brykmantra.com

(What follows is a joint-blogging post from myself and Steve of Look at This, to be posted simultaneously, more or less, on both of our blogs.)

You are about to enter another dimension, a world between light and shadow, between rationality and insanity … a place called TEXAS … :

Only in Texas: A functioning barbecue grill shaped like a six-gun.

Buddy Holly, the Father of Rock and Roll, and inspiration for “British Invasion” bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and of course The Hollies. Did you know that his last name was actually spelled Holley, but he was saddled with the alternate spelling due to a typo? You do now.

Anyway, here’s a picture of my cousin at Buddy’s grave in Lubbock.

Unfortunately, Dallas is best known to the world through two avenues: The TV series Dallas, and the assassination of President Kennedy, making Southfork Ranch and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza two of the city’s biggest international tourist attractions.

Texas community profiles.

The Plainview Cattle Drive Project.

Historic Texas Postcards. (via)

Colossus of Rhodes? Close: It’s Big Tex, the towering mascot of the State Fair of Texas.

Texas Trailer Trash – Lifestyles of the Southeast Texan. (via)

The slogan Don’t Mess with Texas started out 20 years ago as an anti-litter campaign, and has grown to seem like some sort of jingoistic battle cry — to the extent that a Croatian punk band has adopted the slogan as its name.

Now comes a new public service campaign that probably won’t be as politically charged: “Don’t Burn Texas Down”, an anti-wildfire anthem by up-and-coming country singer Jake Kellen, is hitting the state’s airwaves this week. And if you want to hear the song but have access to Texas radio stations, just click here.

Arch-ive.org — Photographically documenting and archive buildings and sites in Houston and surrounding areas.

Our global cultural influence: Steve’s favorite childhood candy bar, The Texan (which I, ironically, as a Texan, had never heard of) is about to be brought back on to the market in England.

Haunted House display getting complaints.

Butterflies of Texas.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Texas images, Texas photography.

Pictures of Texas.

Wild Texas Guide to Texas Parks, Travel & Outdoors includes Texas Photography Web Guide.

Texas Bird’s Eye Views. Hand drawn panoramic maps of 44 Texas cities circa 19th century in high resolution. Aerial mapping minus airplanes and cameras.

Texas Beyond History. The virtual museum of Texas’ cultural heritage.

Texas Bigfoot Research Center includes 5th Annual Texas Bigfoot Conference.

How to Speak Texas English. Same story with added comments.

Texas Jokes. Lots of them.

There’s also a specialized type of Texas joke know as the Aggie Joke, in which the subjects are the students and alumni of Texas A&M University. Basically, they’re Polack jokes except that don’t make fun of anyone’s ethnicity. You can read lots of Aggie Jokes Here, here, here and here. And finally, a true story: How Aggies board up their windows in a hurricane, and the A&M newspaper reaction to the negative attention brought by the picture.

Dumb Texas Laws. Not sure if they are true though.

Music: The Texas Music Project, Lone Star Music, Texas Music Roundup, the Governor’s Music Office (!), SXSW, ZZ Top, Texas Music Magazine.

Bonus points: (Former Monkee) Michael Nesmith’s Video Ranch.

Famous Texans.

Texas Timeline (Key Events in early Texas).

Texas State Historical Association – The Handbook of Texas Online.

Texas History.

Texas recipes.

This past weekend, Kermit the Frog kicked off this national 50th Anniversary tour in Kermit, Texas.

Shiner Bock Beer, brewed in Shiner, Texas, which just this past Saturday celebrated Bocktoberfest. In 1983, The Spook & I went to the brewery to take the tour, but all we got was the Hospitality Room.

Which was still rather rewarding.

Then there’s Lone Star Beer, “The National Beer of Texas”. Note that their website is PureTexanBeer.com.

And don’t forget Pearl Beer, which, like Lone Star, has been absorbed into the giant Miller conglomerate. But while they were still independent, they did some cool things, like rebus puzzles under the caps.

