I don’t watch reality television. Don’t look at me that way–Dancing with the Stars is not reality TV, it’s a talent contest. And it doesn’t start till Monday.

Tonight when the TV came on, before I could get it flipped to my show, I saw about five minutes of the abomination that apparently is Wife Swap. I knew the show existed; I’d seen the promos. But this was unbelievable. A man and woman having a huge fight in front of the man’s children–the woman was the swap-in–while the children curled up miserably in the corners of the couches. Apparently the fight was over school–the woman was insisting that she homeschool them, the way she apparently does with her own children–and the man was protesting that she was “not going to mess with their futures.”

Look, I’m no enemy to homeschooling. I’d lean more towards it myself if I thought I had the patience and attention span. Her preferences are not the issue here. But a strange woman comes in to live as mother to your children and starts insisting on breaking up the kids’ settled routine and the school life they’re already living AND fights it out in a screaming match with their father? I’m sorry, but fuck that. Yeah, that’s what I said. Wouldn’t those kids’ mom flip if she saw what was going on back at the house? Their dad certainly was. The only valid point the woman had was this: “Why did you sign up?” One surmises that it’s part of the “game” to let the swap-in set some rules. But at the expense of the children’s peaceful home? They likely understand it’s for television, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to leave a mark.

Sure, I’ll say it again: Fuck that. Why would anybody sign up? You simply couldn’t pay me enough to turn my child over to somebody else, who had the goal of turning his life upside-down for the cameras, for a week or however long it is. Not even for a day. And judging by the houses they were in, they weren’t too much in need of whatever ABC is paying them. (Although, for all I know, the houses could’ve been provided by the show. Whatever.) So whether it’s greed or exposure that’s motivating them, any adult going on that show deserves whatever emotional hangover they get–but it looks to me like their kids are paying the price. Assholes.

FWIW: In the other house, with the homeschooled kids and the mother of the previous children, she was trying to get them to go to school. Mildly. Without raising her voice either to them or to the dad (although to be fair, the dad was the one doing most of the shouting in the other scenario, but it looked like he had plenty good reason). The dad was about to tell her he wasn’t going to make the children go back to school. In a measured tone of voice. Fine. Meanwhile, back in the first house, the swap-in is equating the importance of what she wants in this faux, for-camera situation with what the kids need and what their dad says they’ll have. Asshole!

Cross-posted at Electric Venom.

Xrlq uses ICDSoft for hosting, and after my unfortunate experience with DreamHost, so do I. They had me set up almost instantaneously, their rate is good ($6.00/month for 1000MB and 20GB of transfer, which is ample for me. Xrlq, who occasionally gets linked by Instapundit and other such bloggy luminaries, upgraded to the $10.00/month plan for the extra bandwidth), and their control panel is crisp and easy to manage.

But just as tech support was DreamHost’s downfall with me, so ICDSoft’s major outstanding feature is their unbelievably fast, comprehensive, and ultra-professional tech support. I could not be more impressed with this department. They guarantee a) 24/7 email support and b) one-hour response time, and I can unequivocally say they deliver on both promises. I’ve dealt with them on at least three different occasions: on trying to set up my blog email address, on experiencing an unexplained inability to reach my site (probably just a connectivity blip from my end, since it loaded within the following five minutes), and during a system downtime on their end (the only one I’ve experienced in six months of service). In reverse order, a few anecdotes about these experiences.

The Downtime. The dread of any webhosting customer who is online as much as I am, downtime spells loss of clients and generalized doom to a webhost. On DreamHost’s status blog during a downtime, all was chaos. The DH team, in an effort to be open and friendly, would detail their maneuvers to cope with the outage … thus exposing them to the wrath of their commenting customers when their efforts were unsucessful. I know that the people staffing IT companies are only human and that they use trial and error as much as the next person, but laying it all out like that for us to read only frustrates the client and makes the company look unprofessional. ICDSoft, by stark contrast, maintained a page concisely stating the big-picture causes of the outage, the various groups who were working on the problem, and the general means they were using to solve the outage, as well as a generous estimate of the time involved that did not get our hopes up. They had us back up and running under the estimated time. Support that knows how to give clients sufficient information about a problem without over-extending themselves with feel-good estimates they can’t keep? Check.

