Wow...what a week this has been. Thank goodness it's almost over. There's nothing particularly interesting to write about; it's mostly problems at work that I'd rather stuff wasabi up my nose than rehash here. I did have a basketball game this past Sunday, and we lost. As I've mentioned, I'm fairly terrible, so I'm rarely a factor in whether we are victorious or not. Unfortunately, the usual suspects on our team that actually do possess some basketball acumen started playing down to my level. It's a surprise that we only lost by 6 the way we were playing. In some ways, it's encouraging. We can suck it up and still barely lose a game. Had we played like that last season, we would have lost by 20. Now...well, I guess we lose with more style.

I am saddened today because it's the season finale of my favorite tv show, Burn Notice. This show has single-handedly caused me to start watching television shows again; so, maybe I shouldn't be so sad. I'm watching far more tv now that I did 3 or 4 years ago. Luckily, I have a DVR so I can skip past most of the beer and insurance commercials, but it's starting to hurt my reading time. I seem to only read books now when I go on vacation, and that's a very bad habit. I decided I would list the tv shows that I'm watching right now to see how much of my time I'm wasting.

1. Burn Notice - As I said before, this is currently my favorite show. It's not the best show in writing or acting, but it's the most enjoyable for me. Following a discredited spy who's been thrown out of the CIA and forced to live in his home town of Miami without his identity, it's a cross between the A-Team and I Spy with a splash of MacGyver. Michael Weston, burned spy, solves distressed people's problems with his spy expertise and his two friends, a retired Navy Seal played by one of my all time favorite actors, Bruce Campbell, and his IRA terrorist on again off again girlfriend, played by the sexy Gabrielle Anwar. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire...wait, wrong show. Still, Michael Weston's laconic narration about the trials and tribulations of spycraft on a budget are worth watching the show by themselves...well, them and seeing Bruce Campbell be awesome as usual.

2. The Soup - This show has been the most consistently funny half hour on tv for several years now. Hosted by a lanky and pale comedian, Joel McHale, it basically shows hilarious and horrific reality show clips and mocks the shit of them. It's a very simple format that is aped on several other stations, usually with much poorer results. The reason this one works is the writing is quite funny and McHale manages to be a likable asshole doing what is basically an extended version of SNL's Hollywood Minute with David Spade. Spade has the whole asshole thing down, I just wouldn't want to watch him for more than a minute.

3. Supernatural - I stumbled on this show by accident, which you'd have to since it's on the CW. I'm pretty sure most people don't even know what the hell the CW is. When it first aired, it looked like a Buffy clone with hunky guys to appeal to chicks, so I ignored it. After watching the 4th season from the beginning last year, I picked up and devoured the first 3 seasons. The story is about two brother who were raised by their father to be hunters of ghosts and other creepy crawlers. The concept isn't exactly original; I mean, Abbott and Costello made a career out of starring with movie monsters and that Who's on First skit. Still, the writing is top notch and the plot has evolved beyond your everyday monster of the week storyline into one of heaven and hell, angels and demons, and the end of the world. This is straight fantasy with a lot of drama, but also a surprisingly large amount of comedy. I guess it really is kind of a Buffy clone.

4. Psych - I only checked this show out because it was advertised during Burn Notice and I'm quite happy I did. The show follows the misadventures of Shawn Spencer, a super detective masquerading as a psychic for the Santa Barbara police department and his pharmaceutical salesman best friend, Burton Guster. Shawn is a lazy, underachieving loser who gets by on his remarkable perceptions and 80's references. The scripts always feel like they were thrown together in a couple of hours of a case of beer, but that's sort of the charm. The show doesn't take itself seriously and can be hysterically funny. I have no idea how the USA network, home of Silk Stalkings and...I'm not sure what else, somehow managed to end up with two quality tv shows.

5. Bones - I started watching this because David Boreanaz, or Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was on it. Usually, I ignore CSI, NCIS, Law & Order SUV, or any of the other 300 cop shows. This one is rather entertaining because they concentrate on the quirky characters instead of the "ripped from the headlines" crimes being investigated. The show is titled after the nickname of the lead character Temperance Brennan, the leading forensic anthropologist in the world. Considering that shit sounds made up, she couldn't have had too much competition. Either way, she works for an imitation Smithsonian Museum in D.C. and helps the FBI solve crimes by investigating gory and decomposing bodies. As I mentioned, the crimes are always second to characters which is how I prefer it. Story is king in movies while character is king in television. If I'm going to spend hours with someone, I better damn well like them.

6. Tosh.0 - This is actually another clip show that is a fairly blatant rip off of the Soup, but the reason it works is the same, a hilarious host, Daniel Tosh. Instead of showing tv clips, he uses clips and photos found on the web, as well as a segment which is one of the most creative on any show, the Web Redemption. In it, Tosh will do a comedy segment/interview with web clip "stars" and allow them to make up for whatever reason they ended up on the web in the first place. People like the Tron guy, the 7 year old black kid who stole his grandmother's SUV, Afro Ninja...well, you get the picture. Tosh manages to pull of the likable asshole act as well, although he's a lot darker in his humor than McHale. Any guy who comments about a girl doing competitive cup stacking with, "Okay, we get it. Women are good at putting dishes away" gets a thumbs up in my book.

