RIP coffee maker

 

click for ebay

Not sure how long we had that coffee maker, guessing at least 20 years. We've had osmosis water filtration about that long, too, so cleaning with vinegar to get the mineral buildup off wasn't necessary. No, that one clicking out isn't ours. It's an identical very nice barely used model that is really probably worth way more than $80 because they haven't made those in years. No, our cord has been taped up for awhile and finally caught on fire, plus the clock hasn't worked in forever, plus a few other little fixes, so it's going to be a huge void in our lives.

I've already been looking through a few dotcoms and have decided to hit a Walmart personally tomorrow to see how much that cuts down cost on a programmable yet simple model that doesn't actually start my laundry and go feed the chickens. I'd just love someone to create another under the cabinet without a water hookup. We looked high and low for those one year and felt very sad how passing a trend something that simple was. Anyway, I chopped $20 off one I liked last night browsing online just switching dotcoms, perks on the stove like the olden days only it's spiffily a little more modern and, again, simple. If I can find it in a box store, I don't have to wait for delivery.

In the meantime, we're using a smaller guy I bought for backup just in case and had stored in the closet. Just really glad this last one didn't burn our house down. Pretty handy Scott was right there when it literally flamed up. I have black streaks on my white wall.

I should probably refresh more of our electronics. We've had so many storm surges over the years, no telling what will go next. Our microwave is as old as the kids, and they've already got kids of their own. Not a clue why it still works great, but we've had it upside down vacuuming out the little grill vents occasionally during deep cleaning sessions, so maybe we're just fastidious and very, very frugal.

And I guess that is why we can have nice things. At least, it looks like it. I'm enjoying a rainy day, cozy on the inside. It's been darkish most of the day, little bit of lightning, mostly organizing my thoughts for a day out shopping tomorrow.

Because dang.

Totally for real. We've got eggs and cans of tuna for backup in case the world crashes or something. Me and tuna go way back.

Playing with filters again. Wound up realizing just how much Scrubs I need to marathon through for my #TomCavanaghWatch because I ignored it so badly when my daughter was still living here, and I'm just shaking my head but admiring that Dr. Kelso nailed so much monologue. Also, I somehow missed Ralphie being in so many episodes and started noticing other background regulars. After about a week of sporadic watchathons, it hit me how terribly depressing the show is behind all the humor, and I bet that's why I left the room so much when the show was still fresh. I mostly watched with my daughter the same way some men watch sports with sons, basically I really suck at small talk and emotionally invested interaction. Turned out years later when we were on the phone and I mentioned I was doing a search for Pariah on The Flash because of rumors it might be Tom Cavanagh, she knew exactly who that was without having seen The Flash and I never remembered him from Scrubs, so that right there tells you where my head is on the scifi/comics litmus scale of popular television.

Anyway, I start season 3 next, and I don't know why this even popped into my head, but I started wondering today if anyone has ever thought to do a Tom Cavanagh vs Jeff Goldblum writeup, and so far I'm not finding anything, although I did run into one person saying you could switch Tom for Jeff if it was a certain character (check this cached page), which had me looking off into space like J.D. on scrubs imaging out a sort of celebrity wrestling on set to get their lines in first.

Honestly, I can't imagine the two of them in the same film without some kind of major fan group explosion, but I decided to hit my ever trusty go-to Oracle of Bacon to see where they fall in their careers, and was shocked not to see Cavanagh pop up at all on the list of Toms that popped up when I moused over.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??? Welp, surely he'll pop up now, I'm plugging his name in.

And here we go, I had no idea.

And the link there goes to this wikipedia page. 

Pittsburgh (2006 film)

And I just found it on amazon, so.

Ok, then. Things you learn rambling on a blog on a rainy day.

What else is happening around here? 

Won this sweet little build in the spire.

Not sure yet if I'll keep it beyond its 50 day expiry.

Also this. It might be pertinent to pay attention to people who keep trying to share this stuff against it being removed over and over. Why is it so important to cancel this?

 

In case blogger or some other reason doesn't let you see that, go to this link.

JUANDERFUL CLUEZ IN THESE INTERVIEWZ❗️❗️❗️ BOMBSHELL COMMZ❗️❗️❗️ JUAN O SAVIN ❗️❗️❗️ (drop.space)

I have a feeling the biggest celebrity on the planet is going to be showing up sometime this year. I keep hearing rumors.