Texas Instruments designed the first transistor radio and first integrated circuit

And finally: Texas on Flickr: Texas Hill Country, Texas, A Country Called Texas, Texas Tech, Texas Roads, Shiner beer, Lone Star, “It’s Texas, Dummy”.

Another great episode last night; here are some notes:

They finally revealed what the show is all about: That all the “survivors” are actually clones, and that the plane crash never really happened. The crash, like all of their previous life experiences, were implanted memories, and the flaming wreckage was scattered around the beach before the clones were “activated”. Only Jin, one of the scientists, sent to monitor the clones, was a “real” person — and yes, he does speak English.

There were some problems with the memory programming, though, since several of the people start hallucinating, like Jack, when the “memories” of his father started bleeding over into his conscious thought. There were also some malfunctioning with the bodies: Locke, in an experiment to see how clones would psychologically cope with disability, was supposed to be a paraplegic, but his physical responses were misprogrammed, and even he was stunned to find that he had the ability to stand up.

Okay, okay, I’m just kidding: None of that really happened on the show.

But if you didn’t see last night’s episode, I might have had you going for a second … again …

ANYWAY: If you didn’t see it, you might not want to read what’s below until you do:

You might remember that Hurley’s boss at the chicken restaurant had the same first name (Randy) as Locke’s boss at the box factory. That might not mean much, except that people in the message boards on the Internet (that’s right — the people with no lives) have figured out that the same actor played both Randys.

And that among Hurley’s financial holdings is a box factory.

Add to that the fact that the actress who played the girl that announced Hurley’s lottery numbers also played the girl in the hotel room with Sawyer, and you get …

Well, I don’t know what you get.

But I bet it gets even more tangled as it goes along …

Check this out: The website of the Hanso Foundation, creators of the grand experiment that yielded the bunkers.

Bonus: Explore the site to see if you can find the hidden Dharma Initiative link; it’s supposed to show last week’s orientation film when you click on it, but the site was running very slowly when I tried it earlier today.

Still, though, I found the link …

And look who else has a site: Hurley’s former employer, Mr. Clucks.

Don’t be fooled by clever, enterprising imitators … although their Lost blog is still pretty good, so you should probably bookmark it …

And speaking of a good Lost blog, check out 4eight15sixteen23fortytwo.

And finally, speaking of what was found by the people on the Internet who have no lives, read about the legendary (but possibly apocryphal) Montauk Project, and see if it doesn’t sound like what might have been going on at one time on the island …

Weirdest name ever for a TV show: Bobobo-Bo Bo-Bobo.

It’s a new anime show on Cartoon Network, and, well, it’s as weird as it’s name. It’s about this hero with a big blonde Afro who uses his 40-foot-long retractable nose hairs to fight an intergalactic emperor who wants to see everybody in the universe to be bald.

Did I mention that the show is Japanese?

Yesterday I read on Boing Boing about a $30 amplifier that was apparently meant as a toy, but is scoring some astounding reviews from professional audiophiles.

Since The Wife and I have both been getting back into music lately — I’m considering getting an electric guitar for the first time in 12 years — I did something I very rarely do: I made an impulse purchase.

I found a place on Ebay that had only three left — which is shocking, considering the BB mention — so I snapped one up.

I’ll report back when I get the merchandise and try it out …

The season premiere of Saturday Night Live tonight is pretty good — which is a little surprising since quality has been slipping lately. Early on, they had a great sketch about celebrities pitching in to build houses for Katrina evacuees; impersonations included Anderson Cooper (!). Tony Danza, Geraldo Rivera, Sharon Stone, and guest host Steve Carrell as Ray Romano. Plus, one of the new cast members is an impressionist, doing a great Al Pacino.

Also: musical guest Kanye West did a bit where he was walking down the hallway and ran into … Mike Myers, who West blind-sided a few weeks ago with his off-script remarks on the first Katrina Relief telethon.

It was a nice touch having the two of them back together on the show.

We had a break, of sorts, from our usual office routine yesterday: Everybody was spendinga huge chunk of the day filling out insurance forms.

