Brothers & Sisters and a Bad Robot

During last night's episode of Brothers & Sisters, sharp-eyed viewers such as myself may have noticed that the robot drawing by the "geeky magician" may have looked a little familiar. Did it ring a bell? Take another look:

Fans of a fair portion of modern television will recognize that drawing as the infamous "Bad Robot" production's signature Bad Robot.
See the resemblance? It's too uncanny to just be a coincidence, right? So what gives? Brothers & Sisters is not a J.J. Abrams/Bad Robot production. What's the connection?

To start, both Ron Rifkin and Balthazar Getty previously worked on Alias, a Bad Robot program. Patricia Wettig guest starred in the same show. Wettig's real-life husband, Ken Olin, is a producer for Brothers & Sisters and a guest star, and was previously a producer on Alias.

The J.J. Abrams connection continues. Sarah Caplan is also a producer for Brothers & Sisters, having previously worked on Felicity, Alias and Lost, all projects J.J. has been involved in.

"over 90,000 audience are turned on at the same time"

The 2008 Beijing Olympics ended with a magnificent ceremony on Sunday night. Due to the time difference between America and China, and the fact that NBC showed the ceremony on tape-delay many hours after the ceremony happened, that allowed for almost an entire day to transpire in which I could look up "spoilers" for what happened during the show. This brought me to an official Olympic web site, whose synopsis for the closing ceremonies brought humor and light joy to English native speakers whose language speak. Bless their hearts, they tried. And all things considered, they did a pretty good job of writing in English. But there are some things that, being a native English speaker, just strike me as plain funny. Here are some choice excerpts:

"Guided by volunteers, all audience count down from 10 together. Both Arabic numerals and numbers written in Chinese characters appear on the screen with typical patterns of minority ethnic groups as the background."
Chuck's Comment: "Typical patterns of minority ethnic groups"? I feel like I'm back in Cultural Anthropology class again.

"With 60 light wheels shuttling, 200 bouncing and flying men run and roll over."

"A women's percussion band for welcoming performance and two children percussion players play cheerful music, and the whole stadium is in raptures."

"The torch lights in the hands of the marshals and over 90,000 audience are turned on at the same time, implying that the holy flame will be in our hearts forever."

"When the singing performance reaches the climax, the "memory tower" performers on the tree of friendship descend rapidly." (Chuck's comment: does this mean the "memory tower" really does not like the song?)

"50 male dancers holding Fuwa lucky cloud yarn strips and paper flower launchers and 120 other dancers dance on the Main Stage in tune with the rhythm of the song." (Chuck's comment: Are the 120 other dancers female? Cross-dressers? Who are these "other dancers"?)

A Golden Girls exchange

I watch watching The Golden Girls the other night and there were a few lines that I thought I would share. Sophia "Ma" Petrillo is mother to Dorothy. Dorothy is maybe in her sixties, Ma in her eighties. That's all you need to know for this scene:

SOPHIA: This is the proudest I've been of you my whole life.

DOROTHY: Aw, thanks, Ma.

SOPHIA: Can you believe it? My whole life and this is the proudest moment. I'm depressed. I need a cookie.

I saw a tornado on LIVE TV

I was in my room, enjoying a mid-afternoon snack after having mowed the lawn. Buzz came into the room - enjoying the last few days of sharing a room with me, I'm sure - and turned on the television in order to play GameCube. The television had last been on the FOX News Channel, you see. So he turned it on and my eyes instinctively went to see what was on. He had quickly hit the "Input" button to get to the gaming system. But in that brief second, I recognized something. Something amazingly incredible, rare and magnificent. THIS:
A TORNADO. On live television. Taken with one of those helicopter cameras that can zoom in for miles and miles.

Normally when you get to see a tornado video, it's edited. All the choppy parts are gone, only the highlights are left. And it's usually not more than a minute or two. This video was real, raw and long. We saw the tornado go back up into the cloud, then come back down and hit the ground. Over and over again. It was almost chilling to realize that you were seeing this big, black thing as it actually happened.

If you want to see the video of that broadcast, click below:

Part One


Part Two

Lessons from TV: Raising children

I don't often like to post videos to convey my message. However, I'm feeling the slightest bit lazy about my blog right now. So I'm launching an irregular feature, Lessons from TV. I watch an episode of a TV show - it may be the same show repeatedly - and I talk about the lesson I took away from it. Television is often a metaphorical garden of horrible morals and lessons. So what am I doing? I'm highlighting what I think are some of the good flowers that can be found amongst the weeds.

Below is an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (my new favorite show) that deals with Mary's neighbor, Phyllis, and the ramifications of raising a child according to books. It's kind of funny, and in an abstract way, a kind of nice warning against using childrearing books as a tool, not a guide. And that's this week's Lessons from TV!



Also learned: Shopping cures years of bad parenting in a single afternoon. Who knew?!