For some reason, Lithuania took a huge interest in that post on Feb. 28th of this year. Both the post link and general blog link went a little viral for some reason

In case you might not have a clue what in the world Lithuania and JFK Jr might have in common, the world of politics was exploding right about that time in their area. This snip will click out to the page it refers to.

The ship that blocked the Suez Canal is part of the mess, since heavy weapons were captured during that search, along with over a thousand dead people and over another thousand people being trafficked, which I linked on twitter, but the screenshot will click to the link I tweeted.

You know what I think? I think Juan O Savin is JFK Jr and that he's eyeball deep on all this political stuff going on behind the scenes, and the deep state has been terrified of him ever since Trump got in and started writing executive orders.

And I think we've been watching a world scale military op leaking us info around treason-complicit mainstream medias blocking what's really going on so we'll stay docile and stupid.

And I think the wealthiest people all over the planet are getting their asses handed to them, because it takes wealthy people like Trump and JFK Jr to beat filthy wealthy vampire families who run everything behind all the curtains.

And I think I have never enjoyed being alive on this planet as much as I have these last few years watching all this roll out.

And if you're just now joining me and don't know what the heck you've been missing, start digging back for all the links I've shared. LEARN.

Gotta run, Scott is on his way home from work now and I need to start supper. Here's a good way to start catching up.

Love Monkey (TV Series 2006-) wtf did I just sit thru

My very first impression of Love Monkey (2006-) was that it feels like a conceptual smash between How I Met Your Mother and a grown up version of Boy Meets World. I normally hang out in scifi land, or at least go for action with chases and explosions, so I assumed Love Monkey would be a little stultifying in the 'regular TV' sense. I was wrong. Starting that series was like jump starting a stick shift on a steep hill in the dead of night. I went on full alert upon launch between narration, multiple character intros, multiple subtle cues and hints, and hard transitions between scenes. 

Quote- The first episode aired on January 17, 2006, on CBS, attracting an audience of about 8.6 million viewers. By its third episode on February 7, viewership was down to 6.2 million, and CBS pulled it from the schedule. 

I'm  not sure if CBS thought Love Monkey bit off a little more than the audience could chew (since it was almost immediately canceled), but a marathon of only 8 episodes had me so dizzy from continual fast paced dialogue that I almost gave up and just turned it into an actor spotting sport. For example, Ivana Milisevic from The 100 was in Love Monkey. She's a badass, so that totally kept me watching. If you go on a Love Monkey bender, prepare to brake for IMDb lookups.

Thankfully, I did a little more research than that and then went back to it with fresh eyes, and actually quite liked it, although I'll have a little commentary on what I think happened with the ratings. I actually wound up liking it way better than most friend group shows I've avoided through the years, mostly because it wasn't dumbed down with a laugh track and had intelligent dialogue, and I wound up going back and rewatching the whole thing because I appreciated that.

Do people prefer sitcoms with laugh tracks or without? 👈(click)

Quick heads up for occasional extremely slow fadeouts. Extremely. Slow.

Love Monkey was actually reimagined from a novel of the same name, although quite a few changes were made for the TV series. The original novel was written by, of all people, a film critic, but the TV series drastically spiffs up our main character Tom (played by Tom Cavanagh, so we have Tom the actor and Tom the character) with a much cooler job (that needed too much narration to establish) and apparently a better body, so if the high paced dialogue content and jumpy scene transitions are too head spinny, you can always go chill with the book and feel sorry for pudgy Tom at the tabloid. If pretty Tom the actor as handsome Tom the character with a real life and a cool job at a record label can't launch this story all spiffed up, pretty sure pudgy Tom the book character can't win over Julia. I could be wrong, I haven't read it. And then the music biz stuff in the TV show was a bit busy, although it did hold its story integrity. Any kind of talent scouting is rigorous in its own right, so building a 'friend show' around that kind of a job was probably a little grueling. When I found out the original Tom character was working at a tabloid in the novel, I just shook my head. The leap to TV idealism was possibly a bit overdone.

I don't usually have concerns over content cramming in TV shows, but each segment in Love Monkeys was power packed with content, and if the content switching between scenes had been as slow as the fadeouts, it might have kept those 2M viewers that dropped off. Just having to stay alert enough through every episode to transition with scene changes felt a lot like watching high school basketball from mid point floor bleacher, lot of head swiveling trying to follow the ball. I felt like the scenes could have been paced out a little bit, possibly 8 eps could have been 16. It made the friend group feel a little too tight. Otherwise the show itself was really good, in my opinion, and I don't say that lightly for these kinds of shows. Maybe the timing was off or something, like Mystery Men.

