House

I have mixed feelings about the TV show “House”.

On the one hand, it’s got Hugh Laurie. I love him. And it’s got some decent writing and some ok characters. The main character of House is fun to watch. But there’s this problem. There is essentially only one episode. It just repeats, with slight variations. The episode goes like this:

[opening credits]

Our scene opens on an attractive, healthy-looking person, doing some activity. Suddenly, they collapse to the ground, probably coughing up blood. People around are shocked, because the person looked so attractive and healthy.

Next we see the person in a hospital bed, now looking all sickly. The House team poke at the patient briefly and then retire to the clubhouse.

In the clubhouse, they do a differential, guessing at different causes. House points out why each guess is wrong. They pick the most likely guess and go with that, even though House says it is wrong. But he thinks it’s better to give the wrong treatment than nothing at all, since the wrong treatment, if it doesn’t kill the patient, will narrow down what is wrong.

The patient gets worse (it may be preceded by a brief moment of seeming to get better).

They decide they need an MRI of the patient to see what’s going on inside them. The patient is nervous, but they assure the patient that the MRI is perfectly safe. As soon as the MRI starts, something horrible happens to the patient, probably a seizure and/or coughing up more blood.

The house team is stumped.

One of the team members comes up with a pretty good theory, and this time, House thinks it’s plausible, and they go ahead and try it.

The patient seems to get better, but then gets worse.

House has a flash of insight, and realizes that it’s some pre-existing condition or obscure environmental factor, and just in time, swaps out the treatment for the correct one. Probably there is some kind of ethical dilemma here, where House does something seemingly cold or unethical, but ends up saving the patient, so no one faults him for it.

The patient is saved. Yay!

During the episode there is also a subplot, centering around a personal conflict between House and one of the other characters. House is stubborn and inflexible, but in the end some kind of compromise is reached.

[end credits]

I mean, it’s not a terrible episode, but the same plot over and over and over… for god’s sake, let’s get some variety in there!

The Name Game

Finally got around to something I’ve been putting off for a while… namely, getting a new Social Security Card with my updated name, which will allow me to get an updated Driver’s License.

Which times nicely, since my driver’s license is up for renewal next month. And I’ll probably need up-to-date ID to vote, and I definitely want to do that. Go, Obama!

Reminds me, the debate is tonight… maybe I’ll watch it in HD, so I can see if McCain got his money’s worth.

Oh, and on another unrelated note, I watched the new Knight Rider TV show, and it sets a new high-water-mark for awfulness. Horrible acting, unlikable characters, pointless special effects (the car uses an elaborate transformation to change into… a basically identical car), bad scripts, and just general badness. It’s not even enjoyably bad, which if you’re being generous you could say they were going for, it’s just bad bad.

The cord is cut!

Got my new ATSC Tuner last night, it’s a Samsung DTBH260F. It works well, I can now get digital TV in my room. I got it because it has a variety of outputs, including HDMI.

I have a couple complaints about it:

  • It doesn’t let you put your own labels on channels, I would much rather see “NBC” than “WZDLMHD” or whatever. Not having labels makes it very hard to tell what’s what when flipping through channels.
  • Although the manual seems to say it does, it doesn’t switch aspect settings automatically. I have a 16:9 screen, I would expect if the content was 4:3, it would switch to “pillar” mode (black bars on the left and right) automatically, which is what the manual seems to say, but I have to do it manually.

Returned the cable boxes and cable cards to Charter this morning.
I couldn’t find the component cables, but they didn’t need them back.
They are supposed to shut off the cable today, then we’re rid of them.

Yay!