Six Months In A Leaky Boat

Last week we finally caught Harry Potter and the Order, based on the book I still haven't finished. I will reserve my opinion about whether the director did the same. I realize it couldn't be an eight-hour movie, but I would watch Gary Oldman stand around in doorways being underused for at least three hours, then they'd better give him something to do for the next five. It was a good advert for the book, though.

Superhero Movie, the latest (I guess?) of that spoof series...that spoofs...movies. I enjoyed it, I actually laughed a few times even, which is generally unheard of.

Then I watched a lot of tennis. Oodles of tennis. Tons of tennis. And Jon Stewart. Then I found myself outdoors one night staring at my feet, and that never ends well. I'm still waiting for it to pass, actually. Now it's raining and no one can play tennis, so I have to watch other things. Like Frontline. Hmm.

You know how the sun has that warning label about not staring directly into it? I haven't quite figured out how to pull that off while driving. Everyone gets annoyed when I close my eyes, so that's out. The great thing is that even on these rainy days I still have the image of the sun burned into my retina. It's super!

I also dodged a bat and chased a raccoon this week. I wouldn't have noticed either, except the cats tend to pay attention to great big creatures infiltrating their space and they've not got the afterimage of the sun burned into their eye, so that also gives them an advantage. I had to walk up to the raccoon with a flashlight before we saw each other, and the raccoon was like, "HOLY CRAP!" and slowly scaled the fence. The bat just flapped about, avoiding us. Luckily these two incidents didn't take place on the same night, or I'd be checking for snakes and Indiana Jones in my hedges.

Six Months In A Leaky Boat

Should Have Quit While I Had A Head.

Once more, my ribbon routine goes unseen. You lucky, lucky people.

That's it for the games, hope you had at least half as much fun reading them as I had creating them and keep up with our usual antics at either monkey.comicgenesis.com or monkeycomic.livejournal.com.

Should Have Quit While I Had A Head.

Diving Time!

Here's a good reason to not have two ladders, kids.

I've been keeping up on my RSS feeds, really.

Diving Time!

It Just Caught My Eye.

You know it wouldn't be mine if it didn't have something going in my eye.

Things take a dive in our next installment.

It Just Caught My Eye.

Horsing Around

The days of watching dressage 'til dawn may have ended, but they're alive and well in my head.

Next, the weekend!

Horsing Around

Never Use A Cannon To Kill A Mosquito.

Continuing the shameless hype of my comic strip, here's one use for all those extra cicadas and mosquitoes laying around.

Coming up, mixed doubles table tennis!

Never Use A Cannon To Kill A Mosquito.

Watervolleybasketpoloball!

Twenty years back, I drew some silly pictures while watching the Olympics. This time around, I put a little bit more thought into it. Not much...but I thought pasting them here in addition to the proper site and behind-the-scenes journal would spread the entertainment around an extra third.

Stay tuned for mosquito shooting, in only 2880 minutes!

Watervolleybasketpoloball!

Limiting my area of expertise.

Having curling, billiards, and table tennis as favorite sports makes it difficult to rave about sports publicly. After all, they are not easy to follow from home due to crappy network coverage. ESPN shows billiards, sure, but I have no idea which tournament is which, and how well any of the players are doing, I just make fun of the pink 7 ball when it's in use.

What I'm trying to say is that I am aware that the New York Mets have a chance to get into the World Series, but that is as far as I'll allow myself to get into baseball. I have a Mets hat, but I also have a Yankees hat, because I'm from New York, and I'm related to fans of both teams, and I can assure you that the Subway Series of 2000 gave me enough of a nervous condition that I would not need to watch another baseball game ever in order to fully experience life.

However, because I'm a weird date fiend, it's been 20 years since the Mets won the first World Series I ever watched, so, hell, let's go Mets, or whatever you all shout these days.

Limiting my area of expertise.

Now maybe there'll be more television coverage.

Pete Fenson, Shawn Rojeski, Joe Polo, John Shuster and Scott Baird won bronze medals today in the Torino Olympics.

They beat Great Britian at the game Scotland invented, curling.

