My So Called Life

The Mentalist?

/ Shane / 3 Comments

After The West Wing ended, we followed actor Dulé Hill over to a show called Psych. It’s a comedy about a guy named Shawn who was trained by his father from birth to notice tiny clues and solve crimes. (Dulé Hill plays the sidekick, Gus) Because he’s so good at noticing things that other people don’t notice, people mistake him for a psychic. Shawn capitalizes on this by pretending to actually be psychic and to help the police department solve crimes.

It’s a good show. I mean, it is what it is, a sort of witty, pop-culture referencing, slacker comedy entirely based on the joke that Shawn must play-act and pretend to be psychic to keep the charade going. It’s sort of like Monk, or any number of humorous, throw away episode mystery shows, where you don’t need to turn your brain on too much and you don’t need to see every episode to know what’s going on.

After the show had been on for a few years over on the USA network, a new show, The Mentalist, premiered on CBS. The premise of the show seems to be more or less identical to psych, other than the fact that it is a drama instead of a comedy, and that the main character is smarmy and annoying and British, and everybody calls him by his last name, “Jane”, which is girly. The two shows seemed so similar that I thought perhaps the people responsible for Psych had decided to repackage the idea a little bit for a much wider audience on a much bigger network. It seemed to work too, since the Mentalist apparently has a huge audience and has won some awards. However, lately Psych has been taking some digs at the Mentalist, leading me to believe they were not part of the deal. Here is a transcript from a recent promo:

Shawn: “You’ve seen the mentalist, right?”
Dude: “Yes.”
Shawn: “It’s like that.”
Gus: “Except that guy is a fake.”
Shawn: “Right, if I was a fake psychic, it would be eerily similar.”
Gus: “Exactly the same.”
Shawn: “A virtual carbon copy.”

So obviously, they’re not too thrilled. But The Mentalist can’t have just stolen the idea, right? Everybody would notice that. Or is CBS just big enough to bully USA around when they like? Has that ever happened before, that another network just blatantly steals an idea from another? I mean, if the Mentalist really is better than Psych (it’s not), then what can USA say? Waaa, you took our idea and made it better!

So I guess the only thing that can be done, is that I can get the word out there. So don’t watch The Mentalist, watch Psych instead.

Alice

/ Shane / 4 Comments

Evie has recently become obsessed with Alice in Wonderland. She has 2 slightly different versions of the Little Golden Book summary of the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. (Kind of like a game of telephone, isn’t it? A translation of a translation.) It’s not all that surprising that she’s into it, considering it stars a little girl, a cat, and a rabbit; probably Evie’s three favorite things to hear stories about.

Imagine her delight when she found a copy of the original Lewis Carrol book on my nightstand.

I bought it at a used book sale some time ago, meaning to read it, but never quite getting around to it. Evie, however, was desperate to read it immediately. Sara and I figured that she was probably ready for chapter books and, though it’s probably not the one I would have chosen, it would do. So I started reading it to Evie before bed.

I’m not sure why Evie liked the book so much. She mostly seemed bored while we were reading it and asked for more pictures. Alice is quite a precocious little girl and most (if not all) of the story went right over Evie’s head. After we finished reading she would ask me what happened and I would try to summarize it in a way that would be more interesting to her. But every night she would demand that book, even when I tried to get her to read something else.

Now it so happens that around this time we stumbled across an Alice in Wonderland play being put on by the Chicago Kids Company. The timing was too perfect, so we had to go (in fact, Evie and I finished the last page of the book the morning of the show).

Tickets were pretty cheap, and, the day of, Evie and I were pretty excited about it. It was definitely designed for kids and was very interactive. There was yelling, counting, and even a dance section. During the dancing Evie mimicked Alice exactly, move for move. Because most of the theater was full of school kids, Evie and I ended up in the very front row. This was pretty cool, but maybe a little scary for Evie. At one point, the White Rabbit ran through the row right behind us and then down the stairs next to Evie and she about clawed my leg off trying to get into my lap away from him! Evie had insisted on bringing her stuffed bunny to the show, and, whenever the White Rabbit was on stage, she would hold her bunny up so he could “see”. Afterwards, the characters all waited out front to say hi to the kids. Evie was a little nervous, so she wouldn’t get too close, but she did show her bunny to the White Rabbit. He said that it looked like one of his cousins, and I think that was a highpoint for Evie.

I asked her what her favorite part was and she said the singing (it was a musical). She liked seeing all the characters she expected to see. The play was about an hour, and there was no question about Evie sitting still for it. She was enthralled and probably could have gone another hour, no problem. Huge attention span on that girl. (Side note: the theater company must have been a little leery about the Queen of Heart’s famous “Off with their heads!” line, because when it came time to deliver it, they decided to go with, “Off to the dungeon!” instead)

Since Evie’s main exposure to Alice was from the book and not the Disney movie (which she’s never seen), I imagine her perspective on the show was a little different than the average audience member. She kept asking for obscure characters like the Griffin, the Duchess and the Mock Turtle. Her favorite character in the book is the Griffin, which she knows has a “birdie face and lion legs”. She has decided in particular that the Griffin in Alice in Wonderland’s face is red, like a cardinal. She was not quite sure what to make of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. I seem to remember them being a big part of the movie, but they aren’t in the book at all.

