Posts from — February 2008

Disney is reviving their House of the Future attraction in May and like a high school reunion, it will look dated in a decade.

Remember when you bought your first PC and how pissed off you got when you saw cheaper, more powerful computers a month later? Imagine buying a house of the future and the talk around the water cooler…

“So then a year ago we bought the House of the Future 1.0. It has fully-integrated networking between our appliances, computers, home entertainment. It talks to us and helps us organize our lives better.”

“Oh that’s the old model John. We just bought the 2.0 version and it has robots. Half the price too.”

“Son of a bitch.”

To avoid awkward moments like these I think there should be some practicality in the house of the future.

I would like to see special features for the television/audio system like “Chipmunk/Helium Speak”. If politicians are going to talk about government-managed health care and the re-distribution of our money they should sound as ridiculous as the concepts themselves.

Maybe in the house of the future there will be politicians who aren’t in it to boost their egos or status in society making such a feature unnecessary. You never know.

If I can’t have that pipe dream at least give me a wall made of foam, just one anywhere in the house where I can bang my head anytime a politician says or does something stupid.

I want bar codes to be able to inventory the groceries in my house and communicate this with my cellphone in some way.

“This is Kathy from OnStar Mobile. How can I help you today Mr. Cameron?”
“Yes, I’m outside the liquor store…and its about to close!”
“Mr. Cameron, I need you to calm down sir. My computer is loading your household inventory…”
“Hurry, he’s getting his keys!”
“Almost there sir…”
“Chloe I need those files!”
“Got it! Buy more beer.”

I want the bathroom floor to be grated so when stupid shit like an overflowing toilet happens or my future offspring runs the shower with the curtain open because he thinks it is funny the water will have a better place to go then the hallway.

I want escalators instead of stairs. We invented the damn thing like a hundred years ago for crying out loud. Besides, we as a nation have a goal of complete and utter obesity. This cannot be achieved in the future without some kind of radical change. The elimination of having to climb flights of stairs is that agent.

I would like my house to talk to me. Dirty.

I want to come home and have the dirty house voice greet me with television listings. I know it sounds like I’m channeling Michael Rapaport’s character in Sixth Day but at least there’s no hologram in my vision.

And if there was I could totally rag on Mr. 2.0 House of the Future Guy.

What is your House of the Future like?
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There is the list of the Ten Smartest Shows and the Ten Dumbest Shows. So where are the shows for the humor lovers? Angry Seafood is here to help with our official original list of the television shows we think are the funniest.

Except there’s only five.

[UPDATE: The rest of the list revealed in part two of Top Ten Funniest TV Shows. ]

2. Seinfeld

No list of funny television shows is complete without this one, the show about nothing. The soup nazi…festivus…and of course the infamous scene below all make up one of our favorite tv choices in the humor department.

The oddest thing is for like the first two seasons nobody watched it. Amazing what a table change at a diner will do for ratings. The series finale was an interesting way to try and tie up all the loose ends but it gave you the sense it became less about nothing and more about something.

5. South Park

It is rare that a show can be so offensive and funny yet be so dead-on when it comes to topicality, twisting current events on their head. In the end, they joke about messages but there really is one in every episode we can all learn from. Awwww

7. SCTV

Unless you grew up in Canada you probably missed out on one of their best humor exports Second City Television. Starring many of the comedians you know and love like John Candy, Rick Moranis, and Eugene Levy, it was about a local tv station with their own form of programming like “Shoot at the Stars” and “Doug and Bob McKenzie” which later turned into the movie Strange Brew.

8. Happy Days

Life in the 50’s sure was cool except for that time Richie told Fonzie to “Sit on it“.

“In my office Cunningham!”

Times sure have changed since the 1950’s. The cool guys don’t live above people’s garages anymore. Those places are reserved for the creepy bloggers like me.

Without Happy Days there would have been no Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, the phrase “jumping the shark”, or Fonzie’s Place.

And where the hell did Chuck go?

10. Wings

Tv.com calls this 90’s under-rated sitcom Cheers 2 which might be a compliment. I don’t agree but you can’t beat a combination of good acting and good writing along with funny guest stars like Gilbert Godfrey and James Handy.

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After a week of Congressional busy-bodying into baseball and football, it was refreshing to find out they replayed the Super Bowl and the Patriots won!

That was until I realized it actually was a gift to the citizens of Nicaragua by a charity.

Nothing is more uplifting to the downtrodden then t-shirts of losing teams. I bet the same people behind this stupid idea are the ones who think there shouldn’t be score keeping in Little League.

And how often is this done anyways? Are there millions of people with almost-championship apparel? If I ran one of these countries, I’d convince the population that the teams really did win. Imagine the fun the tourists will have trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.

Since the third world is allowed to misremember the outcomes of sporting events can we do the same with members of Congress grilling athletes? Or should I say brown-nosing.

The amount of ass-kissing in Roger Clemens’ direction had me wondering if maybe Winstrol wasn’t the cause of Roger’s butt abscesses. The winner of the political grandstand award of the week however goes to Arlen Specter who met with Roger Goodell this week to discuss Spygate.

