Thanks to the last few months of under-employment (which ends tomorrow), my TV-watching has almost gotten back up to the levels before I worked for EA and before I discovered RSS feeds. I still haven’t suddenly regained consciousness sitting on the couch 35 minutes into a History Channel documentary about classified Nazi cheese experiments, but I have spent 3 straight hours watching back-to-back episodes of “Mythbusters.”

And I still won’t watch whatever’s on, just for the sake of watching TV. Which means that the list of shows I watch with any regularity is also the list of

Best Series Currently In Production

1. “The Venture Brothers”
This could’ve been just an obvious parody of “Jonny Quest,” ‘cept it’s all edgy, and the pilot was pretty much exactly that. But Jackson Public and Doc Hammer just get it, more than the creators of any other series except maybe “Arrested Development.” One episode of “The Venture Brothers” has a dozen throwaway gags that lesser writers would try to form entire TV series or Lorne Michaels-produced movies from. Just the details are hilarious: like when Hank & Dean make the Go Team Venture! sign and you can see the light from it reflected on their dates. And also, Patrick Warburton as Brock is the best animated character ever. Next to maybe Dr. Girlfriend.

2. “Battlestar Galactica”
I admit I didn’t watch it at the start. It was too depressing, and I didn’t cotton to the idea of a female Starbuck. I still don’t like her very much, and I still hate Apollo, but the series is just every bit as good as people are saying it is. And huge stuff happens, all the time. Whenever I see the count of survivors at the beginning of an episode, I remember being a kid on the way home from elementary school (okay, maybe it was middle school) and screaming at the bus driver to go faster so I’d get home in time for “Starblazers.”

3. “30 Rock”
I’m still baffled as to how a show that started out so shaky turned into one of the best comedy series ever. Everybody goes on about how great Alec Baldwin is, and he is, but he’s not even carrying the show anymore. Most series would’ve been content just to have Paul Reubens as inbred Austrian royalty (with only one real limb, which was genius), but they threw in a catfight between Isabella Rosselini and Tina Fey, as if they had a direct line to my subconscious. I still say it’s a shame they don’t use Rachel Dratch more often.

4. “How I Met Your Mother”
I started watching this one just because Willow was on it. And I figured it’s pleasant enough, so I’ll watch it if it’s on and I’ve got nothing better to do. Somewhere along the line it became one of my favorite series. Just recently, they had three or four episodes back to back that were just hilarious, and now that they’ve hit their stride, they’re consistently funny. And they have the most appealing cast on TV right now. I think the best thing they did was changing the big question from when is Ted going to meet “your mother,” to when the remaining slap-bet slaps are going to happen.

5. “Lost”
This week’s episode was pretty strong, and it was a good sign that they’re slowly getting back on track. The sad fact is that even if the executive producers of the show really are as smarmy as they come across in interviews, and even if they have no idea where they’re going, and even if they’re unable to get themselves out of the corner they’ve painted themselves into, this still has some of the best performances, set design, and just overall production quality of any series on TV. (Even “Galactica.”)

6. “Monk”
I’d speculate the reason this series is underrated is because it’s so formulaic. That’s actually kind of why I like it. It’s got so many formulas and cliches weighing it down, and still manages to be great TV. Every episode has to have the hour-long crime drama format, plus the unassuming “Colombo”-style detective with issues, plus the comedy scene showing Monk freaking out because he’s completely out of his element, plus the black-and-white recap at the end, plus all the formulaic bits from a Sherlock Holmes story, plus the therapy session, plus the character development. As if that weren’t stifling enough, they’ve by now established their own formula, of making every episode somehow “bittersweet.” Still, instead of being hobbled by it, they come up with some great mysteries and characters that for the most part (except for Disher) feel real. I’m just really impressed with how solid the show is, going into its fourth season, dabbling a little bit in an overarching storyline (Trudy’s death) but not really needing it.

I’ve got to say I was completely wrong about Sharona’s leaving. The character of Natalie is my favorite one in the series now; she’s not abrasive or annoying, but not saintly, either. And the actress playing her (Traylor Howard, from the pizza place) does a great job. Her delivery is perfect, always, and she just makes you glad she’s there even during the frequent times her character’s given nothing to do. There’s a lot to be said just for being appealing, and she, and the series itself, always manages to do that.

7. “Heroes”
Yeah, the writing is still weak, and there are plot holes you could pilot the X-Men’s jet through, and the marketing hype blitz around it is annoying. Yeah, I’m still completely hooked on it. I don’t want to talk about it.

