DirecTV still sucks. I’ve been trapped in my apartment since Wednesday, missing all the rich, juicy television that’s been airing, waiting for the FedEx guy to finally show up with my new receiver. Now I’ve got to be trapped in my apartment Monday as well, waiting for a service guy to come out and fix the new receiver.

The tech support person on the phone kept going on about how these new receivers were so much in demand, and every time I pointed out that they don’t work, she found a way to spin it. I’m one of the lucky few to be on the bleeding edge of technology, apparently. Ditching TiVo to make their own bug-ridden and less-functional PVR wasn’t a colossally selfish and short-sighted business move on DirecTV’s part, it’s the beginning of a brave new world.

Anyway, the point of all that is that I finally got caught up with the last two episodes of “Lost” by watching them in tiny, pixelated format on ABC’s website. I liked them better than I liked the season premiere, but the whole thing still feels weird. Not the kind of weird that you watch “Lost” for in the first place, but the kind of weird where you can’t quite tell what the people making the show are doing.

It seems like they suddenly forgot how to make a great show and are feeling their way back to it, just based on somebody else’s written description of the series. (And yeah, I said “suddenly.” Remember that I think that season 2 was great.) They know that an island’s involved, and strange things keep happening, and the characters have flashbacks, and didn’t somebody mention a polar bear at one point?

(By the way, spoilers apply from here on out, in case you haven’t seen the two episodes).

So each episode has a really cool sequence — the guy landing on Jin’s car, and Locke’s vision quest. After each, I thought, “Yes! This is the show I got into.” But by the end of each episode, I was back to thinking, “Wha? But I… huh?” The flashbacks seem unfinished; are they going to be extending them across multiple episodes now? What’s the resolution of the guy landing on Jin’s car? Did he really just jump, and that’s the whole story? I kept waiting for Sun to flash back, right before she shot one of the Others, to show her pushing the dude out the window.

And what about Locke’s flashback? The whole point was for him to say he used to be a farmer but now he’s a hunter? No sudden gruesome death of undercover police guy? The pot farmers get arrested, and that’s what he meant by “bad things happen to people who hang around me?” I can see why he waited 69 days for that flashback, because that’s a totally boring memory.

On the whole, it seems like they’ve only got enough material for three episodes, and they’re trying to stretch them out to fill six. And the big revelations are okay, I guess, but they’re stretched out to the point where my reaction isn’t “whoa!” but “whatever.” Jack is going to be tempted to betray his friends, okay, and… here, look at the Red Sox winning the World Series! How weird is that? And Desmond can now remember the future. Yep, he sure can. Look at him, there, standing there on the beach, rememberin’. Hurley sure is freaked out by that, even though that rates about a 4 on the scale of Weird Shit Happening On This Island.

There are three episodes left to go, and hopefully my TV situation will be worked out by the time the next one airs. One of the creators has said that by the end of the sixth, before the hiatus, there’ll be this major revelation that takes the show in a whole new direction that nobody saw coming. I hope they’ve got the goods to deliver.

Do you know what’s the best thing to do for jetlag your first night back home? If you said, “sleep through the day, then stay up all night watching a marathon of ‘Doctor Who’ episodes on DVD,” you’re wrong! Don’t worry, though, because that was my answer at first, too.

I’m definitely no stranger to unnatural circadian rhythms, but being this far out of sync is weird, even for me. Usually I can have a somewhat normal day, just offset a few hours from the rest of the world. Today and yesterday have felt as if I’m stuck in some kind of limbo — I can’t do anything, and can’t seem to get back on track.

It doesn’t help that I had to stay by the apartment all day waiting for the FedEx guy to not show up. I’m still without a functional satellite box, so I’m missing all the TV shows airing this week in addition to all the ones I missed last week. “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” and even “Heroes” and “How I Met Your Mother” are all going on without me, and I’ve been trapped here without any contact with non-televised humans, either.

On the bright side, though, I can’t say enough how much I like the new(-ish) “Doctor Who”. The ones I watched ended with a two-parter set during the London blitz, and it’s the two most enjoyable hours of television I’ve seen in a long time. Everything in the story was telegraphed way ahead, and none of the “surprises” in the plot were all that surprising. But still by the end of it all, I was laughing at just how well-told a story it was, and by how well the ending worked. It’s not going for gritty realism or “adult” complexity; it’s just great, well-crafted storytelling.

And creepy as hell in parts, too. You can tell that the creators of the new “Doctor Who” are going for the same kinds of indelible images imprinted on them from the original series, more of an iconic, emotional reaction than a cerebral one. It’s the same kind of phenomenon that lets us instantly recognize a Dalek and the “EX…TERM…I…NATE!” cry even if we don’t remember watching the original series. And I think the image of a gas-mask wearing boy who wanders the streets of London during air raids, repeatedly asking “Are you my mummy?” is something that won’t be going away any time soon.

