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Why didn’t he get up and elbow him back?

And why is his teammate just asking the ref for a foul, as if that is what matters?  Why didn’t he at least push mcgrady back?  And if you really just get a foul for elbowing someone in the chest, he should throw a punch.  I can’t stand this instance of Asian passivity.

Really what I want to do is to open all the windows in my parents Brooklyn apartment and to blast this as loud as possible.

First, thank goodness that this series exists.  When I was in elementary school I would get annoyed because Charlie Rose would be on right before Batman, but now, there are few things better on television.

What I take some issue with in this episode is their easy dismissal of the stigma that depression has today.  Even with the understanding that depression is clinical, that there are literal problems in the circuitry of the brain that cause depression, there must be some acknowledgement of why there is a stigma.  Personally I think the stigma has something to do with how successful one is whether it be in their profession, their romantic life, or their social life.  It’s true that highly successful people are still susceptible to depression, but it seems far more likely that the loner, the recluse, the single drop-out living in his parents’ basement, is suffering from depression.  Even within the episode itself, all the people at the table acknowledge that “character counts.”  What I haven’t articulated well is that I believe there is still a kind of tension between what is literal and what is psychological, that having fewer friends or an unsuccessful career probably make one far more likely to be clinically depressed, and these are things that do carry a stigma with them.  

As is obvious, I am not the best at expressing my thoughts.  It’s all a work in progress.

I turned on the TV and this episode of “Reba” was playing on ABC Family.  What I find a little strange about this channel that if it sells itself as a “family” channel, I’m confused why every show is about sex, sex, and marriage after high school.  Of course, this is strange from my personal perspective, but maybe this is precisely what “family” means for many people.  To be overly-simplistic, maybe every show is really about sex, sex, and marriage.  Even when the 700 club or the Ed Young show comes on, its not unlikely that its about sex, dating, marriage, divorce, cheating, temptation (read porn).  

There were some things that I appreciated about this show.  First, I was thinking about the style of this kind of show (the laughtrack, the jokes that aren’t funny, the exaggerated personalities, the impossible situations, bad acting, etc.).   I wonder whether all of these stylistic qualities could be adopted for a show that was better, or, more serious.  It would be very similar, say, the same kind of living room set, the same glossy lighting, the same use of the laughtrack, but the themes would be different.  

Secondly, in the above clip at around 1:50, reba (the redhead) confronts the woman who her ex-husband married (the blonde).  It was an interesting mixture of this over-the-top style and a more serious topic (the hurt that reba feels about the situation).  I found these seconds interesting because there is a tension between the serious aspect of the scenario and the jokey-funny-stylistic part.  At first, the blonde plays into her character by thinking that reba wants to talk about menopause.  Second, both of them are interrupted by a parade of children led by a symbol-banging clown.  Sure, the episode kind of ends with a cheesy ending, but as an outsider, I found this scene interesting, almost as if it were both hyper aware and hyper unaware of its foolishness.  What I liked is that these serious topics aren’t dealt with seriously, or, they aren’t really dealt with at all.  I recognize that this is probably not deliberate, that I am reading too much into it, but just because this scenario may not be deliberate doesn’t mean that the scene doesn’t have interesting parts.  

An interesting clip from 1990.  At around 9:50 the White Nationalist says that he is amazed people in New York actually believe in racial equality, that they speak about equality “with a straight face.”  I recently happened to watch an episode of “Celebrity Ghost Stories” on some random cable tv channel, and came away wondering something similar, that is, how there must be people in America today that watch this show and actually believe it.  (As a note, “Celebrity Ghost Stories” is very poorly produced, and the ghost stories rely on the cheapest and most predictable visuals combined with voice overs by B-rate celebrity have-beens.)  To me, the idea that something can be so obvious to me while the opposite so obvious to another is a little troubling.  I mean, how do you reconcile this?  Do you try to be impartial or “fair” by saying something like, “Well, there are two opinions, and because I know that I am partial I should recognize that maybe the opposing opinion has just as much of a chance of being correct?”  But this seems silly, because even if there are two opinions, it does not then mean that both have an equal likelihood of being true.  For example, if two people are arguing about the sum of 1 and 1, the person who argues that the sum is 2 is correct and the person arguing otherwise is definitively wrong.  And if this is the more logical approach, by what criteria can you measure success of whether or not Jews are controlling the government or whether ghosts really are haunting this musician that I’ve never even heard of?