Blessed by the Potato

I was just reading an article the other night about how random celebrity walk-ons usually signal the impending doom of a TV show, particularly when said celebrities aren’t even guest characters, but merely faces in the background, or themselves. Usually, I agree with that point of view: when you get down to throwing random people into scenes just to try to maintain interest, you’ve probably jumped the shark.

Corner Gas however, seems to be an exception to that, since it’s had random, self-conscious inserts of Canadians pretty much all along. Not an hour after I read that article, Adrienne Clarkson popped on the show to help tear down a barn. After all, what self-respecting Canadian wouldn’t want to help wreck a barn? Anyhow, it just really worked for me, in a way celebrity cameos never really have before. I laughed and laughed, and had just barely stopped laughing by the time they cut back to the former Governor General with a sledgehammer in hand…

By now if you own a radio you’ve doubtlessly heard the song that basically wails “does that make me crazy?” On endless repeat like that, I find it gets really annoying. However today I noticed that the song tends to play in the morning when my alarm goes off, and its undue popularity is handy, because when you’re half asleep playing snooze button basketball, asking yourself “does that make me crazy?” is a good question…

I had a funny, brief conversation with a telemarketer from Rogers. They were trying to get me to switch to their phone service as well, and I said I wasn’t interested. They asked why, so I said the two basic reasons: if you have no add-ons to your line, it’s more expensive, and if the power goes out, it runs on a backup battery for 8 hours and then dies as well. I’ve been through too many blackouts that lasted longer than that to completely discount it. She actually acknowledged that in my case, it probably wasn’t for me, said she’d like to point out that the battery is rated for 8 hours but would probably last 12, and then hung up.

I’d like to thank Baum for pointing me to these:

Curl (come on baby put the rock in the house) and Code Monkey. It also gave me another song for my “alternative” Christmas album.

Right now I’m trying to sort out his terrible store front so I can buy these songs. There are lots of other cute songs there, too (like Pizza Day), so feel free to poke around for a bit. I’ll wait.

Bats seem to be everywhere these days, particularly for the people in my office at work. I saw one in a used bookstore this weekend, just chilling in the mystery section.

Perhaps because I had bats on the mind, I was astonished to see a new-to-me John Grisham title: The Brethren. I immediately thought “Cool! Vampire Lawyers!” and picked it up. However, reading the back of the book, I found out that unfortunately he’s using the word brethren in a decidedly non-vampirish way: instead referring to a brotherhood or association of professionals… kind of like the actual definition of the word. Go figure.

I was a little disappointed at that (and I’ve found Grisham getting pretty dull lately, so he really should consider that vampire lawyer idea). Then I had to sit around and wonder how it was that I automatically think of an underground (often literally) society of conspiratorial vampires whenever I see the word “brethren”.