Thanks to the International Date Line (1-900-UN-SLUTZ), I have to live Tuesday, October 17th all over again. I feel like I should use the opportunity to correct any mistakes I made the first time around, but I can’t think of anything particularly boneheaded I did other-today. As an added bonus, I should be relatively jetlag-free, since on the plane I slept like a rock. Assuming that there are rocks that drool all over themselves while making noises like a wounded bear being fellated with a leaf-blower.

Hey, here’s something comical: immediately after typing that last sentence, I fell asleep and woke up six hours later. More evidence I’m living in a long, slow, hackneyed sitcom.

Monday was my last day of sight-seeing, and as I mentioned I hit Tokyo Disneyland in the morning and then Akihabara in the afternoon. I think I know why Japan’s bubble economy burst — everybody in the entire damn city spends all their time at Disneyland! I could kind of understand why the parks would be so crowded on a weekend, but being there on a Monday morning in October and seeing all the rides with wait times ranging 45 to 120 minutes just caused something to snap. I became replaced with some alternate dimension anti-Chuck.

I decided I hated Disney and I hated Japan. I was tired of all the cloying, schmaltzy music and the over-done decorations and costumes. I was sick of seeing people walking by wearing clothes that assaulted my native language (”Be a HIGH CLASS! Girl is charming!”). I was tired of maps where south is at the top of the page. I was sick of wandering from one interminable queue to the next, never able to find a trash can. I was tired of seeing a city so intent on regimented population-reprogramming that there are vending machines selling cigarettes and drinks every 20 feet, but you can only drink or smoke in designated areas — not just in the theme parks, but throughout the entire city.

I left Disneyland after a few hours. (Two of those hours were spent in line for Pooh’s Hunny Hunt, which is still cool as hell, but a two-hour wait is pushing it). I took a train ride to Akihabara, the nerd mecca, and just wasn’t in a mood for any of it. By the way, if anyone’s planning a trip to Japan, avoid the Lonely Planet guide books. Four of the noted attractions they recommended, ones that I planned around seeing, turned out to be huge disappointments. Monday’s was the Tokyo Anime Center, which ended up being a room at the top of a mall complex with a TV screen and an adjoining overpriced gift shop. Even the Metreon’s Bandai-sponsored anime-devoted floor was more impressive.

After that, I’d about had it. I trudged back to the train station, past several comics and anime and toy and videogame and electronics stores without heading in to any of them. My train car back to Shibuya had an old woman who muttered constantly in Japanese, causing everyone else to look away and pretend she didn’t exist. She fixated herself on a couple of women with a baby stroller, talking at them for a minute at a time before sitting back down and muttering to herself. Eventually she marched to the center of the car and screamed something at them. She put her hand on my shoulder, pointed at the two women, said something that ended in “baka desu ne?” (”they’re idiots, aren’t they?”) and tromped off. I walked back to the hotel and had a bath.

It’s entirely likely that my crankiness was caused by toxins from my feet seeping up into my brain, because once I’d rested I was in a much better mood. I went to a restaurant in Shibuya called the “Christon Cafe,” which was recommended by a friend of a friend. It’s decorated like a gothic cathedral, with statues and furniture from real churches throughout Europe, and the food was excellent. By the time I got back to the hotel and called it an early night, I was a lot less inclined to write Tokyo off as a failed social experiment. I still don’t think I’d be able to live there for any length of time, but going on vacation once every four years might work.

When I arrived back in San Francisco this morning, I immediately noticed that the level of service took a nose dive. But still, it’s not a bad place to be. It was good to be back home, but unlike returning from Georgia, I didn’t have the same feeling of being desperate to get back to my normal routine. It was a clear, sunny morning, I was back on familiar ground with my own car and my own schedule. I realized that there are still tons of places around here I haven’t seen; I don’t need to leave the country to be a tourist. I just felt like taking an aimless drive, knowing that I could stop anywhere and do stuff and buy stuff without having to point. I could drive to Seattle, or Vancouver, or Denver, or Fresno!

But then again, here I’ve got an Xbox. So I’ll get around to that traveling some more later.

And here are the photos from my trip online: Tokyo DisneySea, Yoyogi Park, the Meiji Shrine, and Harajuku, Asakusa, and Various shots from around Tokyo.

I’d planned to keep the internets updated with the day-to-day progress of my adventures in Tokyo, with pictures and video and all that great stuff. At last, a blog worth reading!