We do this every year about this time, when our group health insurance is renewed and we have to re-enroll. So everybody was running around, filling out the same information on multiple forms, and asking our personnel clerk questions about various aspects of the insurance, and running duplexed (i.e. 2-sided) copies — and I found myself giving several impromptu duplex-copying lessons.

Still, all the paper-shuffling was easier to handle since, miraculously, our rates didn’t go up.

Has that ever happened before in the course of human history?

I’m too far behind on posting the tiny things of life, so I don’t have the luxury of doing one coherent post tonight:

I get misty … : Chances are … that Texas-born Johnny Mathis turns the Big Seven-Oh today.

Our blogging buddy (and fellow soldier in the Adoptee Wars) Pamibe got so inspired by my tales of participation in the Genographic Project that she sent in her own cheek swab, and today she got her results back: She’s in Haplogroup H, a predominantly European people, according to the National Geographic site.

I told her she needs to dig deeper into the message boards, though, because the NG site at first told me my origins were Balkan, but further research and marker comparisons led me to origins in Scotland and Iceland.

There’s nothing wrong with being Bulgarian or Romanian of course … but the prospect of having the blood of Vikings is SO cool.

But of course, any information at all is better than nothing, which is what most adoptees have in the way of a genetic heritage: A big huge honking NOTHING.

That’s why living in the age of easy DNA analysis rocks so much. Pam and I and thousands of others might have the many doors of the Adoption Bureacracy slammed in our faces, but they can’t stop us from climbing in the window of Science.

(All together now: “Science!”)

And speaking of The Motherland, I’ve been meaning to check out other modern Icelandic music (there’s more than just Bjork, you know), so tonight I’ve been listening to the Takk, latest album by Sigur Ros.

It’s really enjoyable. I see it as the kind of music I like to listen to during cool evenings (now that we finally have some) tinkering with my Linux computer in the garage or on the patio. (The Lost in Translation soundtrack also serves that purpose well.) It’s very light and spacy, every evocative.

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Okay, that’s all, now let’s get some rest.

Coolness! Finally!

A full week after the start of Fall we finally got some cool weather today — lows in the high 50′s last night where I live.

It’s about freaking time: After we got short-changed from Hurricane Rita — not one stinking drop of rain made it our way, after the near-flooding that was predicted — we’ll settle for a break from near-100 temperatures.

My lawn might live into winter after all.

Best of all, the cool breezes today have been invigorating, especially after a couple of months of stepping out of the house into a pizza oven.

And now here’s some more cool topics:

What do you get when you accidentally leave a pear in a cooler with some dry ice? If you’re neurobiologist Galen Kaufman, you look at the end result as the prototype for Fizzy Fruit, a line of fresh fruit that has been given a carbonated kick.

Fizzy Fruit is not available to the public now, being sold to school cafeterias before it’s unleashed on the general market.

I haven’t posted anything about My Ancestral Homeland in a while, so this seems like a good time: Iceland photo pool on Flickr.

There was a riddle on Lost last night, one used as a pass-phrase: “What did one snowman say to the other snowman?”

It’s actually a fairly old joke; I won’t tell you the punchline in case you want to stay in suspense, but if you really want to know it you can find out the answer here.

BTW: Someone noted on message boards that Hurley told that joke to somebody last season (although I don’t remember it); does this mean he’s the one for whom the pass phrase is meant?

This is for Yay Kim: Penguin games!

Maytag is famous for its commercials showing their supposedly “lonely” repairmen — that is, repairmen who don’t have anything to do since Maytags don’t need fixing.

All I know is that we keep our local Maytag guys hopping — we’ve had them out to fix our ice maker three times in the past seven years; good thing The Wife got an extended warranty, huh?

This past Tuesday we noticed the ice maker wasn’t producing, so, first things first, I went to the store and got a sack of ice.

Then I removed a piece of ice that was lodged in the machinery, and slowly but surely it started being productive member of society again.

