• All posts tagged with "tv"
ם I’m Back
Posted on August 15, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Hi there. It’s me again.
Sorry for the extended absence. In the viciously fought battle for my attention, New York City in the summer has been defeating the Internet hands down. My sincerest apologies.
The good news: after two months of searching (including five days of homelessness), I found an apartment! It’s much bigger than the picture lets on, and it now has significantly more furniture. And the location is downright fantastic, so I think the two month search was worth it. The jury’s still out on whether the hefty broker’s fee was worth it. Eeeesh.
Also, Jimi Hendrix used to live in my building, so that’s pretty neat.
Moving on, you know when you’re watching Law & Order, and Jerry Orbach knocks on some apartment door or stops some random dog walker, holds up a mugshot, and asks him if he’s seen the guy? And the tenant/dogwalker/shopkeeper/underpaid extra invariably answers something like, “Oh yeah, I know the guy. He owns a bakery down on 51st and 10th.” Preferably he’s a walking stereotype, sporting a thick Brooklyn accent and doing something like carrying a crate of oranges from a delivery truck down to a basement wearing fingerless gloves. Then Jesse L. Martin writes down something in his little police notebook thingy, and Jerry Orbach makes some kind of lame, could-only-be-delivered-by-Lennie-Briscoe joke like “his pastries are going to be stale tomorrow” or some pun about how “soon he’ll have a lot less dough”. Then the screen fades to black (dæung dæung!), and we never see our friend the extra again.
Well, after three years of living in New York, I finally got to be the real-life equivalent of that guy.
I was at home, just putzing around my apartment about to head out the door, when my buzzer rings. “NYPD! Buzz us up or come downstairs.” Now, I’m not one to just buzz up anyone, so I head down. Through the glass I see two detectives (one of whom was wearing an unexpectedly-powder-blue bulletproof vest); they flash some badges and I open the door. Out comes the mugshot of a 50–60ish year old woman.
Him: You even seen this woman before?
Me: Oh yeah, I know the guy. He owns a bakery down on 51st and 10th. Um… no?
Blah blah blah, they ask me some more questions. Turns out the woman did something-or-other, is out on parole now, and the address she gave the po-po was my address. I tell them I’ve never seen her before, and no one lives in the building who looks remotely like her. (The shopkeeper next door chimed in at this point to say that he’s never seen her either, which actually carries a lot of weight, because he just sits out on the sidewalk in front of my building on a stool roughly 28 hours a day. He’s also very tall, but that’s a story for another time.) Anyway, satisfied with my answers, out comes the little police notebook thingy, and they take down my name, phone number, address, date of birth, shoe size, favorite movie, blood type (O+), GPA, fondest childhood memory, etc. Then they hopped in their unmarked car and took off. Dæung dæung! [Fade to black.]
There was unfortunately no Lennie Briscoe-esque quip.
Remember when this happened? No? Go read it again. I’ll wait here.
Good? Good.
Hoo-ah!
ם Things I Saw Today…
Posted on January 25, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Rachel Ray and LL Cool J playing strip air hockey.
ם Fuggedaboutit
Posted on January 13, 2007 at 4:56 am
Today, someone on the street asked me if I was Robert Iler.
Actually, he specifically asked, “Hey, aren’t you a Soprano? Iller, or Iler, or something. Yeah, Robert Iler! That’s you!”
Sorry to disappoint everyone, but I am not in fact Robert Iler.
I’m also pretty sure that I don’t even look anything like Robert Iler.
ם Attica! Attica!
Posted on August 29, 2006 at 12:57 pm
So Deb and I are running errands yesterday, and we head up to the Astor Place K-Mart (she needed a sugar bowl). Just as we’re crossing the street over to the Astor cube (or The Alamo, if you’d rather), Deb tells me to look behind me. Thinking she’s just telling me to watch for traffic, I ignore the advice. So she grabs me and tells me a bit more forcefully, so I look back towards the giant glass Chase building and see some removable van bench seats just sitting out on the sidewalk with people sitting on them.
“Yeah, I guess that’s pretty funny,” I say.
“No douchebag, look who’s sitting on it.”
And there, hanging out on a van bench seat in front of Chase, is Spike Lee.
Only in New York.
But in a strange twist of fate, before we cross over to K-Mart and write this off as just another Gawker Stalker submission, a crew member stops us and asks us if we’re in a hurry. Nope, we say. The sugar bowl can wait.
He points to Spike Lee across the street. “Well, we’ve got a famous director over there, and he’s filming promo spots for next year’s Oscars. He’s looking for Village-y type people to be in them. He’s going to give you famous lines from movies, and you just parrot them back to the camera. You busy?”
Hell no, we’re not busy. Give us the release forms.
So we hang out for a half hour or so, filling out forms and getting Polaroids taken of us, and before we knew it, Deb was standing in front of the Astor Place 6 station, saying:
“I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”
-Sunset Blvd.
“Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”
-It’s a Wonderful Life
And then I’m shaking hands with Spike Lee, thrown in front of some big lights, and he has me screaming:
“Attica! Attica!”
-Dog Day Afternoon
“You talkin’ to me?”
-Taxi Driver
“I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody!”
-On the Waterfront
And my personal favorite:
“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
-Sunset Blvd.
I have now not only met Spike Lee, but have been directed by Spike Lee. Spike Lee has screamed “WITH MORE ATTITUDE!” at me.
If anyone catches this on TV (probably sometime in February), please let me know, and if you catch it on tape, I’ll love you forever.
Only in New York.
In the ever escalating race of “justifying the internet’s existence,” Wikipedia strikes again with a list of problems solved by MacGyver.
Despite MacGyver’s best efforts, an eagle he is trying to save doesn’t make it, and its young are at stake. After hang gliding to the nest on top of a butte in Monument Valley, Utah, MacGyver brings the eggs back to the house where this episode takes place. To give the young a chance, he builds an incubator with padding from a chair and vegetable oil. As MacGyver puts it, “the oil combines with the fibers in the padding to create a low level spontaneous combustion,” generating heat.
Thanks, Wiki.
ScienceNews Online has written up an article about math jokes in The Simpsons, including such nerdy gems as two “near miss” solutions to Fermat’s Last Theorem.
The most interesting part is that of the head writers, one has a master’s degree in computer science, one a Ph.D. in computer science, and another a Ph.D. in applied math. I guess there is hope for my math degree after all.
One last math joke that’s not mentioned in the article is the Powers of Ten couch opening, which ties in nicely with my post from yesterday.
ם Is Lost a Repeat?
Posted on June 9, 2006 at 2:56 am
This is bound to become my kid sister’s new favorite website: Is Lost a Repeat?
The site is admittedly a bit complicated and hard to navigate, but it becomes second-nature rather quickly.
