PS2 Only. Damn.
Archive for March, 2005
Tired, yet not sleepy.
Weird day today. Spent 6 hours (from 8:30 to 2:30) in a meeting, then had a snack instead of lunch and didn’t leave work until 6:00. That will tax a body.
The answer to the question, “What’s the best job in the world” changes so drastically as you get older.
For a lot of kids, “Astronaut” and “Doctor” are common choices thanks to the naiveity of childhood, thanks in part to the best babysitter ever: television. Let’s take a look at these three vocations and examine why the childhood version differs so greatly from the reality:
- Astronaut
You really can’t blame kids for thinking this is a glamorous job. The most famous astronauts walked on the freaking moon, for crying out loud. what nine-year-old boy in his right mind wouldn’t want to do that? Unfortunately, the really famous astronauts are 70 years old now. Today’s astronauts have been toiling away in relative obscurity, partially because the job isn’t quite as dangerous as it used to seem, but mostly because all astronauts do nowadays is ride a computer controlled rocket into orbit, watch some plants grow or mice try to have sex in zero gravity or something, then glide peacefully back to earth in an aero-plane (with a little turbulence and white hot ionized plasma causing only mild discomfort). It’s just not a glamorous job unless you’re zooming around on the moon in a dune buggy.
You can even find evidence of the decline of the American Astronaut image in film. The best astronaut films ever were about the originals: The Right Stuff and Apollo 13. Popular movies about present-day astronauts? Well, there’s Space Camp. Enough said.
- Doctor
I’m not sure where the excitement about this vocation comes from. Maybe it’s the idea of wearing fashionable white coats and a stethoscope; maybe it’s the whole “I get to play around with peoples’ guts” thing. During the golden age of television, when smoking was cool and small pox was the “in” disease, doctors were suave sexy men with hair like David Copperfield (the magician, not the Dickens character — though maybe he had great hair too; I cant’ remember) But today, no amount of Pomade can hide the fear of amputating the wrong leg or removing the wrong person’s gal bladder, combined with the resulting malpractice lawsuits. The calm cool and colected Trapper John’s and General Hospital surgeons of TV land are nowhere to be seen. The medical profession today is represented by two opposite ends of the social spectrum: on the one side, there’s the serious stressed out doctors (E.R.). On the other side is the funny dork (Scrubs). There’s no sexy, confident middle ground anymore. When doctors were cool, they never made mistakes. Nowadays doctors young and old are misdiagnosing conditions and severing corotid arteries left and right. How is that a fun job? And let’s not get into the rising costs of medical school…
I would have added “Cowboy” to the list of favorite professions, but that doesn’t really count. I mean there are real cowboys out there, and it is a real profession. But the average child’s concept of what a cowboy does and the reality are so far removed it’s not a valid comparison. Most kids would be saddened to learn that real cowboys mostly just herd cattle and work on farms, and do not in fact shoot indians or play poker in brothels.
Ok, except maybe in Nevada.
Last night, ’24′ dished out another 43 minutes of pure action. There were some refreshing additions to the episode. For one thing, it was nice to see a character besides Jack or Tony do some major butt-kicking. There was also an unexpected–but not unwelcome from a writing standpoint–death in the show. That sounds a bit harsh, but I’m speaking purely from a plot mechanics point of view. The death of this particular incidental character was, I think, a “trap door”. The character was a plot device inserted into the show that could, if necessary, be used to provide an exit for another character.
SPOILERS BELOW (for last night’s episode, and speculation on next weeks’ episode):
In this particular case, the trap door character was Erin Driscoll’s psyc–er, mentally unstable daughter, Maya. She was completely unrelated to the plot of the show, and at first, just seemed to be there to provide a distraction for Driscoll. However unnecessary Maya seemed to be, it became apparent that she wasn’t just there to interfere with Driscoll’s ability to run CTU. She was Dricsoll’s trap door. If, for some reason it was necessary to remove Driscoll’s character from the show (or at least from her character’s position as director of CTU), Maya would unleash her zany paranoid-schizophrenic antics to render Driscoll ineffective and thereby require her dismissal. It seemed that may have happened last night when Maya, left unattended, committed suicide. The previews for next week indicate that Tony Almeda will take over as interim director of CTU. If that’s true, then the seemingly unnecessary Maya character just showed her purpose.
END SPOILERS