It’s been a dark month for classic TV: First it was Gilligan, now it’s Maxwell Smart.

Don Adams, dead at age 82.

When Get Smart first went on the air in 1965, it took us fifth-grade boys by storm. We were too young to really get into James Bond, and just a bit not quite ready for Man from U.N.C.L.E. — but Get Smart seemed to tap into our late-prepubescent dreams.

The opening sequence alone blew our little minds: Agent 86 began by going into a seemingly ordinary storefront — then down a flight of secret stairs! He’d keep walking, and sets of horizontal sliding doors, each set different from the last, would slide open to let him pass, then silently snap shut behind him.

At the end of this underground tunnel, he came to a phone booth: He dialed some numbers, put back the receiving… then disappeared through the bottom of the booth — all this to enter CONTROL headquarters.

He had the most wonderful gadgets, including weapons and communications devices, all disguised as ordinary, everyday items, and foremost among these was his trademark shoe phone.

It was a TELEPHONE … and it was in his SHOE!!! Sure it was rotary dial, but it was a mobile phone! In 1965!

There was no more Cops & Robbers for us, no more Cowboys & Indians: Now it was always “Let’s play ‘Get Smart’!” We were running around, hiding behind walls, talking into the soles of our shoes, fashioning make-believe detonation devices from the pieces of ballpoint pens and anything else we could take apart. We would write each other messages in invisible ink (lemon juice) and backwards-alphabet cipher. We practiced walking down stairs (the ones in our junior high were about the only stairs in town) just like Maxwell Smart, with each foot flicking outward with each step.

Our parents, who had previously been subjected to the incessant catchphrases of our Three Stooges phases, now had to listen to a whole new set of joke lines, this time in a high-pitched nasal twang: “Sorry about that, Chief!” “Would you believe …?!” “The old (whatever) trick!”

I even had a “Would You Believe” beach towel (and might have still had it today, but for X-Wife).

But enough pointless Boomer nostalgia. Let’s do some links …:

Don Adams’ IMDB page.

Of course, gadgets and danger aside, it could be argued that a huge draw for the show was the smoldering-hot Barbara Feldon. (And apparently a lot of people are searching for her today.)

I always get a kick out of seeing U.S. pop culture news items like this being report in the foreign press, like Japan Today, TV New Zealand, WebIndia.

I especially enjoy finding these things on the Al-Jazeera site, but this time it was not to be.

On Wikipedia: Don Adams, Get Smart, Barbara Feldon, Inspector Gadget (long before Matthew Broderick came along), and Tennessee Tuxedo, a cartoon about a penguin, which was the job Adams had immediately before becoming Maxwell Smart.

The technology of Get Smart: A photo gallery.

Technology catching up to entertainment: A real life Cone of Silence. And this one might actually work.

A fan sight dedicated to Ed Platt, the actor who played the long-suffering Chief.

WouldYouBelieve.com, a Get Smart fan site.

Adams owes a lot of his succes to his comedian buddy Bill Dana, who gave him a part as a bumbling hotel detective on Dana’s sitcom which, like the Andy Griffith Show, was spun off from the Danny Thomas Show.

Spy Lady X’s Get Smart Page.

And Would You Believe … I started compiling Get Smart links last Friday, figuring that one of these days I would get motivated to find more links and do a Get Smart post.

I guess this was the day …

I’ve gotten behind on Fall Premiere Week, so here’s some past, present and near-future:

Desperate Housewives — Season premiere tonight! Except for Lost, this is one of the most interesting shows in years. Multiple lead characters, interweaving plotlines, fresh new stories as needed, and an ever-changing set of assumptions.

Plus: I’m glad they finally got around to adding a black housewife, and I’m glad it’s Alfre Woodard.

Ever notice that everybody who knows anything at all about TV & movies likes and respects Alfre Woodard? Some actors are like that, and she’s one.

Threshold — The best new show I’ve seen so far this season. Three episodes now, and it still looks promising. It’s a nice touch that they have a team of people, each with different skills — especially the mathematician/linguist.

