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I’m mad at ABC for cancelling the new Heather Graham sitcom, “Emily’s Reasons Why Not”.

No, I wasn’t a fan of the show; I never saw it, and there was nothing about the commercials that made me want to tune in. And no, I’m not a huge fan of Heather Graham.

So why am I rallying to the defense of a show I don’t care about?

Because it’s the principle of the thing, and not caring about the show makes this the perfect time to complain on principle.

I’m complaining because they cancelled the show after showing only one episode. They spent millions of dollars producing and advertising the show, then they yank it after the first sign of a weak response.

That’s been a disturbing trend in the last few years, and it’s puzzlingly self-destructive. There are lots of great shows that didn’t hit their stride until after their first season.

The Simpsons is a prime example: Sure, their first season was better than most assembly-line network garbage, but it was a pale comparison to its golden age of Seasons Four and Five. Other shows that still hadn’t found their way early on include Barney Miller, Seinfeld, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Roseanne, all of which went on to become classics. If today’s itchy-trigger-finger network morons had been in charge, these shows would have just been footnotes in old TV-show directories.

I’m not saying “Emily’s” had the makings of a classic, but now we’ll never know.

Is it really good business to spend all this money on a series and not use it? Seeing how dismal the ratings have been for all the networks have been lately, has this on-going gamble — that the replacement show’s ratings will be so much better as to make up for the wasted money of the abandoned series — really been paying off?

And here’s another example of network stupidity: “Emily’s” was part of ABC’s genius plan to replace Monday Night Football with romantic sitcoms.

Um … excuse me? If you’ve got lots of men tuning in at a certain day and time for thirty-six years, wouldn’t it make sense to program something that the people who are already in the habit of tuning in would want to watch?? Is it smart to replace the old show with a show for which you have to attract a whole different viewing audience??

Sure, give Heather a girly comedy, but put it somewhere else on the schedule.

Is it really that freaking difficult???

We rented The Constant Gardener tonight. It was pretty good, but also pretty depressing. With all the billions of dollars at stake in the international pharmaceutical industry, it’s very plausible that all this cash can “wag the dog” of a major national government.

It was especially fun playing Spot the Actor — I picked out Bill Nighy and Pete Postelthwaite. I also thought for sure I saw Terence Stamp, but according to the IMDB it wasn’t him … but I’m still not convinced.

Anyway, go to the movie’s official site and check out their features …

We’re finally going to get some rain! That is, if the predictions are right …

We’re in the middle of a winter drought, so getting rain will go a long way to reduce the number of grassfires, which have been popping up regularly in the area lately.

So with rain expected tomorrow, I got the grocery shopping out of the way today. I usually do it on Sunday, now tomorrow will be like being on vacation …

SNL had a great joke tonight: “New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said this week that his city will be rebuilt as a ‘chocolate city” … and that he’ll be the delicious nut in the center!”

A quick recap for those just joining us: My adopted family is Irish, but as far as I know none of my cousins has anywhere near my interest in Celtic history. I guess that not knowing my true ancestry, having that huge gap in my knowledge, makes me even more curious about Old World heritage.

My annual activities started as an observation of St. Patrick’s Day, then, in the past decade I started ramping up my participation, with the purchase of Irish music, coffe-table photo books of Ireland, scenic calendars, tickets to the Irish festival, and, most relevant to this post, a book of Irish folk and fairy tales.

Oh, and all sorts of shamrock-shaped beads and stickers.

But back to the books for a moment:

Well, okay, not back to the books yet, there’s something else first:

Something happened this past summer that puts my annual months-long celebration of all things Celtic: I got my DNA tested, and the strongest matches in the DNA database point toward Iceland.

Iceland! So now, instead of going all out for a culture that’s not really mine, I have my first true indication of where I actually come from!

Ever since finding out my background, I’ve been wondering if I would still feel like ushering in Spring with my activities.

And as it turns out, I do feel like it.

I’m still getting excited about the Irish Festival in early March, and I’m still listening to my Irish and Celtic CD’s.

This year, I’m just blending a new flavor into the mix, and I’m doing so in part by ordering these books off Ebay:

The first one is a book of Icelandic sagas, which, according to Wikipedia, “are prose histories describing mostly events that took place in Iceland during the Age of Settlement. They are written in Old Norse in Iceland during the 12th to 15th centuries and mostly during the centre of that epoch.”

At lunch the past couple of days I’ve been reading Egil’s Saga, which is pretty tedious. I’ve read at least 18 chapters, and still haven’t run across Egil. There’s just been a lot of family history (it’s almost as tiring as that “Begat” chapter in Matthew), and Norwegian nobility, and the tracing of King Harald’s conquest of Norway — there’s only been one mention of Iceland so far, and that was just in passing.

A note about King Harald: He swore to not cut his hair until he conquered all of Norway, thus earning him the nickname Harald Tanglehair.

