Bruner Blog

I’ve been watching it for 10 minutes so far, but it’s safe to say The Real Gilligan’s Island is my new favorite show. Especially Mary Ann (#1). (I always was a Mary Ann kind of guy.)


UPDATE:

So, it’s now about an hour and 20 minutes into The Real Gilligan’s Island (how frickin’ long is this thing, anyway?), and I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite show of all time, but it’s still amusing. In case you happened to have missed it (poor you!), the basic premise is Survivor (which, for all my reality-TV loving ways I have never watched a full episode of) in ’70s sitcom dress-up. Two competing teams of Gilligans Island characters:

• Hot Mary Ann vs. Wallflower Plain-Jane Mary Ann
• Evil Bitch from Hell Millionairess (and her wussy hubby) vs. Nice Millionaire Couple (who we keep being reminded are quite a lot richer)
• Santa Claus Skipper vs. Disqualified Heart-Attack Skipper
• Funny, Klutzy, Goober Gilligan vs. Boring Good-Looking Gilligan
• The Two Gingers (one’s somewhat more sympathetic (Australian accent?) and has gotten more air time, but nothing especially distinguishes them)
• Gay, Annoying (But-Not-Because-He’s-Gay) Professor vs. Gray-Haired Smart Professor

Basically, aside from the better, dorkier Gilligan, Green Team (aka Team 2) are all a bunch of losers who deserve to lose (especially Evil Bitch from Hell Millionairess, but let’s hope she’s the last to lose just to savor the drama).

Battle of the Professors is next. I can hardly wait.

FURTHER UPDATE:
Yay! Gray-Haired Smart Professor wins and Gay Annoying Professor gets banished to the other side of the island. What on earth that means remains to be seen (but there are still 10 minutes of this two-hour extravanza to go).

YET ANOTHER UPDATE:
The Mary Anns are going for an elimination round next week!!! I’m definitely tuning in again, but if Hot Marry Ann gets elimniated, I think I will quickly lose interest (especially as it looks like she’s already sleeping with Boring Good-Looking Gilligan).

P.S.:
While channel surfing during a commercial, I watched a few minutes of Letterman. Is my imagination, or are Rupert’s Deli Platters looking slightly more appetizing than before? Sliced red bell pepper? That looked new.

A privacy expert (I’d tell you who, but then I’d have to kill you) just emailed me this:

Keep a watch out for people standing near you in the checkout line at retail stores, restaurants, grocery stores, etc. who have a camera cell phone in hand. With the camera cell phones, they can take a picture of your credit card, which gives them your name, number and expiration date. CBS reported this type of identification theft is one of the fastest growing scams today.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about. It just goes to show, it’s always somethin’.

Having had a few weeks now to digest the horror of the election, Mark sends this delicious quote from H. L. Mencken:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

? H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, 26 July 1920

A few weeks ago, I noted that Eminem clearly appeared to be lip-synching on Saturday Night Live, the week after the big bruhaha over Ashlee Simpson’s lip-synching on the same show. Granted, you couldn’t have missed Simpson’s lip-synching, as her bandmate pressed the wrong button and she left the stage in ignomany, but considering all the flack she took for not keeping it real, many were expecting notorious bad-boy Eminem to mock her, not repeat her same offense, albeit a bit more successfully.

Still it was obvious to me, and not just me (bloggers Jon Gales and Stereogum caught it, as did several members of a fan discussion thread on SNL’s official site), but it never got picked up in the mainstream media, as far as I saw, the way Simpons’s flub did, despite the fact that SNL representatives were still contending a week later that music acts on SNL always keep it “live-live.”

Anyway, I realize this is a bit dated, but just for the record, Gales has linked to a video clip of the performance, where you can clearly see Eminem faking it. In case they eventually take the link down, I did pocket a copy I’ll put up here if need be.

Shame on you, Eminem and media reporters for letting him off the hook.