My only complaint the concentration of testosterone: Of the six main characters, only one is female. Admittedly, she’s the leader of the team (except when the government guy has to step in), but that’s no excuse for casting mostly men.

Three Wishes — This comes on at the same time as Threshold, so I missed the premiere, but from what I can tell, this is what happens when NBC says, “What can we do to copy the ratings of ‘Extreme Home Makeover’?”

It would be preferable if they said, “What can we do to help families the way that ‘Extreme Home Makeover’ does?”, but we’ll take what we can get.

Anyway, at least this ripoff has a brand-name celebrity (Amy Grant), and when people are being helped, it seems less like a ripoff.

The West Wing — Season premiere is tonight; I’ve tried to watch that show, but it makes me queasy.

But here’s why I bring it up: I think it’s funny that the network and all the entertainment “criticism” media is pretending that there’s any suspense at all as to whether the show’s upcoming election will produce a Democratic or Republican president.

Is there anybody who really thinks for one nanosecond that “West Wing” will have a Republican president?

That’s like watching a 007 movie and worrying that James Bond won’t make it out of the death trap.

OF COURSE the Democrat will win. Does anybody really think that the producers would: 1) Replace the entire cast; and 2) Do a show about a Republican administration struggling with the world’s problems???

Oh yeah, that’ll happen.

Commander-in-Chief — Speaking of “Liberals Good, Conservatives Bad”: I was actually interested in this show, with the prospect of seeing a woman President, but the awful commercials they’ve been showing over the summer have turned me completely off.

The ad shows Donald Sutherland telling about-to-be-President Geena Davis that she can’t be President because she only wants it for the power.

She says, “No, I don’t!”, and he replies, “Well, that’s the problem! You shouldn’t be President unless you want the power.”

Uh … HUH.

In other words, she shouldn’t be President because he’s the Speaker of the House, and next in line for the White House.

And of course, he’s a conservative, so in Hollywood that means he’s Evil with a capital E.

Note to Hollywood: 70-year-old Conservatives don’t have hair that long.

Especially the evil ones.

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Okay, I had bunches more, but it’ll have to wait.

Check back tomorrow, okay?

Okay!

Before we “get down to business” (figure of speech; no actual “business” is involved), I need to give a shout to three new readers — Liz, Linda and Mary — who were sent here by Vickie, who’s their boss and can therefore make them do unpleasant things like reading weird blogs.

Anyway: Welcome, folks, and stop back by soon!

(If you don’t, I’ll write about you … ha!)

Okay: We now join our regularly scheduled blog post already in progress:

This might not seem to relate to TV, or to the new season, but bear with me:

On my very first day in Dallas in 1986, the headlines in all the papers and news shows were dominated by two words: “HOGEBOOM TRADED”.

A Hogeboom, I was soon to find out, was a football player for the Dallas Cowboys, and apparently he got traded, although I’m not sure I was ever clear on where he got traded to, or what was gotten in return for him.

Why do I bring this up? I just found out this morning that “Hogeboom” is the ex-NFL player on the new season of Survivor.

That’s comforting in a way, because I was beginning to think that I had somehow dreamed that headline all these years ago.

I finally find out what a Hogeboom looks like …

Speaking of highly-scripted “reality” shows: Maggie won Big Brother 6 last night. Ivette may be proud of her “fiery Cuban personality”, but it caused her to lose Rachel’s vote, and probably Howie’s, too, by alienating people who had every reason in the world to vote against her opponent.

I was glad to see that they had a studio audience for the finale; that helps put back some of the energy that Julie Chen-bot leeches out of the show. They had an audience on every episode of the first season, and that gave the studio segments a lot of energy.

Since they’ve done away with the audience, the contestants look like lab rats in a very somber and highly structured experiment, and no amount of soap-opera catfights can make it seem any more real.

Lost season premiere tonight! Woo-hoo!