After becoming king of the whole country, he made his long-overdue trip to the barber shop, after which his nicknamed to Harald Prissy-Pants, or something equally reflective of his newfound fastidiousness.

ANYWAY: The story is finally starting to get interesting, with one character’s step-cousins turning King Harald against him, in retaliation for getting stiffed on an inheritance years earlier.

But the important thing is that I’m learning some of the ancient back-story of new-found Motherland.

The other book is sort of a history-and-travel guide, and I haven’t read much of it yet, but it has a lot of good information in it too.

And best of all, springtime can remain my Old World holiday season, even now that it turns out that I’m not really Irish.

Dolly Parton turns the big Six-Oh today, and she still looks hot. It just proves that 60 isn’t what it was when I was growing up — and it’s particularly reassuring for someone who’s 50.

Thanks to Look at This for serving up this link: Celtic Music Radio. I’ve already got a few similar Internet stations bookmarked, but you can’t have too many.

A good thing about having a blog is that I can make a note of when things happen, so I can have it for later reference.

For instance: My “idea hamster” has been at work again, this time spinning out an idea for an animated sitcom, possibly for the Internet, and my wife has confirmed that it’s a dandy premise. I’m not going to go into detail, but here’s a hint: It’s about a housing development.

And I realize that you’re having trouble getting excited about it, but remember that I’m only mentioning this for future reference.

Your understanding is nonessential, in this case.

One of the perks of serving as the company computer guy (one of many jobs that nobody else wants) is getting to assign passwords for people.

Since everyone has to sign on to the network each session, other functions such as email can be automatically logged in, so most people rarely ever know what their passwords are.

The upshot: I can assign any password I want to people.

This might not seem significant at first glance, but it opens the possibility to vent frustrations and covertly express opinions.

Think of the people you work with: Examples of passwords you could assign might be along the lines of “overpaid”, “smellsbad’, “angryloner”, “jerkwad”, and the ever-popular “die_die_die”.

I’ve never actually done that yet, but it always remains an option.

The reason I brought this up is that on Monday we got a new employee, and he has already … um … managed to make an impression on those around him, and yesterday I had to set up his email.

I was bit tempted to give him a password that demonstrated esteem in which many of us already hold him, but I knew that there was every possibility that the daywould come when out of the blue I’d get hit with, “Hey, I had to reinstall Outlook, what’s my password?”

In such a case, one possibility would be to tell him that the password is something like “fineupstandingcitizen”, then when it didn’t work for him, I’d say, “Hmm, I don’t know what’s wrong, let me sit there and try it.” Then I would enter the real password.

The only problem is that such a gambit would take nerves of steel and catlike reflexes, attributes which are not regularly attributed to me.

Another concern is that I’m not the only one with this kind of access; Main Computer Guy could easily get wind of my little sniping game, and I don’t have 100-percent confidence in his sense of discretion.

So for now I’ll stick with our more traditional password creation conventions …

But should ever I happen to procure employment elsewhere, I have a feeling I’ll be spending most of my two-weeks notice a descriptive password system that will become a thing of legend, celebrated in story and song for generations to come.

It shall be my legacy …

I finally got my annual performance review today, such as it was; we’ve gone through this so many times that it goes without saying that they know they’re lucky to have me.

… at least I think that’s what they’re not saying …

Anyway: My department manager just told me that New Boss in Training has suggested that maybe I should cut down on my customary practice of disappearing into thin air, with no one knowing where I am for extended periods of time.

I told him I’d take it under advisement.

Speaking of New Boss in Training, he scored some points with all of us peons today …

But first, some background: One of the perks of having a catering company as a sister company — pretty much the only perk — is the fact that they cater lunches for us once a month. The bad news is that, although they cook a wide variety of good food, Outgoing Boss keeps ordering barbecue.

I could lose my Texas citizenship for saying this, but I’m pretty much sick of barbecue, especially after this monthly force-feeding. (Once a year was previously the norm for me.)

The ranch used to serve us the traditional turkey and ham at holidays, with a great tossed salad and fresh buttermilk dressing, but apparently Christmas Dinner got run over by the Brisket Express somewhere along the line.

Long story short: NBiT, being a Northerner, lost his patience for our spicy regional delicacy in just a few months, and just as soon as he was able to dictate the menu, surprised us with beef fajitas this month, and it went over really well.

Apparently I’m not the only Texan for whom the frequency of the barbecue buffet was becoming wearying.

And it’s not like he inflicted some uniquely Northern dish on us, like … well, whatever Yankees eat that we don’t; it was still food with a local flavor …

But it was DIFFERENT.

And sometimes that’s all it takes.

I actually did some of these links a few weeks ago, as part of my “36 Posts for 36 Months”, but I wasn’t happy with it, plus it kind of got lost in that shuffle, so tonight I added some stuff, and you can see it like it’s the first time:

With technology making it easy irresistible for dabblers (like me!) to get into filmmaking, it’s only natural for the short-film form to experience boom times, and for extra-short-films — in the area of sixty seconds or so — especially to be popular among directorial newbies.

