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The case against dogs

The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris goes on a rant about pampered pets, some of whom get "spa days" and massages. And he makes the point that we've been introducing the concept of income inequality to the canine world:

Aren't the wrong dogs being soothed? I'm reasonably certain the ones out aiding the blind, saving the imperiled, or gladdening the lonely aren't getting a deep-tissue rub. It's the sad, quaking, barkless leisure pocket dog, the dog that looks as if it's having a nonstop nervous breakdown. Those dogs don't need yoga. They need a cigarette. Look out for that marketing niche: smoking dogs.

I generally agree with Morris, but I think he overlooks that dating a guy with a rambuctious dog can have its advantages. All I'm saying is that the dog would have eventually knocked that vase off the coffee table if I hadn't, so it's not totally unfair that she got blamed for it.

Brush Up Your Cole Porter

(Cross-posted at Extra Criticum)

I thought Cole Porter was still pretty well-known among young people (well, at least young gay men), so I was disappointed to discover that my 44-year-old body was younger than all but three or four people at When It's Hot, It's Cole, a revue by members of the American Repertory Theatre up here in Boston/Cambridge. The dozens of cabaret tables were full, but it was a pretty grim crowd. Think of William Howard Taft sitting next to Margaret Dumont, and multiply the image 100 times, and you'll get the idea. I couldn't believe that almost no one under 50 wanted to escape the heat, get mildly drunk, and listen to some of the best songs ever written. (When I went to the bar for the first champagne split, I indignantly told the bartender that I'd need a second glass for my friend. Since I got another split during intermission, it turns out the bartender was a better judge of character than I give him credit for.)

Whether because of the fish-faced audience or the belief that they were slumming after doing Beckett and Chekhov during their regular seasons, the cast seemed to hurry through the songs without much range in emotion. Or maybe the feeling is that Cole Porter is camp, and that his songs should be treated like college fight songs from the 1920s, to be performed with constantly arching eyebrows and sidelong glances at the other performers.

Or maybe I just have my own preconceptions. I always thought of "Miss Otis Regrets," with its outrageously sketchy sense of melodrama, as something to be sung with tongue in cheek (see versions by Kirsty MacColl and Bette Midler), but it was done competely straight here, as if it were "Strange Fruit." Conversely, I've always thought of the prostitute's lament "Love for Sale" as too direct ("Love that's only slightly soiled/Love for sale") to be performed as jauntily -- and cluelessly -- as it was in this production. I was also annoyed that one of Porter's best songs, "Anything Goes," was sung in counterpoint with one of his weakest, "Brush Up Your Shakespeare."

Have cabaret performers just become sick of Cole Porter? And, for that matter, Stephen Sondheim, Kander & Ebb, and Lennon & McCartney? Are there any composers they they'd be excited to build a show around? And would such a show attract people who don't remember The Ed Sullivan Show?

It's beach season!

My sentiments exactly.

Trash TV, or the nightly news

The New York Times reports that ratings for the big three networks' nightly news are steadily declining. Maybe this provides a clue as to why most of us see the nightly news as an irrelevant waste of time?

CVS: Back on my boycott list

For years, I had avoided CVS stores because they wouldn't let me buy a newspaper the proper way -- skipping the line and slapping two quarters on the counter while briefly waving the paper in front of the cashier. One such cashier sent me to the back of a parade of peevish customers, saying I had to wait my turn to get my item "scanned," and I vowed never to return. (And look what's happened to newspaper circulation!)

Now I live in Malden, and there are more empty storefronts than operational businesses on my street, but there is a CVS a few blocks away. The alternative is a Walgreens in a strip mall, and I figured CVS deserved my patronage for remaining downtown. Last night, I decided to get a six months' supply of mouthwash (when I run out of something, like napkins or physical contact with other human beings, I tend to go overboard in my determination to never let it happen again). Well, CVS happened to have a "buy one, get one free" deal on their store brand of mouthwash -- Rictus Rinse, or something like that -- so I loaded six bottles into my basket.