Unfortunately, since The Wife is going to miss the broadcast, I won’t be blogging about it in any detail until after she’s seen the tape …

So I’d better get it out of my system now: The episode title tonight is “Man of Science, Man of Faith”. I’m guessing that Jack is the former, Locke is the latter, as they hinted strongly in the final episodes of last season.

Does this mean that the flashbacks feature them both? Will we get to see where their paths crossed at some point in the past?

If so, this would be a first. Up until now, we’ve only seen vague references to connections between the characters — like when the woman in Sawyer’s hotel room was played by the same actress as the lottery girl who announced Hurley’s winning numbers.

Oh well, let’s just hope tonight lives up to all the hype and expectations.

They owe us now, after the letdown of opening the hatch in the season finale.

But I will admit that what happened to the raft people was one heck of a cliffhanger; now let’s just hope they don’t drag the suspense out too long.

Anyway: Until the show starts, go to the show’s website — not the network site — and hunt for a few “Easter Eggs” …

Also: There’s going to be a special “refresher course” episode at 7C tonight, right before the Season 2 Premiere, in case you missed the first season, or you don’t remember all the numberous details, which is highly likely.

And speaking of dragging things out too long: We also watched The Biggest Loser last night. That show has an interesting premise, but the weigh-ins are deadly dull.

Seriously, they stretch those out for half an hour.

They’re aiming for Dramatic Tension, but they drive straight off the cliff of Let’s See What Else Is On.

The new Fall Season is in full swing! I don’t know why I still get fired up like a little kid at Christmastime when the fall shows come out, but I do.

So let’s proceed (Warning: Minor spoilers alert):

I’ve been seeing the ads for CBS’s How I Met Your Mother for months, and ordinarily I would dismiss this kind of thing as just another yuppie sitcom hoping that nobody notices that it’s ripping off Friends. The commercials show these two people flirting, and dating, and her throwing a drink in his face (to make her friend feel better). Not too different from things we’ve seen a hundred times before.

Two things, though, made me willing to give the show another chance. The first is the presence of Alyson Hannigan (“This one time? At band camp?”), who I’ll watch in just about anything.

The other factor is the great reviews that Neil Patrick Harris has been getting for his almost-over-the-top portrayal of the main character’s second-best friend (On the first night they met, he had said, “Lose the goatee. It doesn’t go with the suit.” “Um … I’m not wearing a suit.” “Second thing: Get a suit.”)

Then, to top it off, I read an article yesterday saying the finale seconds of the first episode had a great surprise ending — so I was hooked.

Sure enough, the ending was a shock: We hear the the main character telling his teenage kids (27 years from now): “And that’s the story of how I met … your Aunt Robin!”

And the kids are like, “You said it was the story of how you met MOM!”

“Hey,” he replies, “I said it was a long story …”

So this should be interesting.

I also managed to see most of Surface (even though it was on at the same time – that’s dedication!), which is NBC’s entry in the Lost ripoff sweepstakes. This show apparently involves a race of sea monsters, which has been spotted by a few people (one of whom took home an egg … which hatched (!)) and which is already known to some degree by some shadowy government agencies.

It might be an okay series, but with only three main characters and one mystery, it’s sure no Lost.

We also watched Prison Break, which is on its fourth episode. If any of the new shows have a chance of being as exciting and addicting as Lost, this is it.

In case you’re not familiar, Prison Break is about a young engineer whose brother (with a different surname) was framed for the murder of the vice president’s brother. The engineer designed the prison and is sure that he can break his brother out of prison before the execution, so he hid the blueprints for the prison in a full-body tattoo, and staged a bank robbery to get himself thrown into prison, with a mere month to spare before the execution. What he didn’t count on is that a Vast Conspiracy (which seems to be comprised of two dense-looking Secret Service Agents who take their marching orders from a Mystery Woman who seems to be running the Conspiracy from her kitchen, in which she always seems to be in the process of preparing meals).