Gold and silver went to Canada and Finland, Italy's new curling team is idolized, and maybe sports stations in the U.S. will get wise and show some world and nation championships.

I hear the rest of the Olympics are going well, too.

Now maybe there'll be more television coverage.

Olympic Fever!

Well, more like Olympic hypothermia. As numerous groundhogs predicted, we finally got winter. Three feet of winter. That fluffy white crap sure is heavy when it gangs up on my shovel. For the most part, I don't care, because I have something to watch on television: The Olympics!

So far, my highlight was making up a story with my grandmother that Roberto Benigni not only lit the torch, but did it while on fire. That's what my mum gets for not watching. Oddly, though, she believed Benigni, but doubted Sophia Loren and Susan Sarandon as flag-bearers.

Hey kids, Susan Sarandon...Janet from Rocky Horror, she was involved in the Olympics! Will wonders never cease?

Apparently, some wonders do cease. Of all the hyped athletes in Team USA commercials leading up to the games, only Shaun White, who featured in a snowboarding video game we play like mad every chance we get, managed to win a medal so far. Bode Miller? Came in 4th. Michelle Kwan? Don't bring her up, I'll start crying again. Apolo Anton Ohno? What happened there? Why do I like Short Track Speed Skating so much? Is it a flashback to my Korean past life? So many questions.

There are 12 more days for this show to get more interesting. I thought, being part-Italian, that I'd dig the whole Italian vibe of these games, but so far I've seen alps, and I saw Theed Palace in an overhead shot, and I heard...disco. Peter Gabriel coming out of the floor dressed like a homeless man singing Imagine was interesting, and that's all I'll say on that. Nah, I'll make it my run-on paragraph instead. I was so stunned by the appearance of Yoko Ono in Italy, that I think I didn't quite absorb what his performance was about. All the world knows Peter Gabriel, I hear. I wonder if they knew him in that setting, singing Imagine, though. Peter Gabriel has some pretty big songs of his own, doesn't he? True, most are about love, swimming, tools, and monkeys; John Lennon wasn't available to sing his own song, so I understand how the musical pairing came about. Sort of.

The USA network, home of Monk and The Dead Zone, is going to cover Curling from 3AM until 11AM, because only people who are awake at those hours like things that can only be described as extreme Scottish marbles. CNBC will be carrying more Curling at 5PM, and I can't wait to compare the coverage. I'll probably hate the CNBC coverage, because I usually don't like anything at 5PM. I do love Curling, though. Even more than Figure Skating, now.

(For those who do not rabidly follow Olympic Figure Skating, Michelle Kwan has been to four Olympics, once as an alternate in case Tonya Harding was arrested, and twice as a medalist--Silver in 1998 and Bronze in 2002. As (evil, shitty) luck would have it, she was injured this season, and had to withdraw from competition. She's tied for non-Olympic titles with Dick Buttons and Carol Heiss--neither had to do half the insane stunts required of today's skaters--and she most likely will be remembered as the best female figure skater this country ever produced.)

Olympic Fever!

Pastimes of the ill and housebound.

It is literally pouring rain. I swear--there's this gutter over the porch that was incorrectly screwed into the porch, and it is known locally as the Mulch Fountain. I charge ten cents for people to stand under it, but I've had no takers yet.

I can't go outside because of the weather, and because I still sound like a cross between Boushh the bounty hunter and Marge Simpson's sister Selma, but there was solace in today's television schedule. Oh yes, something I watch habitually every year since 1992...the U.S. National Figure Skating Championships.

My history as a hater from the word go might make you think I wouldn't be into the magical world of sequins and string arrangements by Metallica cover bands, but there is just so much material in skating coverage. Not so much the skaters, because they do work their asses off to be the best they can--in their heads--and with the exception of twelve medalists, a lot of people bankrupt their families for nothing. But that's not funny.

What's funny is when the ABC coverage starts off playing Release by Sinead O'Connor and the Afro-Celt Sound System. It's a song about a dead guy. Jo Bruce, to be exact. I mean, yes, it's a great song, but as I recall, the ladies weren't all arguing amongst themselves because of the loss of Michelle Kwan. Or was that why ABC played the song? They seemed to be playing a lot of features that made it sound like Michelle Kwan was no longer of this earth, never mind that she'll most likely be given a spot on the Torino Olympic team, but no...Michelle is gone, what will we do?

