This Is Illness

God, I've been so bored. Being sick sucks anyway, but being in the same apartment for four days without any decent human contact just adds insult to infirmity.

But my best friend in the whole world was there for me, as he always is. TV, you never let me down. Here's what me and TV talked about over the last four days.

Pan's Labyrinth
...which I can now put just behind the The Sweet Hereafter and Dead Man Walking on my list of Movies That I Loved But Never Want To Watch Again. I'm not ashamed to admit that, after about the first 15 minutes, I had to turn the lights back on. I would say that it's a triumph to create a human character so evil that even the most grotesque fantasy creature couldn't come close to his scariness, but then again: X ALMIGHTY DID YOU SEE THAT DUDE WITH EYES IN HIS HANDS?!! Nightmare city.

This Is England
A fantastic movie whose incredible acting was only outdone by the soundtrack selections. This song should be part of everyone's collection, which I say because it's now part of mine:

Toots and the Maytals, "54-46 Was My Number"


Football
There were some great games on this weekend. Thanks, TV! You always know how to cheer me up when I'm sick. TV and I noticed that, once again, it seems like ownership trumps talent in the NFL. It doesn't matter what kind of talent the Saints and Bengals put on their teams: ultimately, they're the Saints and the Bengals, and that beats out any amount of Bushes, Palmers or Johnsons. Hmmm...that last bit sounds like the punchline to a stupid dirty joke. Sorry.

Shot at Love with Tila Tequila
I usually consider myself pretty channel-blind when it comes to my TV surfing. Whatever looks interesting, I'll watch, but I rarely pay attention to which of the hundreds of cable channels I'm watching.

But I can usually tell when I've come across MTV when all of the people on my screen seem borderline retarded. Seriously: in the '80's, I was one of the worst students in my school, barely scraping by and making terrible grades. But if I was 15 years old now, I would guess I'd be the smartest kid in class, getting A's from frustrated teachers only because I know how to spell "you're" instead of "ur".

So I turned on Shot At Love for a trainwreck, and I got it. But while I question the "reality" of this show, it's actually a pretty interesting concept: contestants vie for the affections of the hostess, but the hostess is bisexual, so it's a house full of vacuous men and stripper lesbians¹ (a third, less-known category of lesbian). I really wish I could trust the sincerity of the contestants and the hostess (who I believe is looking for "love" as much as Brett Michaels is), because it's a kind of fascinating psychological study in gender and sexuality.

But from the "scenes from the season" shown at the end of the episode, it pretty much looks like they're all idiots, so "fascinating" is probably far, FAR down the list of adjectives that anyone would use to describe this show.

¹ These two words are going to bring a lot of unwanted search engine traffic my way. Sorry to disappoint you, boys.