John Lindal’s Blog

Hanna Montana

In the newest episode of Hanna Montana, she falls for a guy with really rich, excessively arrogant parents. The father sounds just like Thurston Howell, III from Gilligan’s Island. I doubt this is a coincidence

iCarly

I saw a very interesting episode of iCarly last night. Interesting in the sense that it revealed some of the fundamental assumptions of the show — not in the sense that it was particularly good…

The plot was silly: Insane history teacher vents rage from her personal life by torturing her students. Students deal with her by getting her arrested by the FBI for illegally downloading music.

So we learn that:

• The school administration did nothing to discipline the teacher, so school is basically a Nazi prison camp.
• The students had to trick the teacher themselves, so it’s kids vs. adults.
• The teacher was arrested for illegally downloading music, so the show must have been paid for by the RIAA. Since when did the FBI have nothing better to do than arrest people whom the RIAA does not like? I’m sure the RIAA would love to have this come true…

TV Star

My daughter, Heidi, waved to Emily Osment in the SUV next to us after we came out of the local Panda Express. Heidi liked Emily’s little doggy. (At least, I think it was her…)

Homer³

I watched an episode from the Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror DVD last night. It’s truly wonderful to have all the craziest Simpsons’ Halloween specials on a single DVD Homer³, one of the skits in the episode, proves once and for all that at least some of the writers for the show are true geeks. There were some wonderful math formulas floating around in the 3D world into which Homer stumbled!

Heroes

I caught a few 2-minute sound bites from the premier of Heroes last night, in between bouts of dishwashing. Assuming I didn’t miss any spectacular stunts, it looks like X-Men on $5 a day.

We have a genius cab driver from India who is trying to figure out why his mad-scientist (genetics division) father died. All he needs is to shave his head or lose his hair in a radiation accident to turn into Xavier. All the rest of the characters have their lives turned upside down when they find out about their special powers. All the special powers appear to be based on genetic mutations. And the only female characters are a high school cheerleader and a single mom who pays the bills by being an online porn model. The style is explicitly soap opera, with a thousand plot threads each getting two-minute time slices and dialog predominating over action.

Definitely not worth following…

Lord of the Rings on TBS

So the Lord of the Rings made it to TBS this weekend, and they’re giving it exactly what it deserves. Here are some quotes from the preview ads:

Good witches? Evil Wizards? I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more!

Comparing Galadriel with the Good Witch is right at Peter Jackson’s mental level of comprehension of the books. Too bad they had to insult The Wizard of Oz in the process

It sucks to be Frodo.

Indeed. Sucks to be watching, too

If you stank, and people called you names, and you had no friends, you’d have issues, too!

They were talking about Gollum, who is probably one of the only characters that doesn’t really deserve to be ridiculed. Now, if they had been referring to Peter Jackson…

The X’s

Since basic cable only costs us $4 — above the price of broadband — I occasionally go slumming when I’m too braindead to do anything else. Over Christmas, I caught a couple of episodes of the new cartoon The X’s on Nickelodeon. I found it pretty funny, since I enjoy satirical silliness.

The basic premise is to laugh at the antics of the family. Dad is the leader, Mom is the hand-to-hand combat expert, the daughter Tuesday — a nod to Friday on The Adams Family, I think — is the weapons expert, and the son is the technical genius. They’re all either normal or nuts, depending on how you look at it. They are perfectly normal as super secret agents go, but they fit into the real world about as well as a square peg fits in a circular hole. They don’t even know how to keep the house clean or do laundry — which makes for wonderful fun when the son uploads a “harmless” patch to the central computer, causing it to crash, just before a sanitation inspection.

Of course, every secret agent needs an arch-nemesis. In the case of the X’s, however, this is a token-arch-nemesis, since the focus of the show is the family’s wackiness. He still gets plenty of good lines, however, like:

This is the best secret lair ever! It has a Pit of Doom (points to his right)…a shark tank (points to his left)…and spinning blades of death (points to the ceiling).

Uh, sir, those are ceiling fans.

Oh, uh, well I’m sure we can find something evil to do with them…

In one episode, Mom arranges a slumber party for Tuesday — by paying three randomly chosen girls from school, no less. They are (1) the Goth who enjoys contemplating the meaninglessness of the universe, (2) the ditz who states her interest to be lip gloss, and (3) the nerd who wears Princess Leia cinnamon buns and eagerly demonstrates her talent at intergalactic yodeling. Chaos ensues when the X’s blast off into orbit — in their house, shaped like an X — to blow up their token-arch-nemesis’ new space base. Tuesday must keep the girls distracted while the others blast away and dodge return fire. At one point, she turns on the “TV” so she can also monitor the progress of the battle. The nerd becomes suspicious because, “I’ve seen every science fiction movie ever made, and this isn’t one of them!”

As I said, well worth watching if you enjoy satirical silliness.