REVIEWED:
30 Rock – Season One
Starring: Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Jane Krakowski and many more

The last episode of the last season (7) of 30 Rock aired about 3 weeks ago, but – until this weekend – I had only seen one episode of this generally well-received series.

This weekend I watched all of Season One, and, hey, it’s a really good show. Not up there with M*A*S*H, Seinfeld or other arguably great sitcoms, but very good, even for the first season.

Lots of topical humor, some inside references to movies such as Fey’s Mean Girls, and host of guest stars that are a testament to the respect Fey commands (LL Cool J, Isabella Rossellini, Chris Mathews, Rip Torn, Nathan Lane and a bunch of SNL former/curent cast members – and that’s just a quick list).

The series reminds me a bit of both Al Franken’s too smart for its own good Lateline, as well as the always underrated NewsRadio – 30 Rock is an ensemble cast that is about, in this case, a live weekly TV comedy show (think of Saturday Night Live, obviously).

Overall, light, entertaining and funny in a sad-but-true way. Everyone takes a turn at looking sane/insane (like Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser on Mad About You). Looking forward to seeing more of this series.

All reviews

Apropos of nothing, I noticed recently that I have stopped carrying change.

And that got me to thinking about other things that I always did that I no longer do.

I no longer (or rarely):

• Carry change – I still keep a bunch of quarters in the car for that random parking meter (in the suburbs this is rare), but I virtually never carry change anymore. And if I ever get some for change, it goes in the change jar when I get home. There are two reasons for this: 1) I now carry my smartphone in my change pocket (keys in the other), and I don’t want to bang up the phone; 2) I rarely use cash, so change is not an issue.
• Pay with cash – At Starbucks, it’s the Starbucks card. At the pump or in most stores, I’ll use the self-pay with a credit card. And – frankly – I’m not in stores much anymore. I buy online. And I rarely go out for lunch at work. I think I took $200 out of the bank sometime around last Christmas, and I’ll bet I still have about half of it in my wallet.
• Read the newspaper – While I’m probably at a high in the amount of news I consume, it’s very rarely from the newspaper, for two reasons: 1) By the time the paper arrives (we still get the Sunday paper – Chicago Tribune), I’ve pretty much read all the “news” it has to offer; 2) The paper sucks. Sorry. Typos, sentences that make no sense, and lame stories that have no place in a newspaper in an effort to keep readers. It’s a sad reality; I used to love to read the paper.
• Wear a watch – When I was a studio photographer, it was mandatory to have a watch. The big view cameras – under the tungsten lights – needed long, exact exposures. Yet that wasn’t a big deal, as I had always, since high school at least, worn a watch. I don’t recall when this stopped, but why wear a watch today? There’s a clock in your car, on your computer, on your phone.
• Watch network televison – I’ll watch an occasional live event (news, Oscars) and some late-night comedy (Stewart, Colbert, an I’m-bored-let’s-watch SNL), but I can’t remember the last time I watch a TV comedy/drama (I don’t do any of the reality shows). One caveat: I do enjoy binge-watching a good TV series on DVD, to go though an entire season in a weekend or two. I just watched the first season of 30 Rock last weekend. Good stuff. Well, second caveat: I frequently catch up on Stewart and/or Colbert online.
• Buy computer books – I have – there’s no other way to put this – a crapload of computer books surrounding me. How to navigate the internet (pre-world wide web!), VRML, DOS, ColdFusion, PHP, Perl, CSS and so on up to my last purchase, a jQuery book. The latter was an outlier: It was the first computer book I had purchased in years. Today, you just dive into a new language/framework or whatever, and when you get stuck, you google the issue.
• Use/own Yellow/White Pages phone books – Any questions?

As you can probably see, the common thread of most of the above is technology: How technology has changed the ways we do things.

On the other hand, I still buy DVDs and CDs (with occasional iTunes singles purchases), and I now go to the bank, which is an odd event for me. Why? My current employer doesn’t have direct deposit, so I swing by on my way home to deposit the check. With other jobs, between direct deposit and ATMs, going into a bank was a very rare event. And I don’t have an ereader; still reading books the old-fashioned way.

So I’m still a Luddite in some ways. Fair enuf. I’m sure that’ll change in the near future, as well.