Steal this television program

TCM laments in comments below that we'll be stuck forever with the cliffhanger at the season-ending of Jericho because the b@57ards at CBS cancelled the program.

Perhaps, but then perhaps not. If there is a burgeoning cottage industry of fan-production for Star Trek (think of the dollars they sink into props and costume) there has to be a way for fans to step in and keep a show like Jericho alive without CBS.

All you need is a run-down little town, a few police cars, a school bus, an amateur radio . . . nothing you can't already find in some deserted plains town a stone's throw from the Front Range.

BTW, I watched the second episode the other night, and still no fat women. But suspense of my disbelief was much further impaired by the tatted convicts impersonating cops. They picked up the blonde along the road and they were desperate for . . . gasoline?

And they kept the real deputies in the trunk? Alive? What for? And the deputies' uniforms fit the convicts? Gimme a frigging break. Sorry, I probably would have dropped this series by Ep 3 or 4 anyway, at this rate.

Which only supports my point. I'd wager that those implausible devices were inserted into the plot at the insistence of the Beeeg Teevee Netvoohhrk executives because that's what TV execs have always done.

If fans pick this show up and keep it alive, they won't have tin-eared empty suits telling them what to do to the script. The fans won't have any advertisers to please.

Debating season over there, Boss

My lackluster Senate campaign gets a kick in the yarbles with a good showing at the debates.

Ride like the wind, Bullseye!

Of all the lame derivatives Disney has made of their properties, they are missing a goldmine:

Woody's Roundup.

Sic

I just cracked open a case of Uncle Sugar's finest Caliber .30 Springfield Model of 1906 Ball Ammunition, recently delivered from the Civilian Marksmanship Program.

Some functionary of CMP decided that a liability statement of some kind must appear on the package to clarify that the ammo was delinked from milsurp machinegun belts and wasn't fresh new milspec.

This is really embarrassing. There must be tens of thousands of these cartons in circulation with the word "strickly" in all-caps.

Don't forget Wayne

Please send a few dollars to Wayne Fincher's defense. I did recently, and his wife sent a brief note of thanks and good spirits in reply.

The Wayne Fincher Defense Fund
c/o Mr. Don Bright
2225 No. Mockingbird Ln,
Fayetteville, AR 72703

Does it always have to be about football?

Senator Brownback's misapplication of metaphor is a more grave insult to the language than his failure to invoke Wisconsin's athlete named Faahhrv.

It also takes down a peg or two my consideration of Sen. Brownback for the position of chief executive of the Republic. He's technologically illiterate.

"Blocking and tackling" does not refer to defensive techniques in the game of American football--or if it does, that is a recent misappropriation of the term by linguistic thugs, cutpurses, and pitchmen. It is far older than that, a reference to the use of ropes and pulleys ("a block and tackle") to lift heavy objects. In modern times, it is used to signify drudgery, the repetitive tasks that do not demand raw strength so much as perseverance along a simple plan, one pull on the rope after another after another. It connotes slow progress. Blocking and tackling does not leave one exhausted so much as it leaves one sore, having traveled through several times more in length of rope than has the weight that was lifted.

In comparison, the blocking and tackling of football are glamorous, instantaneous, bruising spectacle. An angle of attack gone wrong, a misplanted foot, and an athlete's career can end.

It's a geek-vs-jock thing, and as jocks would have it, the world turns around jocks. Another term for "jock" is ambitious.

In Kansas, of all places

I just watched the first episode of Jericho. Only one observation of the show that sticks with me as improbable: no fat women.

There was a deaf girl. There was a school teacher on the bus with some likely internal injury---that didn't kill her after being stranded on that bus for hours and hours---she was kinda hot. The ex-girlfriend who drove over the crow corpses, she was hot. Heck, at my age the mayor's wife and protagonist's mom, she's passable. Any of them could fit down the aisle of a commuter aircraft without spilling someone's coffee.

Not one diamond-shaped quarter-tonner. Not a single one. I don't recall a fat guy, either.

And I didn't notice a Kansas accent.

Kinda hard for me to suspend my disbelief for the rest of the show, y'all.

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