I May Have a TV Problem

I watch/record/sit through a lot of TV shows. Some are ones I watched when I was younger and can't give up, while others are new shows that are captivating enough for me to want to keep watching. Some shows go off the deep end and I stop wasting my time on them, but that's not as common as I would like. I tend to give TV shows the benefit of the doubt (5 bad episodes is about my cut off point). So here's a rundown of my TV watching and recommendations for you, if you're looking for a new show. And I'm willing to include the shows that I'm probably a little ashamed to admit I watch.

Reality/Game Shows
American Idol. This show has had a lot of ups and downs, but very few shows on TV ever give a moment like this (yes, pun intended). I dare you to not to shed a tear.

The Voice. Because I think the singers are usually better and not just a bunch of teenagers.
The Amazing Race. All my dreams rolled up into one show. Traveling the world on what amounts to a massive scavenger hunt and some fun physical tasks that seem like a blast. Seriously, I want on.
Hollywood Game Night. Jane Lynch is a genius and has a lot of famous friends. I sometimes wonder if I could ever host a slightly toned-down version of that game night in my house.
Jeopardy. Always fun to realize just how bizarre some of your trivia knowledge is. And feel content that others know these random things too.
Last Comic Standing. These days, everyone can use a couple of extra laughs, and with alum like Amy Schumer, you never know who you might see early in his or her career.
America's Got Talent. I mostly watch for the singers and comics. I typically don't like the judges, but if you ignore them and their ridiculous comments, some of the talent really is pretty good.
Fake Off.* I haven't seen it on TV in awhile, but it is amazing to see people reimagine famous moments in history. Or genres. Or really anything cool.
Pitch Slapped.* The first season just ended and I don't know if it's going to a second one, but it was really enjoyable to watch high school a cappella groups in New Jersey grow into better performers.
American Ninja Warrior. Pushing man to his limits.
Project Runway. I really enjoy seeing the designs people come up with, although I admit that I'm not always in agreement with the judges on this show. I guess my knowledge of fashion is not top notch.

Drama/Law Enforcement Shows
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Even after 17 seasons, this show comes up with innovative storylines that are captivating, even while advancing the development of the show's many characters. I love the personal details of the detectives.
The Mysteries of Laura. I did not like this show to start off, but it's grown on me. It masquerades as a comedy, but there are a lot of really serious aspects in the character development that I'm very much into.
The Magicians. Described as "Harry Potter for adults," the show doesn't live up to that billing but is still pretty fun to follow. There's a real risk this show goes off the deep end, so I hope the writers keep it on track.
Blindspot. It's going in and out; some of the plot points are so beyond ridiculous (and yes, I recognize that even the show's premise is ridiculous) that it's hard to appreciate some of the good concepts.
Quantico. There's something awesome about watching indoctrination happen, and while I understand that the FBI's training academy isn't really like this at all, I still enjoy this show.
How To Get Away With Murder. The first season was amazing, but this current season is just getting weird. I like the premise of the show, but with so many weird plot twists, it's hard to keep track of who killed whom when and how many people know and are helping that person cover up the murder.
Zoo. A virus sweeps through the animal kingdom and turns animals into anti-human killing machines? OK, fine, I suppose I need to see how this goes. I recognize the show got bad reviews, but the characters were, to me, interesting, even if one of the main criticisms of the show was the ridiculousness of the character development.

Comedy Shows
The Big Bang Theory. Nerds having fun. Yes, please. Funny jokes with interesting characters.
Undateable. This show's second season started having poor ratings, so the show switched to live shows. Which are hilarious. Not only do the reference things actually happening both in the world and on the set, but they seem to relish the idea of putting the actors in almost impossible situations. A very strong recommendation for 30 minutes of laughing.
New Girl. I initially watched this show because I love Zooey Deschanel, but I've now grown to love all the main characters. They're all endearing in a quirky way, much like The Big Bang Theory.
Cooper Barrett's Guide To Surviving Life. It took only a few episodes for this show to become one of my new favorites. The characters are likeable, there's theoretically a moral behind each episode, and overall it's a good time on a Sunday evening.
Jane the Virgin. Telenovelas are popular around Latin America, with their over-the-top plots and endless twists. It's nice that one has come to American TV.
Impractical Jokers. Is it stupid? Yes. Is it brilliant? Absolutely. Four guys pranking each other and doing stupid things just because they're best friends? OK, I'm intrigued.
Superstore. I'm still up-in-the-air on this show, but there are enough laughs to keep me entertained.
Telenovela. Same with this show.
The Last Man on Earth. This is a show I've intended to stop watching multiple times, but then it's on TV and I tell myself "one more episode." And I keep watching, against my better judgment. The comedy is meh and I don't find many of the actors all that compelling.

