Bad Glacier

David Letterman is awesome.

Is it just me, or was American Dad better than Family Guy tonight? I know I started off disliking American Dad, but it’s turning around. It looks like Seth is starting to figure out what’s working and what’s not. The alien seems less annoying now, if nothing else. [1]

Or maybe Family Guy was just disappointing. The new episodes have all been at least decent, and there are a couple hilarious moments in each of them, but the spaces in between feel somewhat forced. I can’t really figure out what it is. The overly long pauses aren’t as well-timed now, or the flashbacks aren’t as funny. It seems like the transition into them isn’t as smooth as it was before. It seems like Peter always says, “…like that time I…” and explains the whole situation beforehand, whereas before they’d let the joke surprise you. Sort of. I don’t know.

The show is still good, and it gets me to laugh out loud several times each episode, but it’s not up to the standards of the third season. Maybe Seth is focusing too much on American Dad. Maybe they have new writers or something. Maybe you think my expectations are too high, or that I’m just imagining things, or that I should just stop obsessing over an animated TV show.

Well, maybe you should shut the hell up.

[1] I reserve the right to delete this post and/or pretend I never wrote it if the show starts sucking again.

Did anyone else see last night’s episode of The Daily Show? Did Newt Gingrich actually go from pimping a novel about an alternate ending to the Civil War to basically admitting he’s running for President in ‘08?

I just thought the two acts were mutually exclusive, that’s all.

Extra!: I looked the book up on Amazon, and this section of one of the reviews cracked me up:

The key factor to an alternative history such as this one remains have the characters ring true. Lee continues to take advantage of the tendencies of his opponents and Grant refuses to back off not matter what the body count. George Armstrong Custer is always looking for glory while Pete Longstreet will always want to be safe rather than sorry.

Yup, nothing rings true like one-dimensional, stereotyped characters.

(Of course, this says nothing about the actual books. They could be quite good for all I know. I just wanted to mock this reviewer.)

Reminder: there’ll be a new Family Guy at 9:00 tomorrow on FOX!

Last night’s episode of The Simpsons was prefaced by a warning: “This episode discusses same-sex marriage. Viewer discretion is advised.”

Because in Ohio, we’re scared of gay people. I hear it’s contagious. The gay, I mean.

Bleah. Tonight was a letdown. Not so much the game (it was decent, if a little sloppy) or the commercials (monkeys are funny; everything else, not so much), but the return of Seth MacFarlane (the Family Guy guy) to FOX. His new show, American Dad, was disappointing.

On the bright side, Family Guy is coming back May 1.

And no, this post didn’t have a point.

Other than The Daily Show and Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, I don’t watch much TV. I get my news, music, and much of my entertainment online. But I was in Cleveland this weekend and saw a few shows (there are few things more fun than relaxing with my girlfriend, watching TV and mocking everything we can). I don’t have anything interesting to say about law school, so I’d like to write about TV.

First off is “Numb3rs”, CBS’s new show about a math professor who, in his spare time, uses mathematics to fight crime with his FBI agent brother. Yeah, it’s about as realistic as you’d expect.

I guess CBS is trying to stick with the “CSI” template by showing another side of criminal investigations (I’ve got something to write about CSI, too. Later.). But math? C’mon. The show is apparently based on real-life events, but the episode I saw (yeah, I’m basing this post on one episode. Pshh, I don’t have to try to be fair.) had the math genius using his huge brain to predict where bank robbers would strike next. His model worked; the FBI confronted the bank robbers in the middle of their next heist. But the theives had backup, so his model didn’t work after all! Now, you might say that since his model was only meant to predict the location of the next robbery, it worked just fine. But you’re wrong.

So what does a failed-FBI-agent-slash-math-professor do now? Well, he certainly doesn’t continue teaching or work on a new model that tries to predict the theives’ escape plan. Instead, he lectures his brother on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (wait, that’s physics, not math), stops going to his lectures, and starts work on “P = NP?“, a famously unsolved (possibly unsolvable) problem in theoretical computer science. I’d think that after such a spectacular failure, he’d work on something a little less… um… impossible. But that’s just me.

All in all, I didn’t really like the show. It was boring and it felt like the math was forced into the show to provide a gimmick. All he did was find a pattern, anyways. Bah.