But tonight I’m so very very tired. It’s only 10 PM here and I’m already looking forward to a long, coma-like sleep. What I saw and did today, in list form:

1. Walked around side-streets of Shibuya
2. Took the NHK studio tour (NHK is a Japanese television station)
3. Saw a (really impressive) Taiko performance at some Sri Lankan festival in Yoyogi park
4. Walked around the full circumference of Yoyogi Park
5. Visited the Meiji Shrine
6. Took a couple of pictures of the kids dressed up in Harajuku, before I realized I really didn’t care
7. Visited the Drum Museum in Asakusa (big disappointment)
8. Walked all around the side streets of Asakusa’s temple area
9. Visited the Senso-ji temple in Asakusa (really impressive)
10. Walked around the Senso-ji area at least 4 times, trying to find the tanuki shrine Chingodo-ji
11. Finally realized that I’d been standing right in front of the door to Chingodo-ji four times, but it was closed today
12. Walked to the bridge over the Sumida river, then took the train back to Shibuya

Which, after a couple days walking around a theme park, means that my feet are petitioning to secede from the rest of my body, since the sanctions clearly aren’t working. I’m actually kind of hungry, but can’t walk anywhere for dinner, and can’t afford any of the restaurants in the hotel.

What I should do tomorrow: lie down. What I plan to do: hit Tokyo Disneyland in the morning, then tour the videogame and electronics stores in Akihabara in the afternoon. No telling when I’ll be back to Japan, so I’ve got to get everything in that I can.

Saturday morning there was a 5-magnitude earthquake in the ocean east of Japan. It happened around 6:40 AM.

The reason I know the time is because I’d gotten up at 6 that morning, then promptly fell back asleep and had the following dream: there’s no snooze button on the alarm clock in my hotel (which is true). Even though they could make a toilet that had a built-in remote-controlled bidet and general-purpose ass-sprayer (also true), they were never able to develop snooze button technology. It had become a source of great shame for the people of Japan, and they had their top scientists working to develop a snooze button that would rival the Americans’. At the moment, though, the hotel had to have employees come into my room and gently rock me awake so that I wouldn’t miss my meeting with my co-workers.

Once awake, I jumped out of bed a lot more nimbly than you’d expect from somebody of my girth and general lethargy. I ran to the bathroom and stood in the doorway, remaining there long enough to realize that it wasn’t a big enough bathroom door to have any earthquake-resistant structure, and besides I’d end up standing on the 20th floor of a crumbled tower of rubble in the center of Tokyo wearing nothing more than my boxer shorts. It would be like the heartbreaking ending of Godzilla vs. Sasquatch.

Most of Saturday I spent with co-workers at the Tokyo DisneySea park. Turns out there’s some sort of seasonal promotion going on, so the Tokyo Disney parks were unusually crowded over the weekend. Note that this is “unusally crowded” for a theme park in a metro area population of 40 million people, “unusually crowded” for a place that was crowded when I went on a freezing cold weekday in December. I ended up only riding two things, because there was an almost two hour wait for each.

That’s not as bad as it may sound, because Tokyo DisneySea is all about the themeing; you could say the rides are secondary. The new Tower of Terror, which opened last month, was pretty good — the building itself is spectacular; the queue is interesting and unlike the US versions, actually looks like a hotel; the pre-show effects are really, really cool; and hearing an elevator full of normally-sedate locals screaming their head off was the highlight.

I also rode the Journey to the Center of the Earth ride, which was better than I’d remembered it. I was a little distracted, because the little girl and her mother sitting in front of me kept saying, “kirei!” (pretty!) and I was marveling that I’d actually remembered a word of Japanese.

After DisneySea, we went to Shinjuku for some very good sushi, then a drink at the hotel from Lost in Translation. The nighttime view from the top floor is spectacular, but the rest of the place I’m content to never see again. Mediocre, overpriced drinks, obsequious service (even for Japan); the whole thing had a very creepy feel of excess to it. Still, it’s a place I never, ever, ever would’ve gone to by myself, so it was worth it.

Kon-ban wa, minna-san! I’m writing to you from the future! It’s a quarter to eleven pm on Thursday, way past this gaijin’s bedtime. I’m going to watch the rest of Downtown’s show and share the experience with my internet pals, and then see if I can make one of those little bubble things come out of my nose when I sleep.

You can really tell when the client pays for my travel; business class rocks. On top of all the leg room, they warm the nuts for you. And serve them in a glass cup. The rest of the food was pretty good, too. It can’t change the fact that you’re stuck on a plane for 10 hours, but it helps.

This time, I’m with coworkers who know their way around Tokyo somewhat. It’s better than going alone in all the practical ways, but it’s kind of a disappointment, too — the last time I came to Japan, everything was so completely foreign it added to the excitement of it all. The city is still cool, but the sense of its being completely overwhelming is part of the appeal. I’ll get to do some more exploring for a couple of days after my work is over, and I’ll be reporting back to all of you, my loyal internet hordes.

