Penny Wiseacre

"But I gave up bottled water!" I'll whine, in our drought-raddled afterscape

Out of deference for the Long Winter that everyone east of the Rockies seems to have endured this year, I've avoided talking about how effing weird it was to live in northern California and have it be dry, sunny and seventy degrees through the entire month of January.

(At left: Facebook photo from a friend or illustration of the pioneers' winter hellscape? Why can't it be both?)

When the cherry blossoms exploded before February first, it was disquieting. The blooms frosted over the warm limbs of the trees and I read the Zadie Smith essay on mourning the seasonal markers that have disappeared in the swirling currants of new climates. And I wondered: What happens now?

The Black Hand Files: His world continues to expand

We continue to be a family of three corporeal beings and one highly mutable imaginary friend, Black Hand. He's been busy lately, which lets us flesh out the Black Hand Files even more.

1. Black Hand has a bit of Merlin-the-sorcerer problem, in that he is getting younger all the time. Although he used to be a man in his 20s more often than not, Black Hand has spent the last week ping-ponging between age five and babyhood.

2. Black Hand cries a lot as a baby. You would too if your preschool aged companion/creator had arbitrarily taken away all of your awesome abilities (teleportation, levitation, legal drinking age in most civilized nations) and started talking about how you couldn't use words anymore.

3. We've learned about Black Hand's family, and he is evidently being raised by a clan that took the writing of Robert Heinlein very seriously. Black Hand apparently has two daddies and two mommies. The dads are named Lewis and Cindy, and the moms are named Linda and Lola.

(Of course a man named Cindy was destined to enter a group marriage and parenting arrangement for an entity that ages up and down 60 months over the course of an afternoon.)

(Also, I am dying to talk to Lewis, Cindy, Linda and Lola, because I am vastly curious to find out if having twice as many parents means half the work, or if the time you spend coordinating parental duties with three other people offsets any benefits to having more people in the pool.)

Black Hand also has two brothers named Elsa and Anna. Yes. Brothers.

4. Black Hand apparently attends a megachurch, but he has strong feelings about modern liturgical music, mostly of the "I don't understand it and I refuse to sing it" variety. I have friends who are known to roll their eyes at the mere mention of Marty Haugen's name, and now I desperately want them to sit down with Black Hand for a gripe session.

5. My daughter has expanded her repertoire of imaginary friends: There is Ida, a teenager who is learning how to write her own name but loves helping Trixie read books, and there are two children named Kerry and Simon. Apparently Black Hand has not met Ida, but he is none too thrilled that Kerry and Simon are on the scene. He has taken to blaming toy-strewn messes on Kerry and Simon, and Trix has laughingly told him that he can't do that because imaginary friends aren't real.

6. My daughter is careful to distinguish between her imaginary friends Kerry and Simon versus Black Hand, whom she maintains is not imaginary. I am beginning to feel as if I am living in a Shirley Jackson short story.

7. Black Hand is really disappointed that we didn't make it to Costco in time for samples, and he rejects your kielbasa bargain meal as insufficient. He could have had Aidell's chicken and apple sausage! Followed by a yogurt drink! And veggie sticks!

I am enjoying this recent incarnation of Black Hand. His needs and wants are very simple as a small child. I don't know if he'd go back to being a kick-punching, teleporting, red-haired adult if given the chance.

Viviparous (Clap it out!), or how a biologist is born

Two notes:

1. Welcome, anyone who came here courtesy of the forum thread on Television Without Pity. I'm so glad you clicked. I'm doing a Lenten practice to spend at least 30 minutes nightly re-acquainting myself with composing and writing, so I've been writing here on whatever bubbles up during my reflective period every day. It's the "40 Days To Submit" category.

2. The following entry is about parenting. I get that reading about parenting is not everyone's jam, so it's behind the jump. Feel free to click away if you're all, "Oh yuck, the world doesn't need more people writing about parenting."

How NBC Universal SHOULD handle the Television Without Pity archives

Bowling Green State University has a department of pop culture and the Center for Popular Culture Studies and the Browne Popular Culture Library. The University of Texas is doing exciting work in pop culture studies. (I spoke at their FLOW conference twice.)

I bring this up not to announce any exciting new career directions, but to point out that there exist in the United States many options for archiving popular culture critique and/or original works, and conducting scholarship on the works therein.

It would have been a no-brainer for someone at NBC Universal to reach out to a few cultural studies programs in the country and say, "Listen up, fangirls. You people write PhD theses on TV shows. We have a lot of writing about television. Want it? We'll sign over all the rights to the material. All you have to do is host it on your university servers. Our IT nerds will coordinate with yours."

Then NBC Universal gets to look like it so loves the pop culture it produces, it's helping energize and engage scholars. They unload a website. And some university gets to be the gatekeeper to whomever writes their PhD on the CW's masterful subversion of the notion of canon vis a vis Smallville and Arrow.

Instead, NBC Universal is shutting away Television Without Pity's archives and the rest of us on the World Wide Web will be reliant on the Wayback Machine to find old recaps. (And people do read them a lot.)