8. “Mythbusters”
They know what the people want, and they deliver it. Even if it is 10% science and 90% explosions, it’s not like they ever claim otherwise; they’re proud of it. I don’t recommend anybody watch three hours back-to-back of it, though: the gang gets pretty annoying after a while.

The week of porn spam post titles was such an unprecedented success, I think I’ll keep up the theme weeks forever or until I get tired of it.

This week is Stuff I Like Week. Or, if like me, you’ve taken one quarter of Spanish 101: La Semana de las cosas que me gusta.

Believe it or not, up until now I’ve attempted to make this blog partially interesting to other people. It just occurred to me recently that until my Technorati rating breaks out of the lower 10th percentile, I’m under no such obligation. Thus, a whole week with two of the most boring, most self-indulgent things no one else is interested in reading: lists of my favorite things.

It’s going to be so awesome, that all of y’all are going to have to start blogs and make lists of your favorite things, and this will be at the top of each one.

I went to Disneyland over the weekend, and it was fun. There’s not a ton of new stuff going on at the park, and we’ve gotten pretty ritualistic with our trips — get up ass-early, drive down, eat at the Apricot Tree, check in at the hotel, sleep, get up and drink, get up ass-early, go to Disneyland, ride everything, take pictures, eat a big-ass steak, get up slightly later, ride everything else, go home, write about it on the internets. So you might think that it’s just a chance to have fun and relax with friends, and there’s no way to get any self-obsessed blog material out of it.

Not so! I’ve got not one, but two observations:

1. I think I might be insane. Since I live alone and work from home, this weekend was the first time in a long while I’ve been expected to actually make conversation for an extended period of time. And I was forced for the first time to actually listen to myself. From my experience with mentally unstable people — in the city and on the buses, and that documentary I saw that one time about the schizophrenic — they have a particular speech pattern. It’s a lot of mumbling, with obsession on decades-old grievances or a single memorable experience, along with plenty of totally non-sequitur pop culture references.

In a news report I saw one time about a panhandling ban somewhere in the south bay, they interviewed a homeless guy on camera. In about 30 seconds of talking, he mentioned his time in Vietnam twice, and started a statement about how the ban was unfair that ended with: “I’m just a good old boy, never meanin’ no harm. Beats all you ever saw, been in trouble with the law since the day I was born.” In two days, I mentioned my trip to Japan at least 20 times, and ended about every other sentence with a random quote from Achewood or a sitcom. Not even voluntarily, half the time; it’s like post-modern pop-culture Turette’s.

On the bright side, though, I’m pretty sure I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. So if they are signs of insanity, I’ve been insane for a very long time.

2. Riding Big Thunder Mountain during the fireworks is one of the most awesome things a human can do. I’m a sucker for fireworks shows, and Disney does the best. I can go to the appointed optimal viewing area at the designated 15 minutes before the show starts, stand with thousands of strangers, and watch the show with its accompanying soundtrack, and enjoy it perfectly. But one trip, we skipped the fireworks and rode the roller coaster instead, and by accident happened to be on it just as the show’s finale was happening. It was cool enough to do it on purpose.

And riding what’s already a brilliantly-designed coaster, and coming out of a dark tunnel just as a huge bloom of fireworks is going off overhead, is such a cool combination that it couldn’t possibly be topped by any pre-orchestrated Disney presentation.

I was wondering about this on the long drive home — would it be practical or even possible to design a roller coaster so that you see fireworks blasts every time? It’d be expensive, sure, but barring the cost, how would it work? At this point, Disney’s got pyrotechnics down to the point where they can shoot off an explosive finale at will and have it work perfectly every time, night after night. At one of the dance clubs at Pleasure Island, they fire a blast at the stroke of midnight, every night, right in sync with whatever song is being played by the DJ. (At least, they did several years ago, back when I was young enough to be at Downtown Disney around midnight).

I’m convinced they could do it, and I think they could even work out a way to make it feasible for something as high-volume as a coaster. But it just wouldn’t be cool. A lot of the awesomeness of it is knowing that it just happened, and there wasn’t a team of people working behind the scenes to get it to happen perfectly, exactly on cue.

Most Disney critics — the normal people looking in from the outside, not the jaded and embittered people so mired under theme park obsession that their only link with the real world is criticizing every move that corporate management makes — fault the company for being too orchestrated, saccharine, and fake. The company has to innovate within the bounds of catering to an inconceivably large and wide audience (and that’s not a crack about obesity of Orlando park-goers), and as a result, they have to design experiences that injure no one, offend no one, and play exactly the same way for every person, every minute of every day.