Of course these are very important issues which demand our leaders’ attention. We can see it causing problems in our lives. I ran into an old friend recently who is a teacher. She told me the children have a new game where they run around the playground trying to stick each other in the buttocks with dirty needles used by homeless people.

The kids call it The Rocket Game. See what I mean?

Thankfully, it turns out there are some things in sports we might actually want to remember this week.

Curly from the Harlem Globetrotters got his number retired at Madison Square Garden and that brings up the obvious question: Would they beat an NBA team?

I don’t know. They could probably beat Memphis but not Boston. Maybe Cleveland. Something like that might be a good idea for the NBA All-Star festivities this weekend.

So how about the Globetrotters versus the NBA’s best players instead? Have that be the All-Star game.

Nevermind. Stupid idea. It would be over at half-time.

Just misremember that last one.
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Being a Patriots fan, I was hoping to avoid talking about football this week. Let’s face it the loss was a bitter pill to swallow. New England didn’t execute on defense when they needed to. The Giants played really well and their defensive line never let up the pressure.

The New York Giants deserve the championship.

Did I mention the Celtics are contenders? Even the Bruins too? The Red Sox return with almost their entire championship roster intact. Well, except Curt Schilling’s shoulder but who knows what the hell is going on there. We have three more leagues to try and win championships in before this year is over. We even have the Revolution, our MLS soccer team as a backup. You won’t get rid of us that easily all you sports fans from other cities.

Oh, and the Patriots have the #7 overall pick in the NFL 2008 Draft. Just saying.

So the NFL is considering changing the postseason format:

“In the early stages of Goodell’s plan, which would require the owners’ longshot approval, the bottom two division winners by record in each conference would go on the road the first week if they have a worse mark than the wild-card teams.”

The argument is it gives teams less room to sit players in the last couple weeks of the season. As a fantasy football enthusiast I like it because I will have one less thing to think about on draft day. Having the #1 pick not play in week sixteen because he’s on the fourth-best team in the NFL sucks.

In reality football it is an odd idea. An NFL team can lose all six of their divisional games and still make the playoffs as it stands. Now they could get a first-round home game to boot? I guess it makes sense from a parity standpoint but it waters down the meaning of winning the division.

I agree with the article. This has little chance of passing.

Until Roger Goodell made playoff formats an issue, the talk all week was about whether Super Bowl XLII was the best-ever. From the viewpoint of the Giant fan, the casual fan, the advertisers, FOX network it surely was. From the Patriot fan’s perspective, not so much.

It was a close game with a lot of drama throughout, something you don’t see every year. Sure there was XXX with Pittsburgh vs. Dallas and a late interception thrown by Neil O’Donnell. There was XXXII with Denver vs. Green Bay and a classic example of why you don’t let the other team score so you have more time for your offense. There was XXXIV with St. Louis vs. Tennessee and the Titans a yard-and-a-half away from tying the game at the end.

For every one of those games, there is a 34-7 stinker like in XXXV with the Ravens and the Giants. Or a 46-10 mauling of the Patriots in XX by the Bears. You never know what you will get.

Super Bowl XLII might not be the best-ever but it belongs as one of them, perhaps as high as top-five.

Top-three if the Patriots won.
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On the morning of February 6, 1978 my nine-year-old self awoke to a weather forecast of a weak low pressure system with some light snow accumulation. Light my ass! Thirty-two hours and five feet of snow later it finally ended.

Okay, maybe that was a stretch. It was more like twenty-seven inches in my town but it really lasted for two days. I also know that we had to walk everywhere for like a week afterwards which was a complete pain in the ass.

Plus, the whole thing started up on a Monday which meant most people’s spare cash was spent from the weekend. The damn banks were closed and there weren’t ATM’s. A few people had credit cards but the corner grocery store didn’t take them. Hell most had never even seen one.

“Mastercharge? What the hell kind of bank is that? How do you keep the money in a piece of plastic?”

Those insolent non-future-seeing fools!

There was no cable television yet. There was just ABC, NBC, and CBS and they all went off the air at like midnight. Video cassettes? Only rich people had those. Gaming consoles were non-existent. All you could do was read or play board games. Scrabble and Monopoly got old quickly.

That is of course if you had electricity.

One storm turned 1978 New England into the 1878 version. That also got stale fast. Turning the clock back on technology and progress sucks, even if it just for a week or two. But it did create a lot of November babies, I’ll give it that. And it sure beat being stuck on the roads.

Much like the Patriots in the Super Bowl, New England was caught with its collective pants down. That was pretty embarrassing being that we are supposed to be used to this stuff.

Of course we are supposed to be prepared for the moon being really close to the Earth, 2-4 feet of snow, and seventy-mile-an-hour winds. We should be ready for a Canadian high pressure system that stalls, trapping the storm over New England for two days.

We aren’t Nanook of the North for crying out loud. But that storm did scare us. It would be the last time there was a “no worries” policy towards snowstorms in New England.

The big winners from the Blizzard of ’78 were of course the dairy and grain producers and distributors. Ever since that storm, the minute there is any kind of a forecast of snow, everyone goes on a “bread and milk” run.

What a sucky week it was thirty years ago.
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