The Connectivity Blip. As a naive user six months or so ago, I panicked briefly when I couldn’t reach my site (or Xrlq’s, on the same host) and shot off an email before sufficiently troubleshooting my own internet connection. I got an immediate response to the effect of 1) we can load your site just fine, 2) the server your site runs on is in the green, 3) nevertheless we are concerned about your problem, so would you please run the following diagnostic steps, laid out in great detail, and tell us the result? By the time I got this response, in about five minutes, I had already been able to reconnect to my site. I sheepishly told them as much and got a courteous reply asking me not to hesitate to contact them any time I had a problem. Support that doesn’t make me feel like an idiot even when I contact them prematurely? Check.

The Email Problem. This was a genuine problem that required a tech-support solution, but here’s the kicker: It wasn’t their problem. In transferring from DH to ICDSoft, they each use the same webmail utility, and I used the same username and password at both. My Microsoft Outlook Express would attempt to get the email but fail, even though I could log into the webmail utility. I went many rounds with their tech support, me describing the error messages in detail and them offering various diagnostic tools, before they had me empty out a little cache Microsoft apparently keeps of its own nameserver records. Thus, even though my site had been switched to ICDSoft, my local Microsoft program was hunting for my email at the former DreamHost server. ICDSoft tech support stuck with me until they ferreted out the problem, even though it had nothing to do with any hardware or software of theirs. Support that will get to the bottom of whatever problem is preventing my computer from talking to theirs, even if it’s not their problem? Check.

I love ICDSoft and will keep my blog here. I will be adding an ICDSoft banner/link to my sidebar–if you or anybody you know is looking for a webhost for their blog or other kind of site, it’d be great if they could go through the banner here. I’d get a commission on any webhosting purchase that goes through my banner. I’ll also be submitting this review of their service to ICDSoft–they occasionally pay for selected reviews. But though I may benefit financially from having written this, the fact that I keep my blog here should speak for itself–I ran from DreamHost, and I wouldn’t have hesitated to run from my second choice if they were to disappoint. Instead, they excel. I’d recommend ICDSoft to anybody who wants to start a hosted blog.

Or, A Tale of Two Hosting Providers.

When I decided to start blogging, I looked at the hosts recommended by WordPress.org and chose DreamHost for 1) its intuitive and accessible control panel, 2) its great value for the price (read: huge disk space allotment, which sucked me in even though I couldn’t use that much space by blogging in a hundred years), 3) its hearty recommendation by several tech-minded people of my acquaintance.

“I Heart My Webhost” does not mean DreamHost. My red flags were hoisted early on by their service department, which promised answers in 24 hours but sometimes sent an auto-reply within the 24 hours and real-person answers later, and which misled me, though they say unintentionally, about the status of a domain name I was trying to reserve. Do you know how the domain-name game is played? It’s fairly cut-throat. You wait for a name to be freed from its current owner, and then you ask a registration company to get it for you. Meanwhile, several big companies, notably Network Solutions or Enom, will be snatching up any convenient one-word domain names that fall vacant and a bunch more, too, and slapping advertisements on them to see what they can get. DreamHost’s registration process couldn’t compete with these biggies and failed to get my domain. Fortunately, these companies that snap up any and all names frequently release them after a few days if they’re not making money on the adverts, so that they don’t have to pay the registration fees. I tried again. My request got stuck in DreamHost’s process, and I began to fear another company would snatch it up–again. I emailed DreamHost to ask whether anybody else could get it while they were processing it, and they assured me no, no. Meanwhile a tech friend of mine was watching the situation, unbeknownst to me, and when he saw that the domain still wasn’t registered, he registered it himself using a small registration company that pulled in the name in ten minutes while DreamHost was still twiddling its electronic thumbs.

I uneasily stayed on, but soon a spate of downtime soured me even further on the “dreamy” company. The last straw came on 9/11, when I had an important post up, part of the 2,996 project, and the site was up and down. I certainly wasn’t the only customer to endure their spotty performance; their status blog, on which they unwisely allowed comments, showed scores of understandably screechy, dissatisfied customers. I started shopping around, before my refund period was up.

Xrlq directed me to ICDSoft.

DreamHost has since been working to get its act together, and I know at least one tech guy, Allen my tech guardian, in fact, who performed the switch when I moved from DreamHost, who went with them later on. Hope they’ve got the performance to back up the talk nowadays.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!

Best Word Use of the Week: Rectitude.

If there’s any industry that makes your scam-hackles rise, it’s the car-repair world, but these guys impressed me from the start with Conspicuous Rectitude. Maybe it’s a Minnesota thing. It’s certainly an American thing: six months after a repair job, they agreed without hesitation to revisit the work, because Mister Customer Almighty’s precious quarterpanel was 3/8” out of alignment.

