TDTVS

Previously on The West Wing

Just the title of this post has been sitting in the drafts folder since January 9th of this year. This not too long after Donna and I decided that maybe we should give one of our favorite TV shows a re-watch. The phrase comes from the intro of the show before it shows little snippets of past episodes to foreshadow what is coming up and to perhaps remind you of characters or events that will be featured in this show that you might have forgotten.

The phrase also perfectly fits our desire to go back to, even if fictional, a less calamitous presidential administration. We wanted a version of the goings on in The West Wing of the White House that seemed to be filled with smart caring people that selfishly wanted to serve in government to better the lives of everyone in the country, not just the top one percent.

We have been watching an episode a day, with the exception of a couple of two-part episodes we watched back to back, and are now two-thirds of the way through season 4. We are a little more than halfway through the, 155 episode, seven season run.

So, after gathering dust in the drafts folder for the last 2-1/2 months, why have I decided to flesh out the post you ask. Good question. I have been having trouble finding a book I want to read the whole way through and after my failed attempt at audio books I started to widen my passive entertainment search and opted to try some podcasts. Wow, there are as many of these things as there are books and finding one I’m interested in is actually harder than finding a book that works for me. For one here is the whole voice issue, with a book, it is my voice, which I really like1, while with a podcast not only does the subject have to be interesting, but the person(s) have to sound pleasant to me.

Sunday I found a perfect one that will keep myself (and Donna) entertained for a good while, it is called the The West Wing Weekly. Once a week the two hosts watch an episode of the TV show the West Wing and talk about it. One voice is Hrishikesh Hirway a musician and composer, and the second is Josh Molina who played the character Will Bailey on the show from 2002-2006. Because of the continued popularity of The West Wing and possibly because of Mr. Molina’s showbiz connections they will occasionally have actors from the show on as guests.

They are doing one episode per week and started doing the podcast 2 years ago. The trouble with this is that the latest show they did a podcast for, 4-17: Red Haven’s on Fire, is exactly the same episode as Donna and I watched last night2, so we are now perfectly in sync. But with the differing time tables we will be soon be long ahead of the podcast. By the time we have wrapped up watching the entire seven season run of the show the podcast will only five episodes into season five.

We have been going back through some of the earlier episodes of the podcast to listen to some of the TV show’s stars guest appearances and then binge listened to the first few of the first season’s shows. I think now we are at the point where we might just jump back to season one of the TV show, starting over, so we can watch an episode and then right afterwards listen to the relating podcast.

Danger! You May Get Lost!

A co-worker stumbled on a couple of rerun episodes of Lost and thought it might be cool to see it from the beginning, so I’ve lent her my box set of season one. But before I handed it to her I attached a big warning label to the front.

Warning Sign

I found a place where you can create your own warning signs or warning labels, but I had to modify one because they didn’t have a TV icon…

I Can’t Believe I’m Still Listening

I must be a real fan. As of this morning, depending on which version you believe, the FRS playoff chances stood at 3, 4 or 5%. That was before the Yankees won their game today and the Sox lost the first game, postponed by Earl from last night and will likely lost tonight’s regularly scheduled game (they are losing 3-1 in the 7th.)

As much as I enjoy the coffee (and the coffee cake muffin) from Dunkin’ Donuts I fear they may have lost our business forever this morning. We should have taken the hint. On our way into the place this morning we passed a car with a fellow in the drivers seat talking very loudly to himself, or rhetorically to his passenger inside the store, saying, “How long does it take to get a double coffee?!?” There were three employees with only three customers, so it shouldn’t have taken too long, but somehow it did.

One associate, because of the headset, must have been the drive-up person, who’s job description read, “Do not leave the window for any reason, even if there are no cars in line. And when you are not busy please feel free to carry on a personal conversation with your fellow employees to aid in the disruption their productivity.” Employee number 2 was the main counter person and was either very new at the job or only used to dealing with humans via texting or stoned and having a hard time completing a complex order that consisted of three coffees. To be fair, this person was dealing with someone who had either never been in a Dunkin’ Donuts before or never ordered coffee or was hungover. The third person dressed in a pink polo shirt with DD embroidered in brown on their right breast was probably the “cook” and tried to help out the second person in line (whose partner was outside with steam escaping his ears and possible thinking of driving his 15 year old purple Dodge Neon through the front window), but was stymied by the request for iced coffee and the unexpected return of customer number 1 to ask where they kept the “to go” sugar. We took this opportunity to leave the store.

We headed back across town at a small family restaurant called Autens that we had been meaning to try for some time. We ended up spending a bit more money there and the coffee was nothing special, there were three really nice surprises. First was they offered a salmon cake as a meat side, which Donna ordered, and I sampled, which was very good. The second was instead of having “home fries” as the alternative to grits they offered something called potato scramble, which turns out to be, I’m guessing, last nights mashed potatoes with some butter mixed in and fried on the grill into a sort of pancake. Thirdly, our waitress was Evangeline Lilly who was possibly doing research for her next movie. She is a little younger looking than she seemed on TDTVS and her freckles were covered by makeup, but it was her alright.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 817

Daper Draper

Last night was the premier episode of Season 4 of TDTVS2 and we here at the Bogardus household spent the weekend prepping for the event. On Saturday we watched episodes 1 & 3 of season three and then on Sunday we watched episodes 6, 9 & 13.