This could have been so win-win. Oh, beautiful, crazy dream! Please, won't a band of plucky doctoral students make it so?

So long to all that: 14 years at Television Without Pity ended today

I wrote on airplanes. I wrote in boarding areas. I wrote in the parking lot of a minor-league hockey arena. I wrote during major league baseball games. I wrote in hotel rooms. I wrote in guest bedrooms. I wrote in my bedroom. I wrote in my living room. I wrote in other people's living rooms. I wrote while sitting in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot. I wrote while sitting on a beach. I wrote while sitting on my front porch. I wrote while sitting in the middle of a room that was about to be re-floored.

(At left: Me recapping Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?)

I squeaked in under deadline a week after my father's death, unsure if I'd ever be able to write flippantly or funnily again. I nearly missed emailing in a recap because the baby kicked and the laptop went tumbling and I couldn't pick it up; I was less than 24 hours away from giving birth. I wrote on birthdays and holidays and weekends.

I emailed recaps from DC, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, Kapa'a, Seattle, San Francisco, Tampa.

For the last 14 years of my life, for some significant percentage of that year, I've written recaps for Television Without Pity. That stops now.

(I don't like that my last piece on that site is going to be a resentment-cap for a really shitty show, but them's the breaks.)

In my fourteen years, I covered these shows: CSI; CSI: Miami; Vegas; Big Love; Prison Break; Swingtown; Flash Forward; 30 Rock; Dracula; Helix; Sons of Anarchy. I subbed on a few more: Lost; One Tree Hill; Top Designer; John From Cincinnati; The Wire. I was lucky to see some actors right as they were hitting their stride.

I was lucky to get paid to do two simple things: Pay attention to a TV show and tell people about it.

Since last fall, I've had some iteration of this conversation with Phil, where I say that the very nature of recapping has changed -- writers are expected to be more discerning with which details they include, and the really good ones include some really incisive critique of the episode and the season and series as a whole.

"I'm not going to stop taking the money," I'd say, "But I wonder how long the format can last."

Now we know.

What I don't know is what happens next. I will cop to be a tad nervous about the possibility that I might never write professionally about pop culture or television again. I am even more nervous that I don't have anything interesting or funny to say about pop culture or television.

I am grateful that I did get to say things for as long as I did, and I'm grateful for readers who let me know they appreciated the science breakdowns in the CSI recaps or the wild wardrobe analyses in Sons of Anarchy.

(And by the way, I STILL contend that the show is basically a feminist policy argument with motorcycles and have six seasons of evidence to support that claim.)

I am grateful for the readers, and I am grateful for having the chance to know my fellow recappers and watch their blazing career trajectories, and I am eager and excited to see what comes next.

Disruption is the easy option

Both the New York Times magazine and The New Republic did articles on the unnervingly youthful aspect of the most recent tech boom/bubble, and each piece had someone making the argument that you need the people the kids on Tumblr refer to as "the olds" because, presumable, the olds know what matters.

The one thing non-dolts do every day ...

... Is not confuse correlation with causation.

So I followed a BusinessInsider link on Facebook yesterday (I know ...) because who wouldn't be fascinated by the premise that one could sum up the differences between successful and unsuccessful people with one infographic? I was really looking forward to seeing how a gifted designer would manage convey ideas like "If you define 'success' by these metrics ..." and "See how different demographic trends, economic developments and policy developments enabled or blunted human potential!"

I suggest you not click through the jump until after you stop laughing.

Had I world enough, and time ...

Do you ever find yourself thinking what you'd do if time was no object? I've been dwelling on it all day, ever since a recently-unemployed friend revealed that there was really no need for her to work, she just liked having someplace to go and something to do. I made sympathetic noises, but inside, I was all, "Are you really telling me that you can't imagine anything else to do with your time?"

Had I the opportunity to spend my time as I pleased, some of the things I might do include ...

They're not all going to be deep, people

My Sunday morning went like this: Get up and yawn my way over to the pool; swim for 50 minutes; shower and change; head to Levy's bagels to pick up the family breakfast; notice that they're out of blueberry muffins at the bagel place; decide it would be a jerk move to come home and tell my husband, "I got breakfast for the people in the house who like bagels. You're out of luck"; go get him a blueberry muffin from the Starbucks next door; come home and throw the carb treats at my clamoring family; pull out a boxed collection of Mo Willems books from the closet and throw them into a blue gift bag, then fluff out some stripey tissue paper; dress my child and bundle her out the door to a birthday party.

And then relax, because being in a park around 15 three-year-olds was more fun and less focused than the first two-and-a-half hours of my morning had been.

I don't want to be a runner, I just want all the perks

I have a whackjob theory that is in no way supported by science: Everybody has their One True Sport. It is the physical activity that gives you an endorphin rush. It's the one that makes you feel wholly integrated, body and mind, and once you're done with it, you're simultaneously calmed and energized and the world makes sense for about 20 minutes.