Tommy Ramone (left) on bass,
Alexander Vershbow, the U.S. ambassador to Russia on drums,
and András Simonyi, Hungary’s crazy-looking wall-eyed ambassador to the U.S.,
jamming at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Not pictured (further off to the right), Chuck Young, Rolling Stone writer, on guitar

CORRECTION: Alright, I had the IDs all screwed up. That’s why this is a hobby,
not a full-time job. Would help if the Hungarian Embassy had used captions on the pics.
As best I can make out, the crazy wall-eyed guy is actually Tommy Ramone
(figures; though I liked it better when he was supposed to be the ambassador).
Guy in the cool t-shirt on bass is (I think) Rolling Stone writer Chuck Young;
the drummer is the U.S. ambassador to Russia, and the Hungarian ambassador is not
pictured here, but but he is pictured here.

This story is just so insane, there’s no need for snarky embelishment, so here are the facts. Tommy Ramone, the sole surving member of the seminal punk band from Long Island Queens, The Ramones, was born Tamás Erdélyi in Budapest and immigrated to the U.S. with his parents during the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Meanwhile, Hungary’s current ambassador to the U.S., András Simonyi (whom Adi assures me is a good guy, representing the country well in interviews she’s seen on CSPAN) is a wannabe rocker. So, the other day, he invited Ramone to Washington, “in an event co-sponsored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Embassy of Hungary,” to speak “about their personal experiences with rock music and the impact that it made on their parallel lives on either side of the Iron Curtain.”

Then, along with the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow, and Rolling Stone writer Chuck Young (a punk expert), they cranked out tribute versions of “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Beat on the Brat” and “Let’s Dance.”

More details, including photos and a video clip, on the Hungarian Embassy’s web site; see also on NPR, Pestiside and Index.hu (for Hungarian speakers; or just look at more pictures, including this crazy second one).

Apparently I have “one of those faces.” Not one of those faces that looks like someone you know, but one of those faces that looks like someone you’ve seen on the big or small screen. I am told all the time that I look like a celebrity. The strange thing is, it’s never the same celebrity. I don’t know what to make of it.

Some people look a lot like a particular celebrity and get used to hearing it. In Boston last year, I started to ask a woman working at a hotel, “Has anyone every told you…” but she cut me off with a “Yessssss” before I could finish (Helen Hunt; dead ringer). Nick Johnson of the tech company Revenue Science tells me he gets Jeff Bezos a lot. Lindsay acknowledges she gets Kirsten Dunst often. There an exec at my company that looks quite a lot like this guy.

But with me, I don’t think it’s ever the same person twice. Is that odd? I’ve asked other people about this, and several tell me no one ever tells them they look like a celebrity. For a long time, I’ve been meaning to start a list of all the folks I get, but I always forget and then I can’t remember half or more of the candidates. So, there’s no time like the present. Just got a new one today, which reminded me. The rest are all those I can remember from over the years, but there have been many more. I’ll update this from time to time as the need arises.

I’m not saying I agree with any of these (and, believe me, they’re not all flattering); I’m just reporting it like I hear it:

• Gabriel Byrne
• Bob Geldoff
• Kevin Costner
• Bob Dylan
• Arlo Guthrie
• Tommy Ramone

UPDATE:
This just in:

• Jeff Goldblum

• Josh Groban (whoever he is)
• Josh Cooke (ditto)
• Inspector Gadget (this, I believe, had more to do with my rain outfit than my face, or so I hope)

I am speechless. I ride my bicycle to work almost every day, and it’s the highlight of my day. I would love to do whatever I could to encourage as many New Yorkers as possible to bicycle commute for so many reasons — pollution, traffic congestion, health, to name just the most obvious ones. The bike path all the way down the Hudson River has been a godsend for bike commuters in the city, making it extremely bike friendly (for westsiders, anyway).

But now some crazy-ass City Councilmember, Madeline Provenzano, has proposed a new law, Int. No. 497, that would require all bicyclists to get license plates, apparently believing that with all their “zig-zagging,” bycicles are a “danger to the elderly.” Riding a bike without a license would subject a rider to up to 15 days in jail, in addition to fines and, of course, bicycle confiscation.

WTF?!?!? Who is this moron?

Thankfully, Transportation Alternatives has enabled a fax campaign by which you can send a piece of your mind to the powers that be. I urge you to take a moment to do so. My mental health depends on it!

More details and links on Gothamist.

My company had a blood drive, so I signed up and went over the the blood bus on the street around the corner. I had to fill out a long form about my health, sexual proclivities, drug abuse, body art and piercings, etc. (I have only one tattoo, before you read that the wrong way).

