Fall Break

Today (all of it, the whole 24 hours) is Fall Break at IVCC. I'm not complaining about its brevity because I did take almost all of last week off after all. It just kind of makes me laugh. It's like Spring Break at Ricks College - they'll let you out of class just early enough on Friday afternoon to drive to SLC for April conference. No time to fit a Girls Gone Wild performance in that window, you know?

Anyway, I just took Maryn-Martone-Balone and AJB to school and neglected to mention that the rest of us will be heading to Bloomington for a few hours while they're busily studying. We have a couple of things to return and will be probably enjoying ourselves at Olive Garden for lunch.



I just finished watching the pilot episode of Justified. I'd downloaded to it watch on the plane last week and never got around to it. The thing about pilots is that the show is usually unformed and uneven. I've been watching the first season of 30 Rock in reruns and am shocked and how it's practically a different show -- Liz is confident and capable, Jenna is relatively sane, Tracy is not a complete buffoon, etc. I enjoy the jacked-up surreal version that developed sometime toward the end of the second season more but it's interesting to see where it all started.

With Justified, surprisingly, there's none of that. Admittedly, the show is only two seasons old. It's right at the point when 30 Rock really started to evolve. So if this season it suddenly becomes something entirely different (which I doubt), I guess that will be fine. But for now, I just really appreciate how whole and fully-imagined the whole thing is. Harlan County is a universe unto itself and it's there as much in the first episode as it is in the 26th.

I'm not usually a man-crush type. It's just not in my nature. I think it has something to do with not caring about professional sports - I'm not in the habit of having a deep personal admiration for someone named Payton or Jimmer or whatever. However, I have to admit I have a man-crush on Raylan Givens, the protagonist of Justified. He's just so cool, you know? Ice-water in his veins and a Stetson on his head, he makes me want to invest in a handgun and possibly some cowboy boots. How many guys are so cool that they make you want to buy Western wear?

Note that I admire Raylan, not Timothy Olyphant, the actor who plays him. Olyphant is obviously talented and clearly a kind of unofficial successor to Clint Eastwood (he voices the Eastwood character in Johnny Depp's Rango cartoon) but it is the creation that is Raylan that I think is awesome. Olyphant was the star of a movie called Hitman that I have no interest in seeing and he was the bad guy in the most recent Die Hard which I haven't gotten around to seeing. What I like, I guess, is the combination of Elmore Leonard/Graham Yost's words on paper and the way Olyphant brings them to life.

Anyway, the new season will feature perpetual bad guy Neal McDonough and the surprisingly versatile Idris Elba as villains. It premieres in January and that sounds like a pretty good birthday present to me. (By the way, those of you who know who he is, did you know that Idris Elba is actually British? I had no idea until I heard him in a radio interview the other day. I defy you to listen to his accent as Charles Miner, the upper-level manager who replaces Michael Scott during the Michael Scott Paper Company fiasco on the Office, and tell me you can detect even the slightest clue that the guy isn't American.)

Anyway, off to return stuff and enjoy endless pasta!