Chuck is good. Enough already

Started a new show today with Yuan Yuan - Studio 60 on Sunset Strip. We've been married to Chuck for the last...seems like 20 years but it's only been 3 and a half seasons. We usually watch while we eat lunch or dinner together but Yuan Yuan's been off to Korea and busy with other tours, so Chuck has been visiting us only once a week or so. Soon our viewings of the show will align with Yuan Yuan's period and then hopefully she'll decide she's ready for another. Pavlovian conditioning, my only hope.

Before a shitstorm erupts in the comments from the Chuck-loving crowd and turns this blog into a lonely and irrelevant sideline on an intergalactic flame war, let me set the record straight. I have nothing against Chuck. I like Chuck. It's often entertaining and sometimes hilarious. But it's getting very repetitive and way too emotional. In season 4, it doesn't go an episode without a heartwarming moment. We need more Buy More and less Chuck-Sara relationship issues. We get it, Chuck's a little girl and Sara's a big man with a gun, so Chuck has all these feelings and Sara has little phantom Tyrannosaurus arms where her feelings once were before they were amputated for good, but the steady onslaught from Chuck's pharmaceutical-grade pheromones finally overwhelm her (in every episode) and she starts getting sympathy pains and everything is "well" between them again.

Then there's Chuck's sister, who is completely intolerable. Mario couldn't stand her from the beginning. If there's anything Mario hates in this world, it's being babied and told "if there's anything you ever need, you come to me, you're my brother/son/nephew/mistress and I'm here for you always." Somewhere out there, Mario just felt the inexplicable but urgent need to run away as fast as possible. The only person Mario needs to be there for him is a bowl of mildewy soup. But I tolerated Ellie for the sake of contrast, which she struck spectacularly with Casey. Which brings me to Casey. Casey is slowly but surely turning into Chuck's sister. Ever since he reunited with his daughter, he's been discovering all these feelings and emotions and frankly it's disgusting. Casey was the goto guy for your dose of macho. Without him, this whole show is getting unbearably sappy.

I take it back, we didn't start Studio 60 on Sunset Strip. I was hoping for a self-fulfilling prophecy but the gods would have none of it. Just as we sat down to watch it, after I had downloaded the subtitles and made sure they matched, I unplugged my external laptop fan and set up my laptop on a chair near the bed so we could watch from there. When I hit play, VLC started spouting some nonsense about bad movie files and inauspicious weather conditions. I opened the show folder to try to start up the video from there again, and noticed the folder had disappeared. Turns out the folder was on the fan. And the fan wasn't a fan, it was an external harddrive. When I plugged it back into my laptop and reopened the folder, the first 5 episodes were gone. Somewhere on the other end of the galaxy, a black hole is slurping down one episode after another. The most epic slurping in the world, that we'll never see or hear or maybe even imagine, as black holes are so strong that they slurp up their own slurping sounds and webcam footage as soon as it begins to exist. But otherwise it would be all over the news in a billion years or so.

Iron Man and Chuck

Iron Man 3 is on the horizon. I make it a rule to have low expectations for anything that ends with a 3, so I can be pleasantly surprised no matter how bad it is. Usually I do such a good job with the first part that I end up not watching the movie at all. But I don't always have a choice in the matter because frequently all the other movies in a 2 month radius are made in China (I live in Beijing and sadly Chinese film is even more mediocre than the sweetened garbage that comes out of Hollywood), and Yuan Yuan needs to be entertained. Otherwise she'll entertain me, Gladiator style.

Recently we've been on an almost exclusive Chuck diet. I'm usually busy so entertainment hour coincides with feeding time for efficiency. This has interesting side-effects:

1. Yuan Yuan is more likely to volunteer to cook, since I can go without eating meals and she needs her helping of Chuck.

2. I have no idea what anything tastes like anymore, but sometimes I'll find myself cracking up when I put Yuan Yuan to bed and grab a carrot for a midnight snack.

3. Mario has watched more TV in the past month / 2 seasons of Chuck than he has in the 9 months before that. He never admits to watching, and he's really good at looking away just in time when you try to catch him sneaking a peek, but when he's studying the same syllable on the same flashcard before and after the episode, it gives away the game.