I’m struck with a sudden desire to watch the old Adam West/Burt Ward “Batman.” The TV episodes haven’t made it onto DVD (legal fun - Wikipedia has a nice summary) but the MOVIE sure did! And I’ve got it right here - shark repellant batspray, (Lee Meriwether (not Julie Newmar or Eartha Kitt) and all. So I think I’ll watch that tonight.

To counter last night’s sad sack of a post, allow me to share some entertaining things. Rightfully, and to match the taxonomy and structure I’ve set forth thus far, this post should be called, “Easily Entertained, volume #” - but nah. I like the Riddler reference a bit better. So, here’s some random stuff:

• One of my favorite enjoyable fun reads (that is to day, not horribly mentally taxing, but definitely not a waste of your time) from Mr. Neil Gaiman is up on the internets for free for one month. THIRTY DAYS. You can download the PDF and read it. He and his publisher (HarperCollins) did this a few months back with another one of his books and saw a bit of a jump in sales, esp. in independent bookstores, if I recall correctly. This time, it’s his book Neverwhere. So… check it out if you’d like to read a bit of non-dragon fantasy fiction about London and people and relationships and puns. It’s one of those books I could read over and over again. Just fun.

• If you’re in the northern New Jersey area and have access to a car and are craving some delicious diner food, by all means get yourself over to Tops Diner in East Newark, NJ. I went after work tonight with a friend from work and we stuffed ourselves silly… after spending about 15 minutes just staring at the menu. I must reiterate that my heart belongs to the Tick-Tock diner. They’ve got the sweet potato fries, the strangely surly service and shiny chrome that gives it authentic Jersey diner flair… but Tops Diner is surprisingly upscale (I use the term in the diner sense), offering things like eggs Benedict with crab cakes instead of Canadian bacon. The decor is more modern and sleeker, and the menu is twice as expansive. So, yeah. Consider it for your next northern NJ diner run.
• The Shape of Song. This is just geeky fun. The structure of songs is such that elements repeat - choruses, motifs, etc. This site provides a visual representation of various songs submitted - check out the simplicity of the well-known X-Files theme song by Mark Snow, the minimal roadbumps of Nine Inch Nails’ Closer, anything from Radiohead and Pachelbel’s canon. Pretty.
  

  The diagrams in The Shape of Song display musical form as a sequence of translucent arches. Each arch connects two repeated, identical passages of a composition. By using repeated passages as signposts, the diagram illustrates the deep structure of the composition.

• My Moo stickerbook arrived yesterday (@ right). Moo is a UK-based company who’s partnered with Flickr to create these cute little sticker books from your Flickr photostream. You select a bunch of photos and they print them up in a cute match-book style sticker book. I was like a little kid when I got the envelope. I’m all excited about where to put my new stickers.
• Quick Sarah Palin round-up. I’m not watching the speech tonight (no cable) and I don’t want to listen, so I’ll hear all about it tomorrow morning on NPR. In the meantime, here are some posts I’ve found interesting (and/or entertaining): (1) What a librarian has to say about Mrs. Palin, (2) a post from This Recording which I should not even try to describe, (3) a piece from an Alaska native in The New Republic called, “Palin? Really?” (4) a little piece about Palin’s kids’ names (5) and something a bit less tabloid-ey from the NYT. There’s tons more, but that would just feel wrong.
• It’s going to be almost 90 degrees in NJ tomorrow and Friday - and raining on Friday and Saturday. I want fall to get here already. I want more than just the falling leaves with their colors changing (which is sort of happening already) but also the cool weather. That’s what I want. I also wanted to find and post a clip from the Family Guy episode with the leafers descending upon Rhode Island, but I couldn’t find it on YouTube or Hulu. Oh well.

While on the treadmill today, I saw this on the TV:

Oh, James Lipton. I enjoy that you can laugh at yourself in less-than-subtle ways.

(And I am tired. Goodnight.)

I am looking forward to a day off tomorrow during which I’ll be sitting on a couch with my friend Theresa, watching the entire A&E miniseries version of “Pride and Prejudice.”

And drinking tea. And perhaps eating some biscuits (Oh, fine! Cookies, then) and cake. I deserve the sitting on the couch part for part of the day, anyway, since tonight was a rock-climbing night. I’ll still go running tomorrow night. And I might go climbing again on Saturday afternoon. It’s quite addictive, actually. The way running is addictive to runners, I imagine.

Anyway, post-climbing, my friend and I ate some dinner (at 10:30 at night, but whatevs. That whole thing about your body knowing what time you’re eating is bollocks anyway) and watched an episode of “Flight of the Conchords.” The Bowie episode. Here’s a segment that made me laugh until tears streamed from my eyes. I’ve seen it before, but watching it with someone who hadn’t seen it before brought back the humor ten-fold.

Now I’m going to try to dislodge Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” from my head (perhaps with something like Depeche Mode’s “Policy of Truth”) so I can fall asleep without having a freaky freaky dream of my own.

Futurama is back! And that was a Zoidberg quote from season 4.

The December issue of Wired has an interview with Matt Groening and David X. Cohen talking about the history of Futurama and the new season (direct to DVD and eventually Comedy Central). It’s a really interesting piece and provided much insight into why the show is so perfect for people who enjoy geeking it up:

After the show got a green light, Cohen assembled the geekiest writing staff television had ever seen: one MA in math, one MA in computer science, one MA in philosophy, one PhD in chemistry, one PhD in applied math, and some normals to balance things out. “I went from Home Improvement, where people earnestly pitched jokes about farting and table saws, to a place where there were discussions about nanophysics and string theory and quantum mechanics,” writer Eric Horsted says. “I could only follow the conversation for a few minutes before my brain would start sweating and I’d have to reach for a copy of People.”

“One of the great things about the show was the instantaneous, intense fan reaction,” Groening says. It operated on several levels, rewarding multiple viewings, and it was full of catnip for geeks: In addition to the riffs on The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Star Wars, there were allusions to classic videogames, programming languages, Schrdinger’s cat, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

“The operating principle of Futurama was that you can do a joke that 1percent of the audience gets, as long as it doesn’t derail the enjoyment of the mass audience,” Cohen says. “And that 1 percent becomes a fan for life.”

As much as I can enjoy the geeky Star Trek references and whatnot, I’m glad to say I’m not as hardcore as some:

Some jokes in Futurama were written in a strange alphabet that fans had to decrypt. “Most were jokes about aliens eating people,” Cohen says. “Like, an alien sign on a restaurant says TASTY HUMAN BURGERS.” He checked the Web a few hours after the pilot aired and discovered that the freeze framers had already cracked the code. A trickier alien alphabet was devised.

My copy of “Bender’s Big Score” (the first part of the new DVD set) will be arriving from Amazon this week… along with the first two pieces of my Christmas shopping.

I’ve decided that Christmas shopping this year will be done entirely online. After having seen some of the Black Friday videos out there, I’ve lost all faith in and patience with people.