Heat Wave

Temperatures cracked 90 here in the Valley, and most of the way up the peninsula. This being California, it was the proverbial dry heat, but it was still pretty nasty. Strangely, it didn't feel as nasty as some of our heat waves last year, but I'm pretty sure it was as bad as all but the worst of them (which I dimly recall also threw in some humidity).

My apartment is amazingly well insulated, and I discovered that it stayed cooler if I closed most or all of the windows. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, since the cats, myself, and the few lights I turned on are all heat sources, but it helped. Unfortunately, that also meant that once it cooled off in the evening (and the temperature seemingly dropped about 15 degrees as soon as the sun went below the top of the hills in the west) it takes a couple of hours for the place to cool off. Well, can't have everything, I guess.

The cats have been weathering it, well, like cats: Lying on cool surfaces, increasing their surface area. I brushed them both; Newton didn't really need it, but I brushed two handfuls of hair out of Jefferson. I'm sure he's happier now.

The weather report says the heat should break tomorrow, and by Thursday everything will be back to our usual highs of 75 or so. Whew!

On Saturday to beat the heat I went up to San Francisco. Well, okay, I also had some things I wanted to do up there. But SF was about 15 degrees cooler than the valley, which was very pleasant.

One thing I did was go to Borderlands Books, a neat SF store up there. I actually got off the highway and immediately found a parking space, and had only a one-block walk to the bookstore. Either I had really good karma, I thought, or something terrible was going to happen to me later in the day! (It turns out it was good karma, it seems.) I picked up a copy of Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, which Alexandria Digital Literature has been urging me to read for a while, but which is very difficult to find. Also got Steven Gould's Jumper in hardcover, and - at another book store - chanced upon a single-volume hardcover (not a book club edition) of Gene Wolfe's four Book of the New Sun volumes; I haven't yet read them, but hope to someday, and this seems like the ideal volume.

I ran my other errands, and then headed out, going down the coast along Route 1, which was lovely and very cool. Stopped and bought some food at a veggie stand in Half Moon Bay, and headed home to the brutal heat once more.

Had dinner with Trish and gave her the keys to my apartment since she'll be watching my cats for me during my upcoming vacation.

Today I was torn between several different things to do, including running errands, cleaning, and gaming at Subrata's. I ended up running the errands (bought some clothes I needed, for instance; even found some good ones cheap!) and doing some of the cleaning, but I spent most of the afternoon having a lengthy lunch with John at Borrone. We haven't seen each other for much time in a while, and he had some time before he had to pick up his SO at the airport, so we had a nice lunch. We need to get together more often; I love hanging around with him.

It turns out that John started watching The West Wing as a result of a couple of episodes being on a tape I'd loaned him for some other purpose, and he has really gotten into it. He even said that he thinks its first season might be the best first season of any TV series he's ever seen; now that's an endorsement!

Well, this motivated me to come home and watch the last two episodes of the season of both The West Wing and Sports Night.

The West Wing is so impressive, I think, because it feels so fully-realized in its first season: It has a solid cast of eight regular characters in the opening credits, and a nearly-as-well-formed cast of a dozen or more supporting characters: There are at least four regular secretaries (Josh's banter with his secretary Donna is often hilarious), the President's wife and daughter, the Vice President, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the daughter's Secret Service guard, Sam's call girl friend Lori, the reporter Danny, and various others who turn up from time to time. It has focus and direction, it seems amazingly well-researched, and the scripts are by turns hilarious and moving. It's really everything you could ask for in a show.

The last episode of the season started with a tense situation, then cuts away at the last moment and comes back after the opening credits with the words "24 hours earlier". Bastards! We see how everything unfolds up until the closing moment, and are then left with a huge cliffhanger. It's perhaps a little bit over-the-top, but I have enough faith in this show that they'll deal with it credibly next season. Can't wait!

Sports Night, like The West Wing, was created by Aaron Sorkin. It's a fine counterpoint, since the latter show is an hour-long drama with depth and complexity and serious matters, while Sports Night is a half-hour, mostly light show with great acting which is driven by its extremely clever dialogue. It's about the production of a fictional nightly sports show on a cable TV network which is in the format of (and competes with) ESPN's SportsCenter. Where The West Wing is majestic and meaningful, Sports Night is impish and playful. It's a comedy without a laugh track. And yet it can still be quite moving.

