Workin' It

I've been meaning to stop by here and fill some space with my inept, meandering ramblings, but having been so inundated with work, deadlines, pressure and its ilk I haven't been of the mind -- timewise, anyway -- to get it done.

Since being completely preoccupied with work, it's far from exciting spending days and nights -- especially weekends -- working and focusing on the coming week, deadlines, etc. -- so I can't imagine reading about it is any more so. I must confess during some much-needed downtime I enjoyed "Hot Rod" starring Andy Samberg. It's yet another stupid, run-on-sentence film, pretty much typical for recent Saturday Night Live alums (at least from those since the early 90's). I'm not dismissing SNL alums or their films; for me, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places and Animal House remain among my favorites. However, since John Belushi died and Dan Akroyd decided to become a thespian, most of the post-SNL movies have been equally awful as the show itself (except, of course, for Baby Mama, which was really solid). So to make a long story short, Hot Rod (Kaia's suggestion, incidentally) was actually -- despite the extreme, thorough dumbness of the film -- pretty entertaining and worth a viewing.

More worthwhile is Eastbound and Down, a series on HBO starring Danny McBride. He's typically not so much of a leading guy as he is a solid supporting cast member, but having scored juicy roles in Tropic Thunder, the aforementioned Hot Rod and a variety of other films, he managed to get a series together about an aging, has-been, drugged-out white trash baseball player (one could argue those terms are redundant). This show has scored on a bunch of levels: it's rude, politically incorrect, off-color, hysterical, ridiculous, sad, and, most importantly, genuinely good stuff. With the end of The Sopranos and The L Word, Sunday nights are still somewhat relevant for those of us who don't watch Big Love and who dread falling asleep only to wake up to Monday mornings.

Speaking of which, I finished most of today without having eaten; getting through the work of the day without eating isn't unusual for me as of late. But deciding what I am going to do food-wise is. Since the Food Network has essentially become a joke, I watch it with less and less frequency. Aside from Ann Burrell, Ina Gartner and, of course, Alton Brown, I'm finding fewer and fewer reasons to actually watch it, and -- interestingly -- the less I watch, the less I eat. I'm not fading away into the ether, but it's definitely true that the more Food TV programming one watches, the more likely one is encouraged to eat.

Then again, I'm sure that if I stopped watching the Food Network altogether, I wouldn't wither away and be carried off on a windy day.

In either case, I'm going to go dig up something to eat and, if nothing appears or comes to me, I'm going to roast a chicken and prep some winter veggies. And maybe watch "Stir of Echoes" with the newly-minted, post-Madoff-cum-working-class version of Kevin Bacon.

Eventually I'll be back 'round here, probably sooner rather than later. But I'll apologize in advance in case it's more of the same boring, real-life details which would be better served by a visit to the bathroom than a visit here.

-B-