Sure, it sounds pretty far-fetched, but there are always enough opposing forces in motion to make the story compelling. Colorful characters include the gruff-but-kindhearted warden (Stacy Keach), who had an indiscretion or two in his past and thus jumps through the ceiling whenever anyone says the word “Toledo”, and who is keeping the engineer around because he’s obsessed with finishing a replica of the Taj Mahal for his wife for their 40th anniversary (again: far-fetched); a vicious incarcerated crime lord, whose help the engineer needs to escape; a cellmate whose motivation for escaping is to stop his cousin from stealing his fiance; the brother’s ex-girlfriend, who is working on the outside to prove that the conviction was railroaded; and the pretty-but-feisty prison doctor, who just happens to be the governor’s daughter.

Yes, it stretches credulity, but still it’s cool. Check it out.

I watched some of Las Vegas, but it didn’t take me long to realize that they’re going backward, not forward, so I went back to Prison Break.

For one thing, they’ve added Lara Flynn Boyle, aka the Human Ironing Board, to the cast. Where do TV executives keep getting the idea that viewers actually like her??

And did they think there were too many female curves on the show, and they needed to add some straight lines?

Also, they got rid of Nessa (Marsha Thomason), the cool black British chick, who was a nice change of pace from the rest of the cast.

That leaves only one black character, and last night they had him dressed up in some sort of leprechaun minstrel outfit.

The Fall TV Season is here! I know TV reeks in general, but when I stop getting excited about the new fall shows every year, just throw me in a hole and shovel dirt on me.

I just found out this week that Brent Spiner is a regular on the new CBS series Threshold. I was considering watching it anyway, but the presence of Commander Data cinched it for me. Plus, I’m glad he’s getting work, in something that’s sci-fi related, in order to secure a lot of his old fan base, but different enough to give him an acting challenge (he plays a surly doctor who used to be a Sixties radical).

I was telling The Wife that he was on this show, and she said, “Oh yeah — ‘Mommy, you smell different!’” I said, “Close — you’re thinking of Invasion, ABC’s ‘Lost’ ripoff. The one I’m talking about is CBS’s ‘Lost’ ripoff.”

Not to be confused with Surface, which is NBC’s ‘Lost’ ripoff.

Anyway, I’m watching Threshold right now, and I guess the producers wanted to make sure nobody missed the ‘Lost’ connection: They hired Tom Cruise’s gruesome cousin, playing a part that’s almost identical to his ‘Lost’ persona: Super-strong, vicious, of mysterious origins, able to appear out of nowhere and disappear into thin air, and really really hard to take down.

And really, really gruesome. And creepy.

It’s like they watched ‘Lost’ and said, “Ooh, let’s have him do EXACTLY THE SAME THING on our show!”

That being said, though, it’s not a bad show, and a nice change from the mass invasion of clones of CSI and ‘Law and Order’ of recent years.

And these shows are open-ended, not wrapping up in a neat little package at the end of each episode.

These shows may be ripoffs, but they have the potential to be challenging.

I just read today that Mr. T has given up his gold chains because they’re an insult to God. I’m mainly posting this because I spotted him preaching on TV (and took this picture) a couple of years ago while flipping through the channels. Here’s a link to where I posted about it at the time.

Here are some TV-related items from BoingBoing:

First, a plea to the networks to have less celebrity poker and more celebrity Dungeons & Dragons. Hey, I’d watch it.

The second thing is for The Wife, who is researching digital video recorders: TIVO won’t let you save certain programs longer than 30 days. Apparently they’ll bow to the whim of any content provider and suspend your right to keep a copy of programs the programs that provider supplies; this policy basically ignores the Supreme Court “Betamax” decision of 1984, when home taping of programs was ruled to be Fair Use.

And it’s worth noting: That ruling, far from bankrupting Hollywood, helped to create today’s climate of widespread cinematic appreciation.

Hollywood and the music industry seem to be ignorant of how they’re shooting themselves in the foot with all their draconian “anti-piracy” measures.

The third item: Check out this video of 5th graders re-enacting the Whip It music video.

It does my heart proud to see today’s children have an appreciation for the classics.