Category Archives: Uncategorized

Has anybody else tried McClure’s Pickles? Cuz I just bought some last week and they are friggin’ amazing.

Disclaimer: I received no compensation, monetary or culinary, for this thoughtful and in-depth review. I am not in the pocket of Big Pickle. This is mostly because nobody has tried to bribe me yet. If anyone wants to, be assured that my morals are very much for sale, and will be gladly exchanged for crisp pickled goodness.

In no particular order:

• I was sad to learn this morning that singer Guy Clark has died. If you’re not familiar with his music – well, I’m not especially either. I only know him because of a single NPR story I heard once, and I only know a few of his songs. But damn, they’re good. My Favorite Picture of You is a simple little song, but one of my all-time favorites from any genre.
• This Friday is Betsy’s birthday. She’s turning sqrt(961) but doesn’t look a day over sqrt(841). Friday is also the day we find out the gender of Baby Buckley. She, and I, and my mom, have all had dreams that it would be a boy. We’ll see.
• We’ve started watching Lost Girl on Ben Trube’s recommendation. Only three episodes in. The first one was great, but 2 and 3 have lost momentum. (A lot of shows are like that.) I’m waiting for them to get off the story-of-the-week stuff and into the big story.
• I recently finished reading The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs. Not much insight into spirituality or Christianity, but a whole lot of insight into the Bible as a document, and into many of the groups that take it literally. Did you know there’s a prohibition in Leviticus and Deuteronomy against wearing clothes made of both wool and linen? Or that several groups are trying to breed a perfect red heifer without spot or blemish because they believe it will usher in the End of Days, based on another Torah passage?
• Speaking of the Bible, Betsy and I have now read Genesis, Exodus, the Gospel of John, 1 Thessalonians, and 2 Thessalonians. We’re halfway through the Gospel of Mark, with Leviticus up next. Obviously, we’re jumping around, but we do still intend to read every book. I may post more thoughts on all that when I get time.
• I’m now reading Ruthless, a book by Ron Miscavige – father of David Miscavige, who is currently the successor to L. Ron Hubbard as supreme leader of the Church of Scientology. It’s interesting. Ron is very critical of the modern “Church” (which he correctly labels a cult) and of his son, but he still believes in the basic Scientology teachings.
• Captain America: Civil War was pretty good. It’s basically Avengers 3 more than a Captain America movie per se, but I’m not exactly complaining.
• Monday, when I posted my Buffy Shakespeare thing, I also posted a link on the Buffy subreddit. The response was overwhelmingly positive, which was very encouraging. Blog traffic for that day jumped from the usual 500-ish to almost 1,000.
• Speaking of Buffy, the actress who played Drusilla – Juliet Landau – is now following me on Twitter. She follows an enormous number of people, so this is not incredibly impressive, but I still got a real kick out of it.
• I have cleaned and organized the basement. If you ever saw our basement, you know that this task qualifies as the 13th labor of Hercules. I also shoveled and spread 6 cubic yards of mulch last weekend. “But Brian,” you say, “these are fairly ordinary tasks. Do you really expect us to be impressed?” Listen. I don’t have muscles. This stuff is impressive, dammit.
• I had this crazy dream that one of our two major political parties chose as its nominee for president a man who advocated killing the families of people who attack us. Haha! Oh, man, what a crazy dream.
• Editing is going very well. I’m doing a ton of work for Dragonfly Editorial, Green Frog Publishing, and Creative Sparks Writing. And they’re paying me!
• My dad is in Italy on a business trip. He sent me this photo, with the caption “Exterminate!”

Did you get it? Yeah, you in the back, you got it, right?

I should’ve used “inertial dampener” for the Chief O’Brien meme and saved “Heisenberg compensator” for a Breaking Bad joke.

Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20.

And if you’re Geordi, hindsight is the only thing that’s 20/20. Zing!

I’m a terrible person.

Betsy and I discovered this at a local store. “Mr. Q. Cumber all natural sparkling cucumber beverage.” (Presumably sparkling refers to beverage only, but I’m tickled by the thought of a sparkling cucumber.)

We had to try it. It was just so weird.

I took the cap off and sniffed. It smelled like – well, like they’d put an actual cucumber in there. It was very strong.

