure you could pay me to make out with Cloris Leachman.)

Some people don't like Dwight because he is doing more and more outrageous and fire-able things, but I've decided to just look at him as a sort of deus ex machina of awkward situations. He exists solely as a crutch for the writers, but it's a funny crutch, so I don't care.

The song that keeps running through my head the last few days is Loudon Wainwright III's "East Indian Princess." It's a song about an Indian teenager living in London who likes it much better than India, and it's pretty funny without being overly critical of the titular subject. I get a kick out of the line "she's safe as a cow on the Calcutta streets/This English way of life has got the other life beat."

I'm fascinated by the recent surge of 25 Things About Me posts on Facebook. Some people are so candid about themselves it's really amazing. You always learn something about the person. I feel a little guilty reading the notes of people who I've lost touch with or was never really close to, that's how personal some of these are.

I'm grateful to Bravo for putting the West Wing back in syndication, but it's a little tough to get through the 5th season right now.

I'm glad Bob Costas is going to be a part of the MLB Network, including doing some play-by-play announcing. He was really good at it and it's a shame NBC Sports fell apart about 10 years ago. Especially since it meant we were no longer able to listen to John Tesh's Roundball Rock on a weekly basis.

I liked last night's How I Met Your Mother. It was a much more successful effort to humanize Barney while still allowing him to maintain the character we've come to know. I may have to look into making a video resume. (I haven't yet seen last night's Big Bang Theory, but I'll get on it.)

I hope to finish reading Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men tonight or tomorrow and I'll review that here. I haven't seen any movies in the last few days. I keep thinking I should pop in my little brother's copy WALL-E to see if it's as good as people say, but I can't really motivate myself to do so.