Shows I Can't Categorize Correctly
The Librarians. Legends are real. Magic is real. And the Librarians are out to save the world. It's so nice to see the interpretations of classic legends.
Brain Games. Who wouldn't like to understand how the brain works? To understand why normal human actions happen?
What Would You Do? I stumbled across this show years ago and found strangers standing up for one another when they were severely wronged to be encouraging.
Lip Sync Battle. I feel like this show borders on ridiculous and funny, but it's also somewhat a competition among two celebrities. I don't know why I keep watching, except perhaps because I'm in love with Chrissy Teigen and enjoy her presence on the show.
Saturday Night Live. Some would consider this a comedy. I consider it a half-comedy, since so many of the sketches are just plain old blah. Weekend Update, which used to be a highlight of the show, has fallen considerably and really isn't funny anymore. But there are a few performers on the show that I love, namely Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon. They make everything funny.

Race

I saw the movie Race yesterday, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. On IMDB, I gave it a middling 5 stars, lower than its 6.9 stars average rating. I felt like the movie suffered from an identity crisis, but I'm not really sure what would have made it better.

Is Race a biopic on Jesse Owens? Yeah, mostly. It did get some basic facts wrong, especially when those facts were inconvenient (for instance, Owens had said repeatedly that Hitler shook his hand after at least one of his wins). Overall, though, my issue here was that the movie actually felt more like a movie about something else, and the director decided to follow Owens's story as a way to tell this something else.

Is Race a feel-good sports triumph story? Perhaps, although the movie sort of leaves the viewer down even after Owens wins his four gold medals with the commentary about race. Owens only got a chance to win the fourth medal because the US Olympic Committee pulled the Jewish athletes out of the race.

Is Race a commentary on race? I think it wanted to be, but it never really came through. Some aspects of race were completely brushed over, and viewers could be forgiven if after seeing this movie they thought the Nazis viewed the Jews as a mere annoyance in life.

My other main issue with Race was that the movie dragged (a person in the theater actually fell asleep and started snoring!) and the moments that were supposed to build up tension felt comical. For instance, the movie tried to make viewers feel as if Owens actually might not go to Berlin to compete in the Olympics. Except I think most people know he did. And the movie markets itself as Owens facing off against Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy. I tried not to laugh at the ridiculous will-he-or-won't-he moments.

So those were my impressions of the movie. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't one that I'd necessarily go out and recommend to others. I looked at other movies that I gave 5 stars to (such classics as Duplex, Trainwreck, and A Cinderella Story), and yes, I stick by my rating. In case you want to know more about Owens, below is a short video of his role in the 1936 Berlin Olympics:

Solo Traveling

Lovers running and laughing through a rainstorm look romantic; a single person doing so looks nuts.
--Mille Kerr, Hemisphere Travel Essay, January 2016

My mom recently expressed concern about my seemingly constant single life, prompted in part by my December post about being Jewish and alone on Christmas. To be fair to her, I don't remember the last date I went on that I told her about, but the fact remains that yes, I'm 28 and single. I'm not actively looking to end my singleness, but I'm not actively looking to perpetuate it either. I just haven't found a person to end it with yet.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying doing things solo. My three-week jaunt through Eastern Europe worked well for me for many reasons, but one of those was that I was traveling alone. I stayed where I wanted, ate what I wanted, and visited the sites how I wanted. A 10-mile circuitous route through Warsaw--getting lost a few times--led only to complaints from my own feet. And my 14-mile walk throughout Toronto last month meant I didn't learn my lesson, but again, it was only my feet yelling at my brain. In both situations, I'd want my travel partner, and life partner, to feel the same.

Some day I won't be doing these trips alone, and I look forward to getting lost in some far-off city, staring at maps trying to figure out how we accidentally ended up three miles off-course in Chinatown. Not that I have any experience with that, of course! Until then, I'll enjoy my solo excursions and look forward to seeing other parts of the world.

The photo to the left is me looking straight down from the top of the CN Tower, a really crazy experience. And below is a video that I took from Casa Loma, Canada's very own castle. The piano player was brilliant, and looked like a mermaid princess. Most of her songs were Disney tunes, but not all of them. Unfortunately the better-quality video I took of her playing Beauty and the Beast is too big to upload to this blog, but this was pretty good. Enjoy!

