by jphilo | Mar 7, 2013 | Three Thoughts for Thursday
- Finally, I finished watching the last season of The West Wing. Now I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering, “Wait, is that memory a genuine historic event or was it from a West Wing episode?”
- My dad died 16 years ago this week. At the visitation, my daughter and her two cousins (then ages 7, 7, and 4) stood in the funeral home foyer greeting guests. “If you want food, go through that door.” They pointing to the right. “But if you want to see the dead body, go through that door,” they explained, pointing to the left. Do you suppose the mourners at Hugo Chavis’ funeral will have anywhere near so sweet a memory as that?
- Yesterday, the granddaughter of my fourth grade teacher connected with me via a Pinterest pin of Mom’s fabulous Franklin Chex Mix recipe, originally posted on this blog. How cool is that, and who have you connected with via the magic of the internet?
photo source
by jphilo | Jan 17, 2013 | Three Thoughts for Thursday
- I don’t want to disappoint the president. So hopefully, he won’t ask me to be in his new cabinet. I couldn’t handle people talking mean about me like they’re doing to Chuck Hagel.
- Potential cabinet nominees should be required to watch all seven seasons of West Wing so they know how to walk down halls and talk fast before they get the job.
- So far, I’ve watched five West Wing seasons and am getting pretty good at talking fast while walking. I still have a ways to go. But even as a master walk-talker, I’ll turn down a cabinet spot. I’m perfectly happy filling my own cabinets with stuff from the local grocery store where the clerks talk nice to everybody. How about you?
by jphilo | Sep 10, 2012 | Daily Life
A couple weeks ago I admitted that, thanks to Netflix, Hiram and I are addicted to the TV series, Lost. Today in the interest of full disclosure, I am making a clean breast of things by confessing my love of West Wing, the political drama that ran from 1999 to 2006. (For those of you wondering about the 10 year lag in our viewing habits, remember that thanks to the advent of digital television, we were left with one channel even though we installed a converter box. Our location didn’t allow us to get cable, and our daughter was in college, which left no money for satellite TV until last year. So we haven’t watched much TV since the millennium.)
Now, the conservatives among you may be gasping with horror to think anyone could like such a liberal leaning show. And the liberals among you may be gasping to think anyone could like a show that sometimes shows liberals in a less than favorable light. But my fascination with the show has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with the actors and their acting. Or to be specific, these actors and their acting.
- Alison Janney (C. J. Cregg) – She’s right up there with Meryl Streep.
- Janet Moloney (Donna Moss) – She does amazing things with what started as a bit part. No wonder the writers started giving her more lines.
- Richard Schiff (Toby Ziegler) – Has anyone anywhere ever played the sad sack so perfectly?
- Stockard Channing (Abbey Bartlett) – Since her debut in Grease, she’s been worth watching. But back then, whooda thought she’d play the President’s wife.
- Martin Sheen (Josiah Bartlett) – In the same vein, whooda thought the President could look so much like Peter Parker’s (aka Spider Man) uncle?
- Dule Hill (Charlie Young) – Can he possibly be same actor who plays the comic sidekick in Psych? Now that’s amazing acting.
Those are the actors who draw me back to West Wing for episode after episode. How about you? Who are your favorite actors on that show or any other? Leave a comment.
by jphilo | Nov 21, 2011 | Current Events
Shhh…don’t tell the iWeb people at Apple about the WordPress graphic on this blog page. Let’s keep the upcoming switch from iWeb to WordPress here at Down the Gravel Road between ourselves. The switch should make this site much faster for readers, which is a very good thing.
And the new bells and whistles it’ll offer are nice, too.
My favorite techno-buddy, Ray, has all the incomprehensible-to-my-small-brain details lined up and ready to go. He’s waiting for me to get done transferring blog posts from this blog to the new one under construction. We thought we’d figured out how to do it in one fell swoop.
But no.
So I’m transferring four years worth of posts one by one. The bugs have been worked out (through painful experience), and each transfer goes fairly quickly. But there are a lot of posts, so the whole process is taking a lot of time.
A lot of time.
But, I’m using the hours and hours and hours required for this mind-numbing process to watch DVDs of TV shows on my always-wanted-to-watch-but-can’t-justify-allocating-time-to-them category.
Shows like West Wing.
And Parenthood.
And a BBC series called Monarch of the Glen.
And – hold your breath –
Glee.
Yes, Glee. The show I swore off as a protest against their Madonna-as-role-model-for-young-women episode in the first season. To be honest, the rest of the series was better than I expected. Even though I still have issues with many of the values it promotes.
But wait.
This post is about the blog transfer, not about the TV shows that have made the transfer tolerable. So here’s the scoop: The last of the posts should be moved to the WordPress site by tonight. After that, all that remains are choosing the SEO phrases so search engines will find the blog, and building a few other pages. Once everything is ready to go, the switch will be announced on this blog and Ray will make the switch. Which we’re praying will go off without a hitch.
Wishful thinking, perhaps.
So to be on the safe side, I’m checking the latest Parenthood, Monarch of the Glen, West Wing, and Glee DVDS from the library. Because my web tech issues will pale compared to those of the Bravermans, the laird of the estate, President Martin Sheen, and the glee club nerds.
I call it WordPress de-stress.
Ahhh.