So then I do a short interview in a cramped little room in the bus, and I’m rejected! What weird lifestyle choice is it that makes my blood no good for wholesome red-meat-eating, red-state-loving Americans? My stint living abroad in Hungary. In fact, just about anywhere in Europe would have done the trick. They’re all Mad Cow countries! (Nevermind that Hungary hasn’t yet had a mad cow scare as far as I know and Amerika has.)

I think it’s just that real Americans don’t want any blood that has even a molecule of stinky cheese floating in it or has flowed in places where they speak fur’in languages that John Kerry understands. That’s blue blood!

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war & long oppressions of enormous public debt. But who can say what would be the evils of a scission, and when & where they would end? … If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake.

Thomas Jefferson, on the passage of the Sedition Act, 1798’s version of the Patriot Act

I met a guy at a conference today from Nestlé, which owns Purina, as well as other prepared-food brands (e.g., Stouffer’s and Buitoni). So I told him about a wacky idea I had a couple of months ago: People Chow.

The idea is basically this: sealed pouches of food pellets of a consistency somewhere between chewy and crunchy. Yes, more or less cat food. But for people! Mmmmm.

I haven’t done the market research, so I don’t know how much the meal-replacement bars and shakes market is (e.g., Balance Bar, Power Bar, etc.), but I’m guessing it’s a few billion, not to mention a sliver of the salty snacks industry, which has to be huge.

Those foods fill a niche: snack bars and meal-replacement drinks are (nominally) nutritious snacks, and the salty snacks are simply yummy. But the bars and drinks are all sweet, and the salty snacks are crap nutritionally. Sometimes you don’t have time for lunch or are hungry in the afternoon but you don’t feel like chocolate peanut or yogurt berry, much less fatty-carbo junk.

What would really hit the spot sometimes — when you’re rushing around on a business trip or hiking or biking or just at home watching TV and too lazy to cook — would be a neat pouch — which you could buy at a corner grocery or from a vending machine or at the store in boxes of ten packs — of crunchy/chewy chicken thing or beef thing or tuna thing. Something nutritionally balanced, tasty and munchable to stave off hunger till the next meal. In short, cat food for people.

Whether it would all be brown or tan nuggets or meaty pieces and potato pieces and carrot pieces and rice pieces I don’t know; I’d leave that to R&D to sort out. Marketing it would be tricky. Should you do it straight-up ironic and package it like cat food or try to disassociate from the pet food comparison somehow? I’d be open to suggestions.

Anyway, I’m in no position to launch a food product on my own and I’m not going to spend a lot of time canvasing this around to get a piece of the action. Doubtful that Nestlé will do anything with it, but the guy liked the idea and said he’d mention it around and promised me nothing. Fair enough.

But for the record, if People Chow becomes a multi-billion-dollar product/category, you saw it here first.

My favorite new show of this fall’s TV season is Lost, ABC’s new show about a bunch of airline passengers stranded on an island after a crash. It’s definitely unlike most TV fare, innovative in many ways, and a critical success.

But on last night’s episode, I found two things to gripe about. First, the reliance on fireworks in a complicated attempt to triangulate a transmitter of some sort. Who the hell brings fireworks on an airplane? Also, the tough guy’s metaphor of the moth emerging from its cacoon to help the drug addict kick his jones was fair enough the first time, but by the third time he sees a moth that episode, with tears in his eyes as it climed into the smoke-filled air after he ditched his stash in the bonfire, it was a bit too schmaltzy for the tone of gritty reality, not-TV-as-you-know-it that the show is striving to pioneer.

Some habits die hard.

Interviewed about the election on All Things Considered this evening, NYT columnist David Brooks quipped that a friend of his said of Bush’s promise in his acceptance speech today to build bridges, “I hereby nominate John Ashcroft to the Supreme Court. Let the healing begin!”

That sounds about right.

Parking my bicycle at work in the parking garage under our building, I heard three guys who work in the garage talking about the election, speculating something about which way Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were likely to go. Speaking with thick NY accents, one asked the another who he was going to vote for, and the other grunted contemptuously. “You mean you’re not going to vote? That means you won’t have the right to complain.”

It struck me, that’s what the citizen’s vote our democracy amounts to: the right to complain.