 

Random Act of Kindness

We're bombarded with news of bad things happening all the time. Terrorist attacks, shootings, even car accidents and natural disasters. Turn on the evening news and it's only occasionally that they report on happiness. I think that's why people love random acts of kindness--they're a reminder that there's good in this world and some of that good might just come our way.

I've wasted away many hours on YouTube and Tumblr and BuzzFeed and any other site that lets people show the good in the world, and one of them truly inspired me. Inside a RedBox DVD, someone put a little money in the case and encouraged the person to get a snack. Today, I rented a movie from RedBox (The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials) and thought it was about time I made someone's day, at some point. So like the Tumblr post I saw that one day, I put in a little money and a note telling the eventual unsuspecting recipient to "Enjoy a snack with your movie!" It's the least I could do to hopefully brighten someone's day.

And that's all that random acts of kindness really are. I will never know who gets this little surprise, and it doesn't matter, as long as that person opens up the DVD and smiles. I know I smiled returning the movie. Pay it forward.

As for a happy video, this happens to be one of my favorite Pay It Forward videos. Enjoy.

Unfriended

Every now and then I go through my social media contact lists and purge people out. These are people I don't really care to hear updates from, or, in even rarer circumstances, people I don't want knowing what's going on in my life.

Social convention these days says that when you meet someone and have a connection with them--even if it's just for a day, or less, such as a party--you need to "connect" online. To share photos and funny memories of that one moment together, of course. But photo/one memory sharing alone is a difficult task, so we as creatures of the 21st century often just open up our lives and let people in, the thinking being, "He's a fine person, what does it matter?" And in reality, it probably doesn't. I very much doubt that someone that ends up in my social circle, even along the periphery, is a murderer. Or a stalker. Or a murdering stalker. So what does it matter if Random Jane sees that I went crazy watching Georgetown eke out another close basketball game, or sees photos of my trip to the other side of the world?

This picture has nothing to do with the post,
but I felt the need to break up the text with
something pretty. So here's a picture from
Nosy Be, Madagascar, that I took about one
year ago today. I really love this shot!

But is that the point of social media? No. And honestly, I don't necessarily like when my Facebook News Feed gets inundated with people I don't actually care about, or feel like I share anything in common with other than this random one time. I want my social media to connect me to people I want to hear about, to see about, and to engage with. I know, I know, you can edit the preferences on your News Feed, and I have done that. I have trained it well, and now it in general only shows me updates and statuses of people I want to see. Every now and then it sneaks in something else, which I take as a happy exception rather than an annoying rule. Now my social media connects me to people I feel that I have a social connection to. These are people I have more than one thing in common with, more than one memory to look back on with. Even though I care more about some people in my News Feed than others, I feel confident that I'd be OK seeing an update from anyone I am currently friends with on Facebook.

To get there, though, I had to be brutally honest with myself, and I went and purged people out of my Facebook friend list.* I felt like I was violating some sort of community code doing this on such a large scale. I feel like society accepts unfriending a person here or there because there was a falling out, or the person happens to be an ex (often related to the former position), but I almost feel guilty unfriending people. Why? Why should I feel guilty controlling who has access to information about me? Why has society made this rule that you must be connected to anyone with whom you ever crossed paths? Nevertheless, brutal self-honesty served me well, and now I actually enjoy looking at my Facebook News Feed. Every post I look at makes me think of the person. Some are by people I see every day, but some are for people I haven't seen in 20 years but still care about. That is why I use social media.

And I can't admit to having been in Madagascar without
sharing a picture of a lemur. So ta da! Here's a lemur!

To all my social media friends: congratulations on surviving another purging! I hope that you think of me the way I think of you. I hope you see my posts, even if it is just once every couple of months, and think, "Yeah, he is/was a cool kid. I wonder what he's up to these days." And then you click on my profile, get your fill, and move on for the time being. Or if you're feeling sentimental, you reach out. Because I like when people reach out. I like reaching out too. A few months back I wondered if it was weird for me to comment on a post by someone I hadn't seen in many years. I was told it wasn't, and now I make that my rule. If I like something, I'll like it. If I have a comment, I'll comment. I hope 2016 is a year I interact even better with the people in my life, both in-person and on social media. Just remain friended!

As for a video that makes me happy, I heard this song on the radio recently and fell in love with it. And it actually sort of fits this post. So enjoy it too!

*I know I keep saying Facebook here, but I also do this, although less frequently on Twitter. And I haven't figured out Instagram or Pinterest or SnapChat or What's App or any other social media sites/apps to need to worry about this on those.