October 06, 2006
Drawn together
Drawn together is an offensive little show on Comedy Central that just gets better each season. Part of what makes it great is that although there's no shortage of potty humour and over-the-top cheap-shot jokes, there are layers and layers of funny, some of which are pretty subtle (and not explained!). The fraternity that Captain Hero starts this week? "![[phi-alpha-gimel]](/pix/text/ph-al-gi.png)
"—that last letter is Hebrew "gimel". The Jewish fraternity is meant to be "![[SH-L-M]](/pix/text/shalom.png)
"—i.e. "Shalom"*—although it's in fact "![[M-L-SH]](/pix/text/malash.png)
", because they wrote the letters backwards, in left-to-right order. The terrified little Greek kid shouts "![[evcharisto]](/pix/text/evxaristo.png)
!"—which, not that the majority of the audience would know this, means "thanks!".
Ling Ling goes meta: since he speaks in pseudo-Japanese, you need to read the subtitles to know what he's saying, and just as you're cursing the bunch of idiots at Comedy Central who put a Daily Show ad up as a superimposed lower third—blocking the subtitles—the other characters react as if Ling Ling is talking about TDS ("Oh, I love that Jon Stewart"). Magnificent!
And that was just the linguistic and metalinguistic humour in this one episode. The best line in the show had to be the one tied to one of Toot's bizarre Asian-themed euphemisms:
- Toot:
- I deserve this money! I've been letting Jun-Jee ram his tank into my Tiananmen Square!
(aside in confessional, mournfully:)
Sadly, he always ignores the little student.
Although the line about George Takei was right up there. By the time they flew to Greece and disembarked at Rydell High (get it?), I was just howling. The full-on musical number at the end was just gravy.
*Even this would be incorrect, as the Hebrew for "shalom" has a vav in it, I think. But, I'm pretty positive that's what they meant.
'Can't offer details on individual units, but Kim, TiVo was made for
you. Somewhere deep in TiVo central, someone's saying, "I can't believe
she hasn't gotten one yet. I mean, we made it just for her."'
--Jonathan Prykop
Posted
by blahedo
at 11:55pm
on 6 Oct 2006
In other news, it's about time I thought about upgrading to a new version of MT (or switch to a different blog engine): this one kept garbling the foreign characters in this post whenever I submitted, and so I ended up just doing a screen capture of those words and posting the images, as if this were 1995 or something. Sheesh.
Not that you asked for advice in the "install linux!" vein, but Wordpress is really excellent. And the Kismet spam plugin that comes with it is pretty good at stopping spam completely -- maybe one or two comes through a month out of the hundreds of spam comments I get.
I really liked the first season, but I have not seen more recent ones. Loren just does not sleep enough hours in a day for me to see the things I don't want her to watch. I am even behind in Robot Chickens.
Tivo is the greatest. I love stopping the show we are watching to talk about what has just happened and speculate about what is happening next. It makes it more book club like rather than just passive consumption. I think the better writers are picking up on this too. I watched Psych, and certainly the writer of that expects that someone is paying attention to the details of the language used.
It's interesting to hear that other people do the stop-the-show-to-discuss thing. We do the same thing.
On a different note, though still concerning TiVo: Having replaced the HD in my Series2 to give us more disk space, I've had to replace it a second time because something (I suspect the heat) caused the initial replacement HD to start failing. And then TiVo comes along with an offer to let you transfer your lifetime service (which is no longer a purchase option for new boxes) from an older TiVo to a Series3, which is not only newer and shinier but also has an external SATA port to use to expand the storage. So it costs $1000 ($799 for the box itself, $199 to transfer the lifetime service and cover a year of service for the older box after the transfer), but wow, it's awesome. And I'm going to hook up the new one today. Yes, yes I am. I'm getting right on that.
DVR was in fact made just for me. It's a pity that the cable DVR box won't do all the nifty treats that TiVo will, but it was cheap and quick. I am loving it.