At the appointed hour of the premier, 10:00 EDT, we went to bed.

Got up this morning, started downloading the torrent and left for work. Came home from work and had dinner in front of the TV.

At the end of last year they were running their new agency, created from the ashes of Sterling Cooper, out of a hotel room. this season starts several months later and they now have a floor in the Time/Life building (and telling clients they have two) with a conference room full of mismatched office chairs in a circle around a non existent table.

The episode seemed jumbled and out of sorts and just maybe that was an intentional tone set by the producer because it perfectly represented Don Draper’s life, both personally and professionally.

Now after an hour of digesting the show I’m beginning to appreciate it. It started out with Don being interviewed by an advertising magazine which he does it reluctantly and it shows in the published piece. They want him to do another interview, this time with the Wall Street Journal, but he is uncomfortable and begs off. For the next 30 minutes negative things happen all around him, and to him, until he blows his top at a client and is so mad he boots them out the door. This flips a switch making him realize that he needs to turn his act around, so he agrees to the WSJ interview. The last scene of the show is him talking to the Journal reporter and he is the charming, engaging Don Draper we all love and want to be.

Can’t wait until next week.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 751

Decimal Steps

Summer is here in Aiken, SC. This weekend the temperatures were supposed to hit the upper 90s, maybe even break the century mark, so earlier in last week Donna and I planned a weekend getaway into the state’s northwest corner where it is mountainous and cooler, plus we could finish up those final 2 counties and 3 DeLorme pages for those geocaching challenges.

As the weekend approached, like all good sailors, we kept a weather eye out on what was in store for northwestern South Carolina. It looked like there was not much relief to be had up there, maybe 4 or 5 degrees cooler with just as much a chance of afternoon showers, so on Friday afternoon we decided to save the couple hundred bucks (and I’d forgo having cinnamon buns for breakfast) by staying home.

Saturday morning we went for a bike ride and grocery shopped returning home by 9:00AM and not leaving the house again except for my trip to the mailbox to pick up the latest Red Envelope full of Law & Order: Season 1. Amazing who has popped up so far in guest starring roles; Samuel L. Jackson in a brief bit as a defense attorney, Philip Seymour Hoffman in his first credited role as an accused rapist, the future Lt. Van Buren, S. Epatha Merkerson, as a mother of a mistakenly shot child and TDTVS’s Harold Perrineau as a young drug dealer.

Sunday we stayed outside a little later, through lunchtime (although the top was up for the last couple of hours) doing some geocaching. We headed over to North Augusta to search for some on the Greenway, an old abandoned railway bed now paved over into a biking/walking trail. We started at one end and after we found one right near the beginning, we were quickly distracted by a cache down by the river, which led to a couple in a new park around some old ponds, which then again led to a new section of the Greenway which parallels real close to the Savannah River and we never really made it to the actual Greenway Greenway.

With our t-shirts soaked with sweat, looking like Jack & Kate after a trip into the island jungle, we called it quits and headed back to the car with 8 finds. Realizing that put us at 458 total Donna said we need two more to make it an “even” four hundred and sixty. We snagged one in a small park outside the Greenway entrance that we had DNF?d a couple of weeks ago then another in a park that we have passed a hundred times and never been in. When I got home and logged that last one I noticed that there was a second one in that park as well. Good thing we didn’t realized that at the time, because if we found it, we probably would have had to find 9 more to make the total even again?

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 677

Yo Saf Bridge Returns To Space

After a stint as a con woman that was a pain in the side of the crew of the Firefly a couple of times in the early 26th century and recently seen stuck on Madison Ave, Earth in the middle 20th century on TDTVS2, Christina Hendricks returns to the ‘Verse sometime in the far future where space travel costs an arm and a leg, literally, as an android in a music video from Broken Bells.

The Emperor got a well deserved bath after work today.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 661

108 Thousand Button Pushes

One hundred and eight was sort of an adjunct to TDTVS’s famous numbers (4 8 15 16 23 42) because that is what they added up to and that is how many minutes you had between entering them into a computer terminal before bad things happened. 108,000 is probably how many times the number and execute buttons were pushed by Desmond during his little over three years down in the Swan Station hatch when he was doing the entering.

I wonder what I should do with my eight LOST links in the left sidebar now that the show is over, delete them? Yeah, probably. So what would be a proper mourning period before moving them? Simple, 108 days. Guess I’ll add a countdown for it…

One hundred and eight thousand is the number of miles the Emperor had traveled when we got almost to work this morning.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, down once more, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 643