MiniSky: Thoughts About Funny Stories

News Shows

Ugly Betty (ABC) - I love ths show. It is very predictible, but you are transfixed by the performances. America Ferrera is Ugly Betty, but even the large braces and big red-rimmed glasses, she is still adorable. Vanessa Williams was brilliantly casted as the diva villian. If you haven’t seen the show, you should see it at least once. You can watch it online here.

Brothers and Sisters (ABC) - Sally Field and her overacting carries this show, and it is a charming show about the interaction of a family dealing with life.

Heroes (NBC) - This is show is AWESOME! I can’t describe how good it is. The best thing to do is watch it You can also watch this online here.

30 Rock (NBC) - I am still not sure about this show. I love Tina Fey and Alac Baldwin together but Tracy Morgan brings the show down. He isn’t that funny and not very articulate so I bearly understand what he is say. But, the show has my attention for now. Watch the show online here.

Retired Shows

Smallville (CW) - I am just so tired of the whole Clark/Lex/Lana triangle and nothing really happens anymore. There is no advancement in the stories. Yes, last week Clark realized he had a new power (super lungs) but it is too much like Dawson’s Creek for meteor rock induced mutants. This should really be the last season, but it doesn’t matter, because I am no longer watching.

America’s Next Top Model (CW) - I am really seeing how this show is a vanity project for Tyra Banks. The house the girls live in is filled with pictures of Tyra and she does nothing but spout platitudes and the challenges are completely ridiculous. Where are the photos of the girls looking [tyra]FIERCE[/tyra]? It seems to me that the girls that actual end up being models are the girls that don’t win: Elyse Sewell from Cycle 1, Mercedes from Cycle 2, etc… The season pass has been removed from my TiVo.

ER (NBC) - I am just so over this show.

Labels: television

Can’t start drinkin’ yet, but in my mind, I’m tipping back a cold one in honor of a hero:

Author Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

In books such as “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle,” and “Hocus Pocus,” Kurt Vonnegut mixed the bitter and funny with a touch of the profound.

Vonnegut, regarded by many critics as a key influence in shaping 20th-century American literature, died Wednesday at 84. He had suffered brain injuries after a recent fall at his Manhattan home, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

Vonnegut’s more than a dozen books, short stories, essays and plays contained elements of social commentary, science fiction and autobiography.

“He was sort of like nobody else,” said fellow author Gore Vidal. “Kurt was never dull.”

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view.

He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

“He was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important,” said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.

Some of Vonnegut’s books were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. He took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers’ aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.

Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.

“I like to say that the 51st state is the state of denial,” he told The Associated Press in 2005. “It’s as though a huge comet were heading for us and nobody wants to talk about it. We’re just about to run out of petroleum and there’s nothing to replace it.”

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army. His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs firebombed the city.

“The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,” Vonnegut wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death,” his 1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW’s inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

The novel that emerged, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

[…]

Thanks to AP writer Christian Salazar for the fine obituary.

And thanks to you, my friends, for sharing the occasional Kurt Vonnegut post over the past few years. Along with P.K. Dick, Vonnegut was a sure comment-generator when things got slow around here, proving that these are the types of artists who touch all of us in that common place known as “heart.”

I have a feeling that, as when Charles Bukowski died, I’m in for some bittersweet blues over the next few days. Join me, then, in remembering a man who stood for sanity in an insane world.