Therefore, in the real woods of Tom Sawyer Island, for example, you get plastic tree stumps designed to look like real tree stumps, housing speakers playing bird calls and other nature sounds. It’s an experience so far removed from nature that it feels even less real than Tomorrowland.

That’s the core of why Disneyland is more appealing than the parks in Florida, Tokyo, and Paris, even though the others are more impressive in size, engineering, and overall spectacle. Even today, Disneyland still feels less orchestrated and more spontaneous and random. The live entertainment is more accessible and feels less scripted (even though it’s definitely not). There are just too many people now not to have designated character greeting times, with an orderly line for each, but you can still manage to see characters wandering around the park, having random interactions with guests. Somehow the park still manages to feel more casual, more like a bunch of people getting together to have a good time, instead of being admitted to an enormous, orderly, well-maintained and meticulously organized, but ultimately a little cold and sterile, machine.

And that’s why I think their new “year of a million dreams” promotion — where prizes are given out not for going through a turnstile or having a raffle ticket or entering a drawing; but randomly and spontaneously, no matter where you are at the time — is such a great idea. No long lists of rules presented by armies of lawyers, or angry, tired guests jockeying for position to be the big winner. It’s an ingenious way to tell guests that they are special, just like the millions of people in the parks with them at the same time, and make it actually work.

Man, I want to get a 24″ iMac so bad I can taste it. The problem is I don’t, strictly speaking, need one.

I’m a master at convincing myself to blow too much money on excess stuff, and my skill only increases when Apple’s involved. But I’m hitting a brick wall here.

At the moment, I’ve got a PC that’s a little over two years old, and a MacBook Pro that I got last spring. I use the laptop for about 99.9% of everything. The PC is now my ghetto machine, for work stuff that only runs in Windows, for games (and it’s already showing its age on that front), and for “private web browsing” of stuff I don’t want anybody to know I look at and don’t want in my main machine’s browser history (like this).

So really, it all comes down to the fact that I want a bigger monitor (somewhat valid), and it bugs me that I’m using a laptop as my desktop computer (totally irrational). And, I guess, I want to get more room on my desk. I could ditch the PC, and the only thing I’d be missing out on — apart from the wad of cash I spent on it a couple of years ago — is the ability to play a videogame full-screen while checking my e-mail. I suspect I’d find some way to manage.

Part of me says that as long as I’m jonesing for a computer, I should be all excited about the Mac Pro. It’d be better at running both OS X and Windows stuff (if you believe some people, it runs Vista better than it does OS X), and it’d be more expandable. Which is to say, expandable at all.

Every instinct I have says it’s a bad idea to buy a machine on which you can’t swap out video cards and hard drives, but then I’ve got to look back at my track record and the mass-market, preconfigured computer industry as a whole. These things just ain’t as upgradeable as they used to be. Apple’s most guilty of it, granted, but across the board, it seems like the planned obsolescence lifespan of computers and electronics has shrunk to just over two years.

But, much like James Bond and my car, they just won’t die, is the problem. They linger. They stay just functional enough that they’re perfectly adequate for most of what you want to do, but constantly give you reminders that they’re old. That top-of-the-line videocard you shelled out for now wheezes when it tries to display a Flash movie. That monitor that seemed more than big enough a couple of years ago, now seems cramped and confining. That 1GB of memory that at the time was so excessive you started to reminisce about how your first computer didn’t even have a quarter of that in hard drive space, now is just a minimum requirement. And sure, you could upgrade, but it’s like putting bionic parts on your high school sweetheart, when you really want to run off with the new secretary/trophy wife.

Which all leads me to realize that this thing that Apple marketing and product design does, is more insidious than I ever even suspected. There’s just something about the iMac that works on the nerve endings at the base of my spine, even though it’s irrational. Sure the Mac Pro is an overall more powerful computer, but then I’d have to buy a new monitor! (Yeah, I know that logic makes no sense, but I already said it was irrational). The iMac is a whole, complete package, like the perfect answer to a question. And that question is, “What can I waste a ton of money on this year?”

I should be safe for a few months, anyway. The rationalization that’s still firmly in place is that I only buy a new computer when the new version of the OS is available. See, that way I save over $100, instead of having to buy the OS separately. (That’s how you stick it to The Man, by spending a couple thousand bucks every OS upgrade!)

Still, don’t be surprised if around spring, you see me trying to sell a PC and a couple of flat panel monitors. (Note: readers of this blog, as always get, deep discounts).

When are companies going to learn to stop hiring “guerilla marketing” firms?