I know what ABC did. They had the worst coverage ever. If I felt like beating you all over the head with my opinion, I'd be throwing lots of periods and EVAR into that statement. But I swear, the camera work for the first half hour showed me close-ups of parts of Sasha Cohen I really didn't need to see.

Also, because I caught the short program on ESPN only a half-hour earlier, I noticed ABC changed Emily Hughes' music. This wouldn't have mattered at all had the song she really skated to been anything other than Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F. Yes, the one we used to call "Piano Concerto in F...U" back in the day. Oh my, Barney the Dinosaur could skate to that song dressed like Disco Beethoven and I'd love it. ABC replaced Gershwin with the Celtic Death Song. It's not a big deal, but it is the kind of thing that eats at your mind after 7 hours of non-stop skating coverage, much like the damned Ore Ida microwave fries commercial. Share the damn fries with your sister, punk--you've had ten boxes.

It's not even the camera work and music that pissed me off the most, though. Rena Inoue and John Baldwin, although they may not be even passably good--I wouldn't know, I didn't see them--made history. Rena Inoue spun around a whole bunch o'times when John Baldwin threw her, and for some reason, ABC didn't think it was worthy of two seconds of air time. Instead, Katarina Witt and Kurt Browning discussed whether Michelle Kwan should go to the Olympics, and then they analyzed the pitch of the screams coming from an Ice Dancer whose routine was not shown on the broadcast. I shit you not. Why was she screaming? I don't know! She got high marks for something...I don't know what, ABC didn't show me.

Early on in the broadcast, Nan started checking out the football match between her two fleece blankets, the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos. Phantom of the Opera was also on, and it even surprises me that I like that movie, and I enjoyed it better than heckling skating for a few minutes. The weather had different ideas, however, and knocked the satellite out, leaving us with the skating just long enough that we got transfixed by it again.

I don't generally root for anyone in sports, because that causes them to lose horribly, and I'm expecting Russians to win all of the Olympic skating events this year, but I hope Johnny Weir and Sasha Cohen do well, because they are so pretty. Michelle Kwan (also pretty, but as pretty as Johnny Weir? We may never know) has been put on the team to go to Torino, so the Olympics will give me more of a headache than this competition did. I will, for the third time, say that Michelle must win, or I am never watching skating again. Not that I mind who wins anymore, really. It's like when I found out the Broncos won tonight, I was cool with it, not because I just don't follow football, but because both of Nan's blankets are fluffy.

Pastimes of the ill and housebound.

Because I never let go of certain things...

I happened to find Earth Wind & Fire: a Tribute on Ice tonight on TV. I watched ice dancers dance to September, and then gave my verdict:

"Earth Wind & Fire were in Sgt. Pepper's, this show is nothing compared to that."

It's true, no one tried to kidnap Shae-Lynn Bourne while she was making Shae dip for the band, and Brian Boitano and Brian Orser didn't team up to rescue her from Josef Sabovcik or anything.

Holy crap, I think I just created Disney's next ice show.

Because I never let go of certain things...

While I'm playing TV Guide....

Sunday at 4PM (EST), NBC will be showing curling as part of its Ice 2005 pre-olympic hype. That is what I will be watching, even if they show as little as they did today, when the women's team couldn't even extend the duel into a fourth end. Personally, it sounded as if the match taking place off-camera was more exciting. Ah well, I should just be glad they're showing any curling, and they don't act as if aliens invented it so much anymore. The "Curling rocks!" ad campaign is gone, sadly. I shall miss those young punks curling the turkeys in the supermarket with the old lady, they made quite a team.

Other sports featured on Ice 2005 will have people riding a thin board with blades down icy tracks head first, and also the double luge. I think I see why all of these sports were thrown together in one show and simply titled "Ice," and I'm okay with that...as long as they show the curling.

61 days until the winter olympics...the original reality show.

While I'm playing TV Guide....