PS: Here’s a handy travel tip: check the forecast for your destination city before you buy clothes. When I went to Japan last time, it was in December and I remember freezing my ass off the entire time. So I got a lot of warm stuff, then got here and found out it’s going to be in the high 70s all week. Stupid gaijin.

• If you missed last Sunday’s “Venture Brothers,” like I did, because DirecTV sucks, and they broke their deal with TiVo to reinvent the wheel and release a buggy-as-hell crippled DVR that you have to use if you want HDTV but it breaks just a few days after you get it and so you have to go without TV until they send you a new one, then don’t worry!

  It’s available on Adult Swim’s “Fix” site but won’t be for long. The episode was called “Showdown at Cremation Creek” and is a 2-parter. Make sure you click the link quick, or you’ll have to watch a promo for “Squidbillies.”

• SciFi.com has interviews with Grace Park from “Battlestar Galactica” where she answers questions posted on the message board. I know I came down hard on hot geeks earlier, but I get a funny feeling deep down inside when I see her talk about Cylons and how Boomer is not the same character as Sharon.

  Seriously, I get a real kick out of seeing and reading interviews with the “hot” cast members of the show, because they all seem into it. They’re not in denial about whether it’s science fiction or political drama; they’re completely aware of what they’re making and they’re putting their energy into making it work, even if it means having to know the difference between a Viper and a Raider.

• According to 43folders.com and upcoming.org, John Hodgman is reading from his book The Areas of My Expertise in San Francisco this Thursday.
  
  
• The New York Times Magazine ran a long article about Spore (registration may be required). It doesn’t really cover anything you haven’t heard before if you’ve been following the game, but it does give a little perspective.

  Most interesting to me was the quote from Will Wright: “I’ve had a few people ask me if I think Spore will help teach evolution, and the ironic thing is that, if anything, we’re teaching intelligent design. I’ve seen a few games that relied on evolution — I’ve even designed some of them — and it’s just not as fun.”

• Check out Dave Grossman’s Pumpkin House of Horrors. No new entry yet for this year, but it’ll help you get in the mood. (For Halloween).

An entry on the Sci Fi Wire blog says that David Eick, one of the creators of the new “Battlestar Galactica,” is planning a “complete reconceptualization” of the series “The Bionic Woman”.

I called some of my contacts in the industry and obtained a top-secret document detailing the proposed story arc for the first season:

Prologue
A series of 8 “webisodes” available exclusively on SciFi.com, detailing the work of the brilliant doctor who comes up with bionic technology. After her most important breakthrough, operatives from a rival technology firm kidnap the doctor in an action-packed sequence. They then rape her, steal her blueprints and her ovaries, bury her alive, make fraudulent charges on her credit cards, dig her up, rape her again, then murder her. Runs May through July with strong lead-in to August season pilot.

Episodes 1-2 (Pilot)
Career woman with promising career is told she’s infertile. Thrown into depression, she develops eating disorder then gradually more self-destructive behavior. Leaves fiance, takes up extreme sports. Final 30 minutes of episode 2 shows skydiving accident in prolonged, horrific detail.

Episode 3
Cut between flashbacks to skydiving accident and invasive medical procedures. Pronounced dead. Misogynist military biotech expert proposes bionic enhancement, has difficulties with his own marriage and deals with death of his mother.

Episode 4
More flashbacks of skydiving accident, invasive bionic medical procedures. Biotech expert develops drinking problem.

Episode 5
Physical therapy, frustration and suicide attempts, addiction to pain killers. Cliffhanger: military presents incalculable medical bills, only way to repay is to work as covert gov’t operative.

Episode 6
While in gov’t training, bionic woman fails to save little girl from oncoming train. Wracked with guilt. Shadowy figure pleased at success of gov’t’s new “omega weapon.”

Episodes 7-10
Black ops missions in Afghanistan and the Sudan. Supporting cast introduced, killed. Bionic woman deals with secret drug addiction, wracked with guilt over death of little girl.

Episodes 11-12
Two parter. Bionic woman forced to assassinate her ex-fiance (an upcoming presidential candidate) and his new wife.

Episode 13
Bionic woman teams with Sasquatch to fight evil Soviet fembots. (Sweeps)

Episodes 14-20
Cancer.

Episode 21
Remission.

Episode 22
More cancer.

Episode 23
Problems with aural implant lead to suspicions of schizophrenia. Suspected mole in agency, evil twin of her biotech expert primary contact. One is rigged with explosives to blow up the Pentagon. Who can she trust?

Episode 24
Bionic arm goes awry, killing Pope. Wracked with guilt.

Episodes 25-26
Meets rival agent, falls in love. Discovers he is also equipped with bionics. Make elaborate plans to leave their respective agencies and escape to obscure island in S. Pacific. Elopement. New husband is killed in horrific wedding night malfunction. She is charged with murder. Was it all a set-up? (Cliffhanger)