It tasted sorta like pop (soda), all fizzy and kind of sweet, except instead of tasting like Coke or Mountain Dew, it tasted like cucumber. I thought it was sort of okay, while Betsy made an amazingly awful face and vowed off the stuff for eternity. We poured the rest of it down the drain.

I have to give these guys credit – this product is exactly as advertised. It is truly a sparkling cucumber beverage. But who actually drinks this stuff (more than once, I mean)? And who makes this stuff?

The latter question is easier to answer: Global Beverage Enterprises, whose website looks like it was created in 1997 and copyedited by precisely no one (complete with Earthlink email address). They even have a Twitter feed, @mrqcumberdrink, which has an impressive 209 followers, although their last tweet was over six months ago.

If it sounds like I’m making fun of them, well, I am, a little. But I also think the world could always use more weirdness, and I’m glad Global Beverage could deliver.

According to their site: “Many of our beverages will make you say, Wow, I wonder what that tastes like?”

They’re not wrong.

I’m a strong believer in the idea that art quality is inherently subjective, that people can like whatever they like, and watch whatever they want to watch. And I’m not one of those cane-wielding grumps who insists everything was better back in the old days. I actually think TV today is, overall, smarter and deeper and funnier and better than it’s ever been. (Current favorites include Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Jessica Jones.)

But there seems to be a particular sub-type of TV that grates on my nerves, for reasons that can be hard to identify. I’m thinking of NCIS, Grey’s Anatomy, Quantico, and The Flash – I’ve only seen a few episodes of each, so I can’t judge their overall quality, but from what I have seen, they seem to share a number of traits that bug me in small, mostly subconscious ways.

Here are the things that bother me most:

Constant ambition and jockeying for position. There’s nothing wrong with ambition, and it can be a great plot/character driver. But when everybody’s perpetually obsessed with the next rung on the ladder, the show quickly becomes (for me) repetitive and shallow. Say what you will about Star Trek and its spinoffs, but this was one flaw they never had. Starfleet officers spend 1% of their time scrambling for promotions, and 99% of their time doing their damn jobs.

Constant drama and petty squabbling. Drama is good, but it should feel necessary, inevitable. Otherwise it’s just childish. It drives me crazy when every scene in a show features adults who act like they’re in high school (or worse, since real high school isn’t constant drama either). You want to grab these people and scream Suck it up and be a grownup and move on! Even Buffy, which had plenty of drama, was rarely that bad, largely because of Giles and his zero-tolerance policy on teen angst. And that was a story actually set in high school.

Constant failure to communicate. Again, I get it – people can be bad at communicating, and stories should reflect that. But does it have to happen twenty times per episode? How many times can somebody refuse to listen before you stop feeling sorry for them? How many times can somebody lie for someone else’s “own good” before you think they should’ve figured out that it never works? And isn’t it possible, just once, just for the sake of variety, that a character could listen to another character without inventing some extra subtext that gets their undies in a bunch?

Constant gravitas. Shows can be serious, heavy, and dark. That’s fine. But break it up a little, tell a joke – and better still, laugh at yourself, at the show itself. Don’t take your own story too seriously. I still remember the year that Steven Martin hosted the Oscars. He walked out on stage, looked around at all the millionaires and billionaires and fancy clothes and rapt cameras, and then – his very first line of the evening – he said, “Well, I’m glad to see they’re cutting back on all the glitz.” He appreciated the Academy Awards for what they were, both the good and the silly, and he didn’t mind saying so.

“Smart” characters written by not-so-smart people. Or at least, written by people who aren’t smart in their character’s area. Look, you don’t like science, fine, don’t write about science. But please, don’t have a show that features scientists as main characters (looking at you, Flash) and give them dialogue that would make a middle school teacher cringe. (People often criticize Big Bang Theory for not being “smart” enough, and I agree it’s dumb overall, but it has enough funny moments that I still enjoy it.)

Improbable attractiveness. I enjoy watching hot women and classy-looking guys as much as the next person. But sometimes it gets a little ridiculous. There are five main girlfriends in Big Bang, and they could all be models. (I would imagine some of them are.) Every class of future lawyers, doctors, and FBI agents seems to be filled entirely with young men and women freshly sculpted by Pygmalion. Not only is this weird, it also highlights the fictional nature of the show and makes it harder to take any of it seriously.

I only had six things. It’s true. I said seven because it sounded better, but that was a blatant lie. Do you feel betrayed?