Memos: Couch Potato Chronicles

• The new season of The Office. Season 2 marked the real beginning of the show, where they added all the wonderful side characters and the show really came into its own. It's now my favourite show that's on TV right now. Creed is the frigging best character on TV .. "Oh I steal constantly. I stopped caring a long time ago." "Hey, have you kids ever seen a foot with four toes on it?" Gold. All of it. Plus it's a loose parody of the life of the actual actor, Creed Bratotn, who was the guitarist for the band The Grass Roots. Unravelling the true bits from the invented absurdities, like that he lost his toe becaue his parents bound his feet as a child, is one of the hidden gems of the show.
  
  I also like the direction they look to be going in with the new setting for Jim's character, in Connecticut with the ivy-league educated high-strung scumbags for co-workers, who are really just as hopeless as the workers in the Scranton branch, but who don't realize it. It's good to see the show moving beyond picking on the easy targets.
  
  
• The Illusionist is playing this week at City Cinema. Definitely go watch it. It's a good old fashioned mystery, and the moral role reversal at the end is actually an interesting take on our notions of heroes and villains and our relationship with a film's protagonist.
  
  
• I still haven't watched a single minute of the show "Lost" or know anything about it.
  
  
• Holy crap, Steve Wozniak is a MeFite now. Wowwowwow. I still can't believe I was 5 feet away from him at WWDC last year. </nerd moment>
  
  
• CBC radio's podcasts have been a good companion to my working day lately. Most shows only update once a week, but between the best of The Current, Ideas, DNTO and Radio 3 it usually fills the quiet times I end up having at my desk over each week.
  
  
• Just bought the movie Fubar, and I can't wait to listen to the commentary on the DVD. Apparently they do it in character. I love stuff like that. Also picked up Vol. 3 of the Loony Tunes Golden Collection, so I have al l3 now. If I ever accidentally have kids this will be the first thing I let them watch, as I'm sure actual kids TV will have deteriorated to the point of being nothing but cereal ads by then.
  
  
• Just re-read The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. I think it's my favourite novel. This essay sums up my thoughts about the characters as best as anything I've read about it (but don't click the link if you haven't read the book yet.) "Thoughts on Dostoevsky's The Idiot" by Hermann Hesse. If you haven't read the book you can get the full text of it from Project Gutenberg here: Link.
  
  
• Yoshi's Island is the most overlooked of what I consider to be the very best Super Nintendo games. I still haven't gotten all the secrets nor come close to getting 100 points on each of the levels, so I'm trying for that now as I'm re-playing it on an emulator. Using the SuperFX chip for 2D effects was a much better application than the awkward, rudimentary polygon graphics that it was designed for. Though Star Fox still kicked ass.