7. American Idol - Haha...just kidding. That show is fucking terrible. I'd rather watch my balls being crushed by a sledge hammer than watch an elaborate karaoke contest. It's not totally a waste; it sometimes provide entertaining clips for the Soup.

Sigh...I really need to either watch less television, or watch better shows.

It was a nice weekend getting out of the house for the first time in two weeks. The crazy cold from the bowels of hell that incapacitated me with racking coughs and buckets of phlegm seems to have taken a break until next cold season allowing me to face the world once again. There was the dinner at Kushi Shabu, a hot pot-cook-your own-all-you-can-eat Japanese spot that was expensive and highly overrated. All you can eat? Well, when it tastes like bland, generic meat, I suddenly find I don't end up wanting too much of it. To make the matters worse, the thin strips of meat that they do give you to cook begin to pollute the water in the most disgusting fashion. Eventually, you have this brownish gunk floating on the surface; a sort of meat puke, if you will. Hoo boy, nothing like scraping dark snot off your dinner. I know I'm still hungry! I'm already morally opposed to having to cook my own dinner at a restaurant anyways. I have plenty of friends who live this crap, but I'll say what I always say; if I wanted to cook, I would stay at home and microwave a burrito. You should at least get a discount, what with having to do most of the labor.

I'd mention the club and the goofy, drunken shenanigans, but they weren't as interesting as when we were in our twenties. Now it's just sad. Anytime you have a friend who ends up suffering from gout like symptoms from drinking, it might be time to think about laying off the binge drinking. I will say the place we went to was a sort of hybrid bar/club where it basically represented the worst of both. It was way too loud to talk to someone, but their dance floor was away from the main area and tiny. I think you should either go all out with the club, or try and make it into a fun bar atmosphere. But, what do I know? The place was crowded enough as is. Plus, I didn't have to pay a cover, so that almost made up for the deafening music and the 12 dollar drinks.

Now that I'm able to walk two steps without coughing violently, I was able to play in the adult league basketball game this Sunday. It's no secret that my game resembles Brian Scalabrine more than Paul Pierce. I'm fairly terrible, for the most part. I'm there to rebound, box out, and play physical defense. As far as scoring is concerned, I'm the 7th option on a team with 7 players. Well, make that 6th option; Newjen is even less involved than I am in a given game. This was our third game of the season, and coming off two dominating performances against our last two opponents, we were feeling pretty confident. Well, our good players were, anyways. I was just hoping to not to pass out from being physically weakened from my sickness. With our last two victories being over 20 points, we've had good reason to be confident. Our opponent was supposed to be one of the good teams in our league, but they were either replaced with pod people, or aliens stole their basketball talents. With 5 minutes left in the half, we were up by 30-6. Needless to say, they began to get frustrated and one of their players, this chubby short white guy who thought he was Lebron, started to get chippy.

With the frustration mounting, our opponents went to the usual outlet; blame the refs. However, the refs weren't really having it that night. It might be because we were putting down an epic ass whoopin' on them and they had no idea why they would be complaining about calls. In fact, at one point, one of the refs actually asked white Lebron, "You're down 29 points. What exactly do you want? This game was over 15 minutes ago!" The result wasn't surprising; at least 4 technical fouls on their team for stupid decisions and loudly cursing. They've decided to crack down on the profanity in our league recently, but they only enforce it sparingly, usually to keep a situation from escalating. I think they're hoping to keep people from threatening to knife someone in the parking lot after the game, as a former teammate once did. (True story)

My favorite exchange between the refs and white Lebron was when he went barreling into one of our best players, Josh, and had his shot casually swatted away. He continued his forward progress crashing into Josh and tumbling onto his back in proper melodramatic fashion, then leaped up yelling at the ref, wondering where his foul call was. The ref dismissively looked down at him, clapped his hands and said, "Hear that? That was the sound of the ball getting cleanly smacked out of your possession. Just because you run into someone out of control doesn't mean you get a call. Now play ball." I started to feel bad for the other team and they even began to get embarrassed for the performance of their most outspoken teammate. When the game mercifully ended (which resulted in the one ref rolling her eyes and yelling out, "Finally! Thank god!") with a 30 point victory, we all did the usual sportsmanlike shaking of hands and wishing each other good luck in our next games. Because White Lebron is a complete dick, he couldn't even just silently nod his head and decided to try and pick a fight with Josh after the game. With his award winning unsportsmanlike attitude, I guess he is similar to Lebron after all. His actions were so shameful that one of the guys from the team actually walked over to us after the game to apologize for his teammate. All I can say is, we'll probably see them in the playoffs. That'll be interesting, to say the least. I just hope nobody gets thrown out.