Sadly, these last two episodes were likely the last ones of the two-season series, which has not done well in the ratings. (There's a rumor that HBO might pick it up, and an even airier rumor that NBC might. We'll see.) These last two episodes dragged at times, with a feeling of foreboding hanging over them, but the final scene of the last episode made it all worthwhile.

If you don't mind my spoiling it for you, I want to discuss the last scene in detail. If you do mind, skip down to the next section...

The final sequence is a perfect example of great television, with dialogue, music, acting, and direction melding perfectly to create the perfect arc for the season (and perhaps the series) to head out on. Sports Night's parent station has been bought by a company whose intentions for the cable network are unclear; everyone assumes they'll likely ax the network and collect the technological pieces (e.g., the cable hardware in New York). As a result, everyone is depressed and contemplating what they'll do after the show ends. Just as she's announcing this to everyone, the program manager, Dana (Felicity Huffman) realizes that a stranger she's met in a bar is the owner of the company who's bought them. Rushing out to meet him while the night's show begins, she learns that he plans to keep the network and the show.

As he put it, "It's a good show, Dana. Anyone who can't make money on Sports Night should get out of the money-making business." Ow! A cutting blow to ABC, whom the show's producers probably feel a little miffed at for not giving it more of a chance (it's not clear why the show hasn't succeeded, but ABC has been rough in not re-running episodes during its regular time slot in the off-season).

Cut to the studio: Show anchors Casey (Peter Krause) and Dan (Josh Charles) are going to a commercial during a lackluster broadcast. Jeremy (Joshua Malina) tries to get people in the control room chattering, but everyone's too depressed.

Dana runs in. "I'm back."

"What's going on?" says Natalie (Sabrina Lloyd), Jeremy's ex-girlfriend, he having broken up with her recently.

"Give me the headset," says Dana, pulling the piece over her head. She leans forward, smiling slightly, and says, "Dan... Casey..."

Cut to Casey. Cue the show's wonderful funky guitar music. Dan is staring at the window to the control room, and has a faint smile on his face. The camera circles around the table, panning past Dan, who smiles and sits up straighter. It circles around behind the pair as one of the technicians cues the return of the show from commercial, as a triumphant guitar strain comes in over the rhythm: "In three, two..."

Dan says, "Well, it looks like we're stuck with each other for a while." He looks at Casey. "Let's go to the American League."

Pause. Casey smiles at the Camera. "Yes, we are." Beat. "Going to the American League." Dan grins.

In the control room, the technicians are smiling and doing their jobs, exchanging information and timing data. Jeremy and Natalie - who earlier in the episode apparently renewed their relationship - exchange meaningful looks; Natalie's could just melt you. Producer Isaac Jaffe (Robert Guillaume) puts his hand on Dana's shoulder; she puts hers over it, kisses his hand, and says, "Here we go."

Back in the control room, the camera focuses on the "CSC" logo of the cable network on the front of the desk. Casey continues, "...they welcomed the Tigers into the house that Ruth built this evening."

"Excuse me Casey," Dan says as the camera pans upwards, "Ruth didn't build the house this evening, did he?"

Pause. "No," Casey grins, "and thank you for pointing out my every mistake - no matter how small - for lo these many years."

"What are friends for?"

"To annoy the hell out of you?"

"Exactly." The camera spirals up into the rafters as Dan continues, "Elsewhere in the AL East, the Blue Jays hosted Baltimore in the Skydome this evening, while the Red Sox..."

Guitar and drums crash to a stop, and fade to black with the words "Sports Night" appearing on the screen.

Why yes, I have watched it about ten times in the last two days. Why do you ask?

Why can't all television be this good?

One other thing I did this weekend: I wrote server-side Perl scripts to handle my Webloggy sidebar over there on the left. Beyond making it hopefully easier to maintain, it also allows the easy creation of a page with all entries for the current year, which you can also get to by clicking on the "Links du Jour" header in the sidebar. It was fun to write.