Zoë Stagg

“You didn’t like that, did you.”

“I can’t even convert to tweet how horrendous it was.”

This might be why I don’t give new TV shows a chance. I have Gilmore Girls, I have Gossip Girl, I have New Girl which I watch because it makes me mad, and I have LOST.

What I do not have is a need for…what IS this show?

I feel bad for how bad it is. Bless their hearts, the writers, yay for them for having a TV-writing gig, and yay for the actors being on a show…but the end result. It can really only be our fault.

Three minutes in, after conservatively 16 applications of the most aggressive laugh track since The Flintstones I said,

“Is this set in modern day?”

It’s racist, you guys. And not even with an edge of societal commentary, it’s just plain The-Honeymooners hamfisted about it. The set ups for the jokes are so obvious, you can almost Rocky Horror along with the punchline. It’s painful. And it’s our fault.

When the third season premiered on September 21, 2009, Big Bang Theory ranked as CBS’s highest-rated show of that evening in the adults 18–49 demographic.

It’s not a new show. And how many shows never even get a second season? This has been around since 2007, it’s been nominated for Emmys, and its survival must mean this is what we want. We want stereotypes. We want gimmicks that have so much potential, yet are played to a lowest-denominator badum bum. We want not to think. Entertainment in this form is really only an interruption of silence. That’s what we want?

Can we as an audience not handle more? The wiki page makes this seem like an awesome show. And it is! If you love going to see a friend of a friend in a beginning Improv class where you’re insulted in the lobby beforehand and slip on a banana peel on the way home, you’ll adore it.

Shatner wept.

(PS: It was really Spock? I said during the episode, “They couldn’t even get Leonard Nimoy to do his own voiceover?” When I don’t even believe you playing yourself? Eesh.)

Wonka lied. All you had to do was follow him and you’d be “in a world of pure imagination”? Apologies to the snozz berries, but we don’t all come equipped.

I don’t think I have any. None imaginations.

I am kind of creative — but that’s different from having imagination. I can come up with nonsense — but oh looky, science says that just makes you a liar.

Not only do naturally creative people cheat more than uncreative people, subjects cajoled into thinking outside of the box become cheaters, too. This suggests that the creative process isn’t just tied to dishonest behavior; it actually enables it.

Well, sure. If you can come up with a scheme, should it just go to waste? Let’s be reasonable.

What I cannot do, the imagining bit, is picture stuff. Sports radio might as well be in another language, I cannot make a scene in my head out of those words to save my life, and it’s not just because sports, BORING, I just can’t do it. I can’t read a fight scene and make sense of it either. My eyes blur and who hit who what now? That happened in The Hunger Games yesterday. (Book #12, finished in a day because who could put it down? Now on to the second in the series which seems to have a sophomore slump and too much romantical stuff, but.. I’m still in.)

The point is, Wonka better show me the money, or I’m sunk. No imagination.

And if science is right, he probably would have dumped me down the shoot with the bad eggs.

I am shamelessly stealing this idea in an effort to serialize. I want to see more of these!

The idea is this: If a stranger (or Columbo) were to walk into your house, what would they be able to tell about you by just looking around?

One of us is vegan, one of us eats all of the things. Our cookbooks don’t touch.

One of us used to be a professional organizer. Oddly, not the one whose clothes look like this.

Mr. Perfect used to live alone. Mrs. Perfect has not been able to mount a successful case to take down the Periodic Table of Mixology from the kitchen wall. (It is luckily located behind the fridge.)

You guys. I live like a [fraternity] animal.

One of us used to be in the Army and has all his coins in a cute case. One of us IS in the Army, but hasn’t done enough cool stuff to warrant more than a tray of “neat tings.”

Neither of us are in charge. That title goes to the cats, especially the fat one who thinks he can fit in the tiny bed.

So what can YOU tell just by looking at your place?

First Twilight, now The Hunger Games — modern YA books and the cloud of phenomena they stir bear absolutely no resemblance to spinning the paperback carousel in the “Teen” section of the library in the Ye Olden Eighties.

I have read both of these books, probably more than once. Back in the day, All That Glitters weren’t no vampire.

The closest I remember to a clamor is trading Sweet Valley High titles or finding out there was another addition to the Kobie series.

Want to trip down YA memory lane? This collection of titles, descriptions, COVERS is remarkably good.

And so of course, where there’s a fuss, there’s me four years later. This is up next — as soon as I finish my Marco Pierre White memoir, and get over wanting to be called an “enfant terrible.”

It’s all plum blooms and yellow blossoms in Italy, but up in the German Alps, Old Herr Winter is still hanging on.

“Let’s get you fitted for skis. How good are you?”

“Well, I can do blues all by myself.”

“You’re Intermediate then.”

Fist pump of victory. I never even made it to Intermediates in swim lessons. This is a very important athletic achievement.

That lasted all the way until I met up with a tiny skiing friend, whose pink skis were the size of baguettes. Without poles (Or “OH GOD PLEASE LET ME STAY UPRIGHT” sticks) she showed me the way down the mountain.

And by “showed” I mean she kept looking over her shoulder at me, puzzled as to why I wasn’t keeping up. And then puzzled why all of a sudden I chose to ski down the mountain upside down, head first, on my back, sticks asunder, legs twisted like that Goofy cartoon.

My little pink-skied friend took me down a red run. I don’t know which humbles me and my abilities more — that she’s three and bombing down reds, or that I got tricked.

I did learn this: The steeper it is, the longer you’ll fall; and if your poles are still 50 yards up the mountain and you’re in a heap at the bottom, someone will probably bring them down on their way by.

Someone pre-K, most likely.

(Mittel means “medium” not “little.” But since it was winter sports in 60 degree weather, faux-translation stands.)