So, the Girlfriend and I were at PetSmart yesterday, picking up a Christmas gift for her poodle, Rusty. (In case you’re wondering, we bought him a pleather aviator’s coat with a faux shearling lining, very dashing and manly. Hey, he’s a poodle, he needs all the external machofication he can get.)

I’d just picked up the bag containing the new dog-jacket from the cashier’s counter and was turning to leave when I nearly collided with another shopper. I drew up short and let him pass by without really seeing him. Just another guy in a hurry, I thought, trying to get in and out of the store on a busy day with a minimum of hassle. I’d taken several steps toward the exit before I managed to process my quick impressions into a complete picture:

African-American (obvious), probably about my age (crow’s-feet around the eyes), vertically challenged in a major way (he rose only to the level of my chest, and I’m only a hair over five-six), and there was something familiar about his face…

I stopped again and put my hand on Anne’s arm.

“That was Gary Coleman,” I said.

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So, did everyone see last night’s episode of Lost? I’m with Jack — the underground station that looks like a leftover set from Gene Roddenberry’s Genesis II is just a big psychology experiment. The reference to B.F. Skinner was a dead giveaway, and even if it wasn’t, wouldn’t it make more sense for the station’s builders to automate the system that has to be reset every hour-and-a-half to avoid Total Global Destruction? Yep, no doubt in my mind: an experiment. And what the hell’s up with Sawyer letting that little girlie girl take his gun? Getting shot in the shoulder must’ve caused his IQ to drop a few points… as Dr. Henry Jones, Sr., said under similar circumstances, “I didn’t trust her; why did you?”

As a follow-up to the previous entry, I thought I’d direct you to some of the Muppet-related stuff I’ve run across on the Internets.

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Ever wonder what it’s like to be win an Emmy Award for a television series you helped create? Javier Grillo-Marxuach, supervising producer for Lost, describes his big moment like this:

now i’m on stage. my thoughts – what am i talking about – what thoughts? my brain is like a hamster on red bull and meth. here is a sample of my brain activity during any given nanosecond and at the same time i was up there:

 

i wouldn’t be here if upn hadn’t cancelled “jake 2.0” in the middle of its run! thank you tyra banks for doing twice our first run number on a rerun of “america’s next top model” how is my wife going to find me after this? I AM HERE FOR THE GLORY OF QU’ONOS! do i get my own trophy? god, i love monkeys. the castaways should find a monkey and train it to be their butler. wolverine! SNCKT! monkey butler. chips would be nice. never be ru-uude to an arab! hey – that’s jj abrams! volare! whoa-oh! cantare! i remember a small band of three men i saw while vacationing in the island of bequia, they sang badly and their instruments were out of tune – but they had HEART! shatner was just here! shatner. the captain. hmmm. some dip would be nice with those chips. hey guinan? where’s the rest of the el-aurian refugees? I AM HE AND YOU ARE HE AND HE IS WE AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER!
there is a little known fact that if you stay within three feet of the microphone during the emmy acceptance speech, you are in the tv zone and will be seen by the folks at home. since my parents were watching and admonished me to be visible, i planted myself in the safe zone and stayed there until guinan and wolverine ushered us out.

 

then it gets weird…

Weird indeed. There’s a lot of geekiness in that excerpt, so here’s a little help for the Muggles out there: when Javi refers to Guinan and Wolverine, he really means Whoopi Goldberg and Hugh Jackman, who played Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Logan/Wolverine in the X-Men movies, respectively. They were the presenters for this particular award. In Star Trek lore, Qu’onos (pronounced Kronos) is the Klingon homeworld, while “SNCKT” is how captions in the X-Men comics describe the sound of Wolverine’s adamantium claws springing out of his hands. I leave it to you to figure out the miscellaneous song references.

If you’re interested, the rest of Javi’s experience at the Emmys is described in two massive (but highly entertaining) entries on his LiveJournal. Part One is here, and Part Two is here.

Happy Thursday!

Dick Clark will be returning to Times Square this New Year’s Eve. Even though the title of Clark’s annual broadcast, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, hasn’t been strictly accurate in years — how much rocking can you really do with musical guests like Kool & the Gang? — Clark on New Year’s is an institution, and I, for one, missed seeing him last year. I know he can’t last forever, despite all the jokes about him being an android; the linked article notes that Ryan “I have lousy taste in clothes and no discernable charisma” Seacrest is warming up to take over for Clark permanently. There’ll be a time, probably not too distant now, when Dick Clark will be just one more old-school pop-cultural reference that garners blank stares from the whippersnappers. But in the meantime, I really hope ol’ Dick’s got a few more New Year’s broadcasts left in him. We have so little continuity in our society these days, so few common points of reference, that we need to prolong the careers of our cheesy, beloved, old TV hosts as long as we possibly can…

Fans of the TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition may be interested to learn that the show is currently filming right here in Utah. Specifically, Bountiful, Utah, which, for you out-of-staters, is a quiet little burg just north of Salt Lake City.

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Just to tie up a loose end, I see that British authorities have recovered that missing Dalek I wrote about last week. According to the BBC, the thieves decided the stolen prop was “too hot to handle” (i.e., they figured they were going to have a problem fencing it, or decided their original scheme wouldn’t be so funny if it ended with them in handcuffs), so they dumped it on Glastonbury Tor and dropped a dime to let somebody know where it was. (According to the Wikipedia, a tor is a “large hill, usually topped with rocks,” in the southwest of England.)

The owner of the tourist attraction from which the Dalek was taken denies that this whole event was a publicity stunt, and despite the offer of his services, the presence of Colin Baker was apparently not required.

Kind of a let-down, actually… I was hoping the thing would turn up in the middle of Piccadilly, dressed in a pink tu-tu or something.