The picture is the only photograph of Thomas Pynchon I've ever seen. He doesn't really look like an enigmatic literary genius who only breaks his reclusive tendencies to appear on The Simpsons, does he? At any rate, it has nothing to do with anything, just something I grabbed off of Wikipedia months ago when I was looking for random pictures to illustrate this humble blog.Okay. So, I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and listening to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album. I have the television muted and on ABC, because I don't want to forget that I'm planning on watching the new episode of Lost at 9:00. (I know there' a State game on, but I don't think I want to watch it. I'm not overly pessmistic, but Duke is Duke. They get more tv time than Leave it to Beaver re-runs [Gods, don't we all miss Pete Gillen on some subatomic level?]. And although State's bigs should be able to dominate Duke in the paint, Duke's ability to force turnovers and run up the score with their Phoenix Suns offense manages to exploit almost all of State's weaknesses at the same time.) I also realize that the fact that I have to set the channel a good two hours before the episode begins doesn't exactly imply that I really want to watch the episode. But I don't watch much network television, so I have a hard time remembering exactly when shows are on. This is what happens when the majority of television you watch is actually on DVD (which is a much more satisfying way of watching most television series, it just means that you can't talk about the show until months after most people have seen them. But this is alright, since most of my friends don't watch that much television either.)
Anyway, Wheel of Fortune is on the television, but I don't really notice it until I reach the end of the essay where Klosterman argues that Empire Strikes Back set the tone for Gen-X. When I look up at the end of the chapter, they're doing the final puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. The category is something like "Fictional Characters" or whatever, and even after Pat Sajak spotted the contestant the letters, it was completely unclear what the answer was. And it turned out that the answer was "Happy and Grumpy". And this is fucking bullshit. I haven't watched an episode of Wheel of Fortune since I was in middle school, at the most recent, but everyone understands that the answers have to be idiomatic if they are multiple words. If the answer had been "Batman & Robin", that would be fine. Everyone associates the two. And if the answer had been "The Seven Dwarfs", that would be fine too. But who the hell would ever guess "Happy and Grumpy"? I thought that I didn't watch Wheel of Fortune because it was too easy. Now I know that I don't watch it because it doesn't play fair.
This weekend, I intend to go see either Juno or There Will Be Blood, depending on whether or not I feel like going to Cary (and, I suppose, on whether or not the theaters don't change the movies they are showing too drastically.) I have a stack of new music books to get through, which have pushed the Nabokov book that I put on top of my bookshelf a few weeks ago in order to motivate myself to go ahead and read it. But a monograph about the first Velvet Underground album or Johnny Cash's second autobiography seem more immediately interesting, even if they are less fulfilling for me as a person.
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