Thursday, November 13, 2008

Things I Learned Today #4 - Jesus Agrees with my TV Choices

Great news for those of us who enjoy terrible television or enjoy fantastic television, and even better news for those like myself with the distinction of liking terrible and fantastic television. On the terrible TV front, NBC renewed Days of Our Lives today until September 2010, with the option to pick up the contract until September 2011. That is, at a minimum, 18 more months of Days. Perhaps that will give the writers appropriate time to wrap up the current loose ends of who killed Trent Robbins, who killed the mayor, why did Abe only have to run a campaign that lasted one month in real world time (approximately 2 days in Days of Our Lives time), whether or not Kate will die of lung cancer, will John Black gain his memory back and find true love for the two hundredth time with Marlena, and why should we care about any of this? No good reason, that is why.

On the fantastic TV front, Jeffrey Tambor of Arrested Development said in an interview that an Arrested Development movie is "a go". This show was one of the best and most hilarious of all time, yet it was nearly impossible to convince people to just give it a try when it originally debuted several years ago. Since its cancellation, it has continued to spread in popularity thanks to DVD sales and continued good word of mouth. If this movie comes to fruition, I can't imagine many things that could make me more excited - perhaps if Days is picked up for an additional 18 or 36 months. The two entertainment things that I miss more than anything in the world are Mitch Hedberg and Arrested Development. Mitch is dead from drugs and I doubt that we'll have a 2Pac like series of posthumous releases, but perhaps Arrested can live on in movie format.

Finally, today I learned that if I want to get people commenting on and reading the blog, I have to write about something else about which people strongly disagree with me, a la yesterday's post about The Detroitist. When I started this thing several months ago, my friend and mentor Heiko suggested that I focus on generating traffic by writing posts about how much Apple (the company, not the fruit) sucks. He loves Apple (the fruit and the company) and is a holder of stock (the company), but there are so many fanboys who are crazy in their pro-Apple standpoint that I would instantly whip up the ire of gadget lovers everywhere. I would have to deal with a fair amount of anger, but people would be reading. The broader problem with this approach, I have found, is that as painstaking as I am in trying to make my point clear, people selectively decide to ignore entire portions of my arguments. This could either be because I am not as eloquent and persuasive with my words as I think I am, or that skimming results in important segments being skipped. For example, yesterday I tried to repeatedly make clear that I am well aware of the obvious troubles in our state and there are no simple solutions, but in the comments I was accused of being a simpleton who thinks he can "believe" himself out of a problem. I can't believe myself out of a problem, but I do believe that singularly detailing a terrible situation is even less effective than trying to believe myself out of that situation.

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