First there was the ridiculously ill-advised Sony PSP blog (Consumerist saved the original here after Sony was forced to take it down), which got the company much, much worse PR than they could’ve ever hoped to gain with the campaign in the first place.

Now, of course, is the hubub over the douchebags responsible for the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” bomb scare. I feel compelled to point out first of all that I used to be a huge fan of Adult Swim, but they lost me sometime between the last episode of “Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law” and the first episode of “Squidbillies.” Somewhere along the line, they got just a little bit too pleased with themselves, and assumed that they could put whatever the hell they wanted on the air, and stoners would watch it. (Which is true, but not a good long-term strategy). So it’s just a damn good thing this promotion was for “ATHF” and not “The Venture Brothers,” or I’d be in an ethical quandary.

The Adult Swim braintrust should realize that they’re already walking on a very thin line between “look how f-in’ edgy we are!” and being genuinely clever. And they should have a tighter lock on that, and realize that an outside company just isn’t going to get it, and they’re likely going to screw it up. Maybe they didn’t understand exactly the magnitude to which they’d screw it up, but surely somebody at Turner saw the idea and had to give it the okay.

Assume that you’re more sincere in your non-violence than I am, and you can look at pictures of the smarmy grinning marketing gurus responsible for the incident, and read their snickering responses to reporters, and not want to just never stop beating them. Still, you have to take a step back and get some perspective. This “guerilla marketing” combines two of the most horrible things to blight mankind: marketing, and performance art. If they could’ve somehow directly involved Fox News commentators, they would’ve scored a trifecta.

Apologists are coming out of the woodwork now, saying that the devices have been in place for weeks, they’re “obviously” not anything dangerous, and it shows how irreverent and edgy the network is and how lame and dumb and out-of-touch Boston’s city officials are. Okay, first: shut up. And then: just how much of a moron do you have to be to plant devices with visible circuit boards and batteries and wires on city overpasses? Acting all surprised that they’d be mistaken for bombs is just plain bullshit.

And if your whole schtick is based on how edgy and counter-culture you are, then you’re just a chickenshit for claiming that they couldn’t possibly be confused for bombs and that that wasn’t the intent. Of course that was the intent, and if you’re going to pull that kind of nonsense, then at least have the balls to stand behind it. I’ve got zero sympathy for these losers, and the details in that CNN story just make me happier and happier: not only could they get fired, but they could be charged with a felony, and one of them could get deported. I just hope if nobody at Cartoon Network’s marketing staff got fired, they’ve at least learned their lesson.

The Disney Blog posted links to two videos recreating the Test Track ride at Epcot using the game Rollercoaster Tycoon 3.

My favorite of the two is below. Test Track isn’t a roller coaster, and the other video looks a little bit more like the actual ride. But this one gets my vote for including the original soundtrack and for doing the whole thing from the queue to the final photo:

As far as I’m concerned, Test Track is the quintessential Epcot ride, and possibly the most solid Disney ride there is. I really wish “works well within its constraints” didn’t sound like damming with faint praise, because it’s really tough to do, and no other ride I can think of manages to do it as well. This attraction had to:

• Bring a thrill ride to Epcot, which had gotten a reputation (only partially deserved) for being too dry and educational.
• Still be educational.
• Replace a beloved attraction with Marc Davis designs, one that was still cool but definitely showing its age and no longer a big stand-out.
• Use a corporate sponsorship without seeming like heavy-handed advertising.
• Be a Disney thrill ride, which means being exciting while still supporting as wide an audience as possible.
• Support a ton of riders, as it was on Test Track’s shoulders to be the new main attraction for the entire park.

And it manages to do all that, and be a fun and entertaining ride on top of everything. I don’t know if I’d put it in my list of top 5 Disney attractions (and yeah, I do have such a list; several, in fact), but it’s one of my favorites. From the excellent pre-show movie — which has one of the most clever “little touches” Disney has ever done (the “surprise tests” gag) — to the final loop, it just all works. (Plus, the show and ride have John Michael Higgins, who I always remember as “Bill MacKim” because of the ride). A definite classic.

Best sign of the staying power of the ride: last summer I drove underneath Test Track on my way to work every morning (did I mention how cool that job was?). And because it has a single rider line, it was one of the only rides I could go on during my lunch break, so I rode it at least once every other day for a month. And I never got tired of it.

Are you seeing an increase in lateral forces? Sure am!

Update: This YouTube video has shaky footage of the entire ride, if you don’t mind getting spoiled. Watching it makes me want to ride it again right now!