I’m going to have to stop watching extra features on DVDs and the like, because I keep running into situations where I see somebody whose work I like a lot, but get the feeling that if I met them in person I’d just never stop wanting to smack them around.
I already bitched about David Cross earlier, but left it kind of vague. Mac and I were watching a little bit of his “stand-up” routine, only enough to see the bit where he said he was pro gay marriage and got a huge round of applause from the crowd. That’s what crystallized what it is that bugs me — it’s not that he’s Varney, it’s that he’s so earnest. I’ve already said I’m getting tired of the whole spirals of irony thing, and appreciate it when people aren’t afraid to just come out and say what they mean.
But if you’re a comedian, don’t you have to keep it funny? I haven’t seen his entire stand-up routine, but I have seen a lot of the stuff he’s done, and I just keep seeing predictable parody in order to Make A Statement. Bob Odenkirk’s stuff is pretty shallow, but at least on “Mr. Show” you got the sense that he was enough of a counterbalance to let things get absurd when they were in danger of getting too much into obvious social commentary.
The image thing would work better if I could say that Jim Varney was always too cross, but I don’t think that was true.
I was watching the special features on the Serenity DVD, and there was Joss Whedon talking about the fans and why they were important and his philosophy of the show and the movie and what they meant to him. And the dude is just fey. I realize that shouldn’t annoy me, but it just made me want to yell at the screen for him to shut the hell up. Serenity is an amazing movie, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is one of the best TV series ever made, I even read the second trade paperback of his Astonishing X-Men series and thought it did everything exactly right. But every time I hear him talk, he just strikes me as a more subduded, more self-aggrandizing, nerdier version of Charles Nelson Reilly. Maybe it’s just me.
And again, the image thing doesn’t really say anything about Tina Fey. The whole concept needs a little bit more work, I think.
I looked around online and it turns out there already are versions of “Celebrity Sudoku,” but they’re just versions of the real Sudoku that use pictures instead of numbers. I think I didn’t understand the rules of real Sudoku, either; apparently the numbers don’t add up to anything, you just have to list all 9 digits. I still think it’d be cool to have a game where you have to put actors into a 3×3 square, with the rule that all 3 of the people in each row or column have to have been in a movie or TV show together. Maybe that would be a fun rainy day project.
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So, what is this Sudoku thing, then? When I walk into Borders, I am assaulted with five hundred billion thousand books telling me how to master Sudoku.
I think, “Wow, lots of people must like this. What is it? Maybe I will like it.”
But when I look at the covers of the books, I see:
1. Numbers
2. In grid form.
I have never been one for abstraction, preferring Dark Tower to Chess.
I believe Spectre Collie should embark on a tutorial.
As far as I can tell, you’ve already unlocked the secret. It’s a bunch of numbers in grid form.
You just take a 9×9 grid, with numbers already printed in some of the slots, and then go to town on it. Each row and each column has to contain all 9 digits, that’s the only rule. They don’t have to add up to anything, or anything more sophisticated than that. Apparently, fun ensues.
I still don’t understand how you can fill up not just one but a billion books with sudoku playing tips, so I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that all the books have special self-help sections explaining how to improve your life to the point where you no longer think solving sudoku puzzles is a worthwhile diversion.
My favorite website says that the name is an abbreviation a Japanese phrase meaning “the digits must remain single,” which makes me wonder if there’s something Zen going on with the whole thing. Or maybe it’s a global kabballistic ritual, or the solutions are being somehow used in distributed-computing experiments like SETI or the human genome project or the cure for cancer. But then I realize that Japan is where pachinko is a national pasttime, and I scroll down the page to see a screen grab of a live Sudoku TV show, and I’m just sad again.