Unfortunately, the cashier informed me that the 2-for-1 deal was only for members of CVS, meaning those people willing to carry around yet another "discount" card in their wallets. I put the mouthwash back, explaining that I had no interest in joining a drugstore caste system. It's not the privacy issues that bug me. I buy stuff online all the time, and Amazon is always reminding me that it knows what silly or perverted things I've already purchased from them, and therefore I should be very interested in a brand-new and particularly reprehensible piece of merchandise that's lying around in its warehouse. But that's a price for the convenience of buying things online and having them brought to my door. If "brick and mortar" stores are to survive, they must play up their advantages over Internet sellers. And being able to quickly buy things with cash, at the same price given to everyone else in the store, is at the top of the list.

So goodbye CVS, I'm placing my order with Drugstore.com.

Jump-the-shark moments: 14 and 10 more

My hometown TV critic Matthew Gilbert has come up with a list of the worst jump-the-shark moments in recent television history:

1. '24' : Kim and the cougar
2. 'Heroes': The first season finale
3. 'American Idol': Sanjaya's ponyhawk
4. 'Frasier': Niles and Daphne hook up
5. 'Get Smart': Max and 99 get married
6. 'Scrubs': J.D.'s girlfriend gets pregnant
7. 'The West Wing': Bartlet's cathedral rant
8. 'Desperate Housewives': Wasting Alfre Woodard
9. 'Alias': The arrival of Nadia
10. 'ER': Drs. Greene and Corday
11. 'Will & Grace': Meeting Leo
12. 'The Real World: Las Vegas': The Las Vegas hot tub
13. 'Nip/Tuck': Sean and Christian sell the business
14. 'Grey's Anatomy': Izzy cuts the cord

Rising to the challenge, I am posting my personal Top 10:

1. M*A*S*H: In the fourth-season opener, B.J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell) replaces Trapper John (Wayne Rogers) and ushers in the show's anachronistic "no adultery, no mysogyny, no fun" phase, which would drag on for another seven seasons.

2. Rescue Me: The entire third season was a shark tease. Susan Sarandon and Marisa Tomei guest-starred only to disappear in the show's parade of female characters who were psycho and/or inexplicably obsessed with Denis Leary's character, and "Probie" implausibly went from straight to gay to bisexual and back to straight in a matter of weeks. But the jump-the-shark moment for me was when the chief took a part-time bartending job and the bar owner, for no good reason, refused to pay his wages. The show's theme that everyone except for firefighters and fire victims were assholes was tiresome enough, but the idea that a New York City businessman would carelessly piss off city employees was preposterous.

3. Oz: I switched off midway through the fourth season, when Beecher's children are kidnapped on Schillinger's orders and he receives his son's severed hand in the mail. The initially compelling prison drama had already become less interesting when it became apparent that none of the major characters would ever change (see Poet's release and almost immediate return to prison). This is when the Beecher-Schillinger battle became more predictable than a Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

4. The Andy Griffith Show: Don Knotts leaves, and the show pointlessly continues for another three years.

5. Saturday Night Live: OK, this show still has a few memorable moments each season, but it's never been the same since Joe Piscopo impersonated Ed McMahon. That's when the show shifted from the shaggy dog quality of its first few seasons and became an assembly line for celebrity impressions based on make-up and prosthetics as much as good writing. See the Piscopo comedy style in this HBO clip.

6. The West Wing: I'll agree with Matthew that the cathedral rant was pretty cringe-inducing, but I gave this show the benefit of the doubt until two characters discussed the merits of abolishing the penny, and I immediately forgot which character had said what. After that, I couldn't overlook the fact that almost all of the dialogue on this show could be assigned at random to any of the sardonic-but-idealistic characters and no one would notice.