Speaking of basketball, my favorite scenes in Love Monkey were the basketball scenes. I say this as a person who has seen the Harlem Globetrotters twice, watched a lot of college basketball on TV, sat by Jackie Crawford in my chemistry class, and had a daughter on high school varsity. I never even noticed Tom Cavanagh before The Flash, but I'd definitely watch him in a movie about basketball.

Star of Ed knows way around court- "During the late 1980s, the six-foot guard played for five years at the Canadian intercollegiate level while attending Queen's University in Kingston, Ont."

Getting back around to Love Monkey, my most basic basic takeaway is that Tom the character hits a sort of self revelation through a song an undiscovered young man is singing in a local bar/lounge/dance something, and suddenly realizes that song is about his own love life. Since he's a music scout for a record label, it's natural for him to scoop up talent, but in this case he winds up entangling the way the lyrics bring out his feels, coincidentally about the time he begins a new life with a new label after being fired from the original, ironically timed with his incompatible girlfriend (whose singing sucks) dumping him because he's as clueless as my own husband (I actually find that endearing, I kept my husband), inspiring his friends to push him to go find 'the one', his "Mrs. Tom". 

In Facebook speak, it's complicated.

And that's probably the best way to review Love Monkey. It's complicated.

But my goal is to find out whether Tom Cavanagh shaves or brushes his teeth in this show, so I committed to searching out free fan sharing, which was thankfully most of it, bless fandom hearts, so it's not exactly definitive, but I submit that it can still be conclusive, based on what I could find. Which was most of it. If Tom shaved or brushed his teeth in any of the missing segments in the seventh episode, I'm going to be very disappointed in fandom fail when I find out. If you'd like to catch up on this series, it's been on youtube for about 12 years now. (:edit: Since I published this review, nearly everything in this playlist has disappeared and I don't know why, but I'm going to guess because I highlighted a free collection that irked the youtube police. Sorry about that.)

Other than a few minor editing problems, though, the story was actually pretty intriguing. Nearly every scene I was making bets what Tom the character would do or say next, along with his friends, apparently. They knew him well. This is kind of where the show hooked me and reeled me in, because I've never had a little coterie of friends synch bombing me on pronoun usage, so when they got to 'her' vs 'it', I discovered I was already on the stringer and stopped fighting it. I admit I downloaded this series.

You guys realize I'm making this longer so I can slide in more screenshots, right. This is a Tom watch, after all. You're welcome. (If you follow Tom Cavanagh around filming just to gaze on him, this series is perfect for you. It's full of costume and scene changes highlighting main actor.)

I'll be honest, when I first started this review, it was more along the lines of What are the writers doing to me?, hence the title. Because I'm horrible for judging other writers harshly, particularly when they are working on big money projects, I've gotta be honest and say Love Monkey the TV series was way too content crammed for the average person coming home after work wanting to relax into some entertainment, and I think the way the scripts were jammed into the filming style is what killed it. When I'm watching a scene in a public area where two characters are talking, I don't want to see a fuzzy closeup of someone's head walking through spoiling the shot. Many of the scene backgrounds were so 'busy' with detail or extraneous movement that needed to be filtered back out that it became work to watch the show. For me, a person who doesn't filter detail well, and I suspect there are plenty of us (since 2M viewers dropped off so immediately), Love Monkey quickly became a grind through high speed content filtering in order to follow the story. Between the script writing and film editing, I nearly jumped off this train myself. This is a good story. Perhaps the storytelling method itself could have been reimagined.

This is the song that inspired the storytelling narrative in the TV series. 👉click for lyrics👈 Find more Teddy Geiger on youtube. The original novel title "Love Monkey" was inspired by an unrelated song lyric.

Cold Squad "Taggert Family" (1998), Tom Cavanagh

Laptop screencaps used in not for profit blog episode and character reviews and film study.
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

 

My Halloween countdown Creepy Tom Watch concludes with Tom Cavanagh's role as Spencer Taggert in season 1 episode 5 of Cold Squad, a Canadian crime show that ran in the late 1990s to 2005.

As deep dig actor watches go, sometimes you hit gold in youtube and find out things are a little mislabeled but still totally worth the time. Thank you, 👉hardcore fan (click)👈 who apparently joined youtube just to share really old Tom Cavanagh filmography. I got your back fixing this one. Here is the show if anyone wants to check it out. Comments there suggest other youtubers and Hulu if you are interested in a complete Cold Squad series rewatch.