Anyway, it was a great day and I’m sure Evie will be talking about it for a long time. Already she keeps talking about “when we go back” and who we will see (she’s hoping for the Duchess). She told me, “When I grow up and become a mommy, I’ll take you to see Alice in Wonderland!” Unfortunately, I forgot the camera and didn’t buy a shirt, so memories are all we’ll have.

The Hard Sell

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Is there anything worse than salesmen?

Okay, I understand that not all salesmen are the greasy, horrible stereotype that give salesmen a bad name. But a lot of them are. Enough of them that we have all encountered them multiple times in our life. And when I encounter one, I am just left with such a sick, dirty feeling that makes me want to wash my hands afterwards.

So you have to ask, why would anyone aspire to be such a despicable person? I am a firm believer in the economic theory of human behavior, that is, there must be a strong incentive to motivate a person like that to exist. In other words, in some situations, it must be more lucrative for a salesman to be a greaseball, than for a salesman not to be a greaseball.

I’m hoping that this trend is going out of style. I kind of feel like it is a generational thing. I don’t know if it is because my generation is a bunch of pansies who don’t like conflict, or just a bunch of savvy technocrats who know that we can do a quick search online and find a better price across town with free shipping. But I do know that people of my generation tend to react harshly to the hard sell. In other words, when confronted with a jerky salesmen, we just leave, rather than dealing with it. Of course, I am dealing with the small segment of the population I know, so it’s not exactly a scientific study.

I can say that for me personally, in at least in one situation, the hard sell directly caused me to go with the competitor. Unfortunately, however, I was placed in a situation over the weekend where I did end up buying from the place with the slimy salesmen. And I hated every minute of it.

From the minute we got there, I was disgusted by them. They immediately started pressuring us, going on about how high quality their stuff is vs. the other junk at the other stores, mentioning about what a “steal” these prices are and how they won’t last long, and bad mouthing all the owners of the other stores. This last part in particular rubbed us the wrong way, since A) we happen to like one of those stores and have spent a lot of money there in the past, and B) I just think it is bad karma to bash other people so much. Also, the guys went on and on about how their business is based on recommendations and how this guy recommended 5 people because he likes the place so much. Well, let me tell you, I won’t be recommending anybody, that’s for sure!

The worst part is that they make you complicit in their stupid salesman dance. Being faced with this very salesman-y approach, we started thinking, “Well, this guy can obviously dicker on the cost. So if we don’t get some money off, we’re suckers.” I hate feeling like this, mainly because I am, in fact, a huge sucker. And I’m already feeling bad about all of the money I’m about to drop, so why do I have to be so stressed about making the actual deal?

Evie didn’t help matters either. First, she put us in a bad position to begin with by running immediately over to the bed we liked the best, yelling, “This is my bed, I know it!” and then climbing in and trying to take a nap. Second, she had an uncanny ability to sense critical moments and interrupt them, asking to go to the bathroom or something similar.

So after the guy whiffed on a couple of lob balls we tossed him, such as, “We’re thinking about adding the bookcase, but we’re kind of on the fence,” and, “Hmm, shipping is pretty expensive.” We decided to walk. The price was significantly over the maximum we set for ourselves and we weren’t really in a hurry anyway, so we figured, “what the heck?” Worst case we would get some time to think about it, and come back next weekend.

Low and behold, 10 minutes later we were signing on the dotted line for $250 less than they were originally saying. This is probably the worst part of it all, that we had to go through the whole sham to get the good price. Ugh. But at the end of the day, it ended up being a good price, so we did it. And the salesmen didn’t learn a thing.

So what do you think? Do you like the thrill of dickering down a salesman? What do you do when faced with the hard sell? Do you have some particularly noxious story about a greaseball salesman? Share in the comments!

Quotes – Grandma hit the fence edition

/ Shane / 3 Comments

So over the weekend, my mom was going to drop Evie and I off at the doctor’s office, and she managed to nick the fence in the back with Sara’s car. It was no big deal, nothing hurt, nothing really damaged (the fence took a little hit, but I think it’s probably fine), but it gave us a lot of fun teasing her about it all weekend. So hopefully, whoever has my mom’s name for Christmas is reading this, because I think any poem about my mom would be remiss without this incident (in my mom’s family, we draw names for Christmas and usually write poems about the person who’s names we get…mostly making fun of that person).

Anyway, I’m sure we will all forget about this little incident shortly…all of us, that is, except for Evie who continued to bring it up all weekend.

::Me backing the car out::
“Don’t hit the fence daddy!”
“I won’t.”
“Grandma did.”

::Sara backing the car out::
“Mommy, do you always hit the fence?”
“No, we don’t.”

::Evie functioning as tour guide::
“…and this is where Grandma hit the fence…”

And another driving-related-but-not-Evie-related quote that made me laugh:

Sara: “That George Lopez billboard really annoys me. Look at how annoying it is! He’s just looking at me, annoying me.”

Not the actual billboard, but similarly annoying

If anything could cause me to drive into a fence, it would be those billboards.

A lot of good information is on the Internet

/ Shane / 6 Comments

I actually tried this to be sure it was true. If you type “why wont” into Google, it will list you the top search terms. And the top search term is…well, I will let the image speak for itself:

By the way, am I the only person who noticed “why won’t god heal amputees” on the list as well?

Link via FailBlog.