7.  The Simpsons:  Epsiode No. 185, in which Apu gets married after complications of the sort we've seen in countless live-action sitcoms, was when I realized that the show's great episodes were getting farther and farther apart.

8. Columbo: More than a decade after ending his portrayal of the raincoated detective on NBC, Peter Falk returned with new episodes on ABC in 1989. Falk was still great, but the classical-style music and bright cinematography was replaced by a more "modern" score (synthesizers) and lighting (dark). Worst of all, Columbo put his own life at risk in the first episode, something totally out of character for the cautious and meticulous detective. The British have owned the classy murder mystery genre ever since.

9. NYPD Blue:  "Take care of the baby!"  Sharon Lawrence wanted out of the show, so at the end of the sixth season, her character is killed in a courthouse shootout, giving husband Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) yet another personal tragedy to deal with. By this point, I wanted Andy dead just to put both of us out of our miseries.

10. The Practice: For a couple dozen episodes, this was producer David E. Kelley's most tolerable series to date, depicting a Boston law firm that wrestled with such ethical dilemmas as obviously guilty clients. But Kelley couldn't help himself from loading up the show with increasingly bizarre murders that wouldn't be up to the standards of Law & Order. In the 43rd episode, there are two different serial killers terrorizing Boston, and the characters act as if this is an everyday occurrence. Buffy the Vampire Slayer looked like gritty realism by comparison.

Oops, more evidence that I'm not a real American

“I don’t think there is an American who hasn’t stopped today and said a little prayer for the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings,” said ABC personality Charles Gibson while moderating tonight's Perry Mason-style interrogation of the Democratic presidential debates. ("Isn't it true that you plan to raise taxes? Isn't it true that you're on friendly terms with someone who isn't sufficiently patriotic?")

Am I really the only person in the US who didn't say such a prayer today? Well, mass shootings happen often enough in America that tomorrow must be the anniversary of another one, so I'll double up then.

Cheese-eating HTML monkey

I'm light on posting this week because I have been:

--Doing my taxes and looking for receipts from anything I can write off as "office expenses."

--Learning webmaster skills at my day job and starting to think in HTML code.

--Getting ready for a trip to Montreal that will take me away from the Boston Marathon and all discussion of the Pennsylvania primary.

More to come when, or if, I get back...

"Hardball" and other vehicles to shut down political debate

Brendan Nyhan informs me that Chris Matthews and company are ridiculing Barack Obama for ordering orange juice instead of coffee at an Indiana diner. When I was in elementary school, I watched The McLaughlin Group because it was fun to see grown-ups in suits and ties maintain the pretense of discussing Important Things but inevitably descending into schoolyard taunts and irrational argument. But I've seen the joke enough times to get me through the rest of my life. And I'm sure that election coverage in hell will be all about gaffes, facial expressions during debates, indelicate statements by friends of the hairstylists of the candidates, and the unforgivable elitism of candidates who have better diets than the average American.

The Handler, or why Captain Hook doesn't have cold sores

Via Boing Boing, here's news of an exciting product for germophobes. The Handler is a little plastic hook that's supposedly strong enough to open doors, punch numbers on ATM machines, scratch behind the ears of kittens, etc. The website explains why you will die without it:

As you go through your day, think of all of the places that you touch -- door handles, sink faucets, hand rails, counter tops, car doors, light switches etc…. People leave their germs behind after sneezing, coughing, blowing their nose and touching their mouth and other more private parts.

But there's a solution: "The best way to prevent problems, of course, is to never touch these 'problem surfaces.'" I think they mean door handles, not private parts, but shouldn't we treat both the same for safety's sake?

And what about other "problem surfaces," such as hands giving us change at the supermarket, or every piece of furniture at your best friend's house? I'm sure strangers and co-workers will understand if you retract your hands into your long sleeves and instead offer your claws in friendship.

Haven't the these guys ever heard of using your knuckles to push buttons and using your elbows to turn door handles?