So invest an hour worth of minutes into exploring what’s out there:

Here’s a good place to start: OneMinuteFilms.com.

Jewish One-Minute Movies.

The New York Minute Film Festival.

The BBC’s One-Minute Movies.

Brickfilms, stop-action animation using Legos and other techniques.

The One Minutes.

One minute videos made by young people.

Croatian one-minute films.

Coming this March, the Lithuanian short film festival, sponsored by Pravda.

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Now if I could just think up 60 seconds of script idea … but that would really stress my attention span …

Let’s start with a “shout-out” to Grace from my church. Grace is the Outreach Elder, and she’s checking out my blog because we’re working together trying to start a blog for the church.

This is something I’ve been trying to do for about 7 months now, but I kept getting put off; now, though, with Grace taking charge of publicity and marketing, I’ve finally found somebody who’s interested. Grace’s son has a blog, so she’s aware of what blogs are and what they can do.

Other people that I’ve suggested blogs for either have never seen one, or they have seen one, especially one by an old-media columnist, and they think that that’s the way all blogs have to be.

Starting this way is much better.

The church already has a website, but, as website usually are, it’s fairly static, and information about upcoming events can be buried too deeply to find casually. Plus, with a regular website, there’s little incentive for readers to keep checking back. With a blog, though, content is constantly being refreshed, with the more relevant items being at the top, but older items still being visible.

Which brings up an obvious question: Am I glutton for punishment, starting another blog??

One of the few advanatages of being sick is being able to use your 102-degree fever as an excuse to engage in some of your favorite time-wasting activities.

You know, if you’ve been paying attention, that three days before Christmas I was hit with a debilitating upper respiratory infection, and during my recovery — on my first day of antibiotics, actually — I recalled that just a week earlier the Everquest people had sent me an email offering me a free 21-day trial on my old account, with my old characters still intact.

And, being in a feverish state and incapable of doing anything more worthwhile, I headed back in.

Usually when I’m out of the game for a while, I find myself ejected from the guild I was in, but this time I was still in it (the Benevolent Knights), partly because it had only been about three months since my last free 21-days (of which I only used about 10), but mostly because the guild seemed pretty inactive this time around, with only one or two people online at any given time.

This time I made friends with some folks in Matrix of Norrath (Norrath being the name of the world in Everquest), and they invited me to join, and they’ve got lots of active members.

I’m actually surprised to see so many people still playing the old Everquest, seeing as Sony rolled out Everquest 2 in December 2004.

I played that sequel when it first came out, and the visuals were really nice, but the gameplay is messed up. For one thing, you can’t heal another player that’s getting killed in a fight unless you’re already grouped with them, and I think that stinks. One of the things that made the original Everquest such a great community game was that it gave you the ability to help strangers.

The spell system in the new game is messed up, too, making you try to figure out all the complicated levels-within-levels.

I realize that they probably imposed those changes to fix what they perceived as problems, but they don’t seem to realize that

I played for less than month, all on the same main good-race starting continent; I just couldn’t justify continuing to play.

And apparently there are a lot of people who feel the same way, because I didn’t hear much about EQ2 in either the media or in conversations with gamers; all the attention this past year went to the similar World of Warcraft, plus the occasional mention of City of Heroes.

Most of the people I met when I went back to the old EQ hadn’t even tried the sequel, and were happy to have their little high-level-character club in the old game.

This time I decided to see some of the sights that I had never been to before, starting with the Ice Fortress. I had been to that zone before (Everfrost Peaks, home to the Barbarian race) when I was at a much lower level, but had never ventured to the high-level castle. In fact I was about 20 levels too low to fight the Ice Giants (pictured above), but I didn’t have to worry about it since there were always level-55′s there claiming the area, and some of them would let me loot the fallen giants, which would prove to be pretty lucrative sometimes, with “drops” of weapons worth 7 platinum pieces not uncommon.

I also did some sightseeing in some of the revamped zones, like Lavastorm Mountains and Nektulos forest (home to the Dark Elf players), to see the great new graphics.

But, not being willing to invest the time necessary for leveling up, I had to settle for just running around, seeing what’s new, and picking up the occasional plat.

Anyway, my three weeks is up, so it’s Farewell to Norrath, and hello to Real Life — at least until the next time Sony’s free weeks coincide with my being nearly incapacitated.

One evening this week I was out in the back yard when I noticed this famous painting a couple of houses down, across the alley, and I thought it was so cool that this classic work of art was just out there for anybody to see.

Of course, the house's residents probably didn't have it on display for our enjoyment; it looked like it had been washed and was hung there to dry. I think that was the only day it was up.

People drive up and down the alley all the time, to get to and from their garages in the back. I wonder how many other people noticed this little random bit of culture -- how many besides me stopped to appreciate it, or to take a picture?

I like to think to that I'm not the only one who paused for a moment to take it in ...