Description on youtube-

This is the Tom Cavanagh Episode of Cold Squad from Canadian Television. The episode aired in 1998 Cold Squad was a Canadian police procedural television series first broadcast in 1998 that followed the investigations of a part of the Vancouver Police Department Homicide Division tasked with solving cold cases, the titular Cold Squad, as led by Sergeant Ali McCormick Episode description Ali revisits the case of Barbara Taggert, a mother who was killed in a house fire in 1995 that was ruled an arson. Her daughter Lisa disappeared that night and was presumed abducted.

clicks to imdb

Spencer Taggert's wife was violently murdered and his daughter abducted two years ago and he was cleared as a suspect. Here we see him still employed with his father-in-law. Spencer is a nice guy, by all accounts.

Two years ago, Spencer was in business with a compulsive liar named Bill Harris who came around to visit a lot before the murder, but he, too, was cleared as a suspect in both the murder and abduction. Because Bill showed back up in custody for unrelated charges, dominos got bumped and the cold case was reopened. Sadly, Spencer got dragged back into the questioning.

Since this is very early Tom Cavanagh filmography, I'm getting a ridiculous amount of screencaps. You're welcome. Imma randomly talk like this in between them. You get a lot of what I fondly call "classic Tom", but where some might inadvertently typecast themselves, Tom somehow manages to convincingly pull off the transition from crushing innocence to stone cold killer, which actually made me feel a little ill. (I can't help internalizing, I tend to steer clear of crime shows.) 

Even from one frame to another you can see the range of internal emotional responses in his eyes alone, like the surprise he suppressed when asked point blank whether he started the fire, which I think makes this creepy guy all the more convincing since I felt that lurch of don't get caught in the pit of my stomach as I watched it. Go watch it.

Tom is a natural chameleon in this very limited role where frame to frame convincingly locks the narrative into place, so watching this show as a film study is rewarding. All the acting is really good, and they have to be to rock out such a complex story so quickly.

Remember the distraught widower who brings in new evidence confessing he was cheating on his wife that night and has that other witness. If he'd really been guilty, surely he'd have used this card the first time around. Still...

Because it took an undercover officer to dig out his true colors. Makes you wonder how many other people can pull off living with secrets like this guy. It was touch and go and very tricky getting this guy to spill.

The lengths they went to just gaining his trust set my nerves off. I'd probably be way more trigger happy.

Lol, keeping an eye out for cops... Irony is fun.

You prove it, no you prove it, no you prove it first... Cop walking that edge over and over, winding up maced in the eyes, no wonder so many crimes are never solved. This was a LOT of work.

Progress creeped along, but it didn't stall. I couldn't believe this guy actually yapped out his intentions to kill again.

Time to put all that work to the test. Will he confess????

The intensity escalated to the point where I'd have broke, killed the guy, and run. I just can't trust.

Nearly there. *edge of my seat*

And without warning, we're going there, flipping the deck and demanding proof the suspect isn't the undercover cop, stripping naked. O_O Holy cow.

And he liked it. Mr. Exhibitionist started blurting all of it. While the team listened in, our boy hammered Spencer with question after question and Spencer was tickled as a naked man can be just blurting it all out. Total psycho. This calls for extra extra screenshots.

Yeah, that sad widower was waiting his whole life for this moment. We can only imagine the rush he was feeling. Naked. How dark is this show, srsly.

Can you just see it. "How was work today?" "I played a naked psycho. It was exhausting." 

The satisfaction of imploding fanfic authors into an all new frenzy.

Sorry, was going off track. I'm not a fanfic author, my work here is already done.

But the show must go on! "What about the little girl?"

Psycho sickos and their weird little trust games.

Tom gets a little shovel action in this script. Imma stop there because the rest is really dark, literally and figuratively, and screenshots aren't as clear. I've been pretty thrilled about being able to get so many pretty good ones for such an old film project.

That was fun! =D

It's even more fun to compare old Tom to new Tom, so here is a brand new upload from just yesterday. Tom is lending his voice to the LGS Foundation, "a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of individuals with Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, a rare and severe form of childhood-onset epilepsy, through research, programs and education." Please check them out, sign up for news and events, and thank you very kindly if you are able to help with donations. There will be a charity auction tomorrow (November 1st, 2020) during the LGS Awareness Day, along with a concert featuring Noah Guthrie. Get a cool LGS Awareness tee, and please share this video to your social medias and help Tom spread this information! Thank you.