I need car guys like his, but that’s beside the current point: Lileks has a precision of expression that is tough to stop short of the event horizon that sucks you into the Pretentious Zone, but he does it day after day. You’d think it’d be easier to do in a column limited to 300 words, but the Bleat is better. Slice-of-life paragraphs incisively expressed, political opinions that lazily skewer the pomposity of the day without any venom or dirty pool, and now and then he pulls out a Jane Austen word like “rectitude.” Add to all that, he apparently manages to write like this while having stayed at home with his daughter while she was preschool-aged and now continuing to be her main source of company, authority, and homework help during the school week.

If I could write one-tenth as well as that, I’d write instead of edit for a living, but I like to think the ability to size him up is what makes me a pretty good editor. I’ll take what I can get. And keep reading, avidly.

I’m a fan of Aaron Sorkin. I loved Sports Night from the very beginning, and though it took me a bit longer to warm up to The West Wing, warm up I did. They were witty, intelligent, occasionally gripping shows, basically nothing somebody else hasn’t said long ago somewhere else, so I won’t rehash them here. I quit watching WW shortly after Sorkin’s exit; I didn’t want to stop, but I just didn’t enjoy it any more. I’ve never been an ER girl, and ER in the White House is exactly what it became.

With all that, I expected to enjoy, if not immediately fall for, Studio 60. Matthew Perry, for pete’s sake! Always one of my to-die-fors from Friends, the idea of Matthew Perry speaking Sorkin lines had to be a sure-fire. Bradley Whitford, fresh off the stale WW and, hopefully, just fresh.

Alas. Fresh seems to be the last thing Sorkin’s capable of producing right now. Old inside jokes and self-parodies, knee-jerk liberal platitudes and Bush/Christian/conservative bashing are Studio 60’s mainstay so far. Surprisingly, it’s not even who/what he’s bashing that I mind. It’s that it’s so done. There is no longer anything new, brave, smart, clever, or stylish about whinging (no, I don’t mean “whining,” I mean “whinging,” pronounced to rhyme with “binging,” see also Firefly) about Republicans, calling Christians stupid, ignorant, naive, and extreme, or tipping the wink to your old shows, to the amusement of those shows’ fans and nobody else. And new, brave, smart, clever, and stylish used to be Sorkin’s hallmark. There were a few hat-tips from West Wing to Sports Night, but the latter was on only two seasons and had few viewers, so those inside nods were gracious and felt good to us diehard fans who hated to see SN go. But WW was on so long that you’d have to either have no TV or have no workplace water cooler … or no blogs, a category Sorkin recently added to his shit list, judging by a rant Perry gave in episode two … not to see the copying. And memo to Thomas Schlamme: Sports Night lines delivered under West Wing lighting are not working. I-knew-it-when, so when the Studio 60 character Harriet Hayes marches in to unleash the fury of the woman scorned on Perry’s Matthew with a speech straight out of Sports Night, I’m hearing Felicity Huffman but watching Allison Janney, who tonight will be played by Sarah Paulson. It’s disturbing.

The worst part about Sorkin’s kneejerking is that it’s contagious. When he spends two or three episodes nonstop bitching about stupid Christians (and guess what, I know there are plenty out there. Plenty of stupid people of all philosophic persuasions out there, folks) and conservatives in general, he makes me think “bullshit” when he trots out a story about Grease and The Crucible at a Missouri high school—the latter having been cancelled “because it portrays Christians in a bad light” after uptight Christians complained about the former. But it’s a true story, of course, because as Perry’s character, again, said, when slurring Liberty University in Virginia (founder Jerry Falwell being one of Sorkin’s true hates, from SN right on up), “I don’t want to get anything wrong.”

Well, Sorkin, you’ve got it wrong. Quit your bitching. It’s annoying. It’s far more self-righteous and whiny than it ever was in the faux White House, which is saying something, since the pontificating found a far more appropriate venue on Pennsylvania Avenue than it ever will on the Sunset Strip. Your players are working hard for you. I was worried about Perry, who seemed deathly nervous in episode one and whom Sorkin wasn’t helping out by alternately writing him as a total screw-up one minute and the grown-up in the creative partnership with Whitford’s character the next, but he’s settling down and might make a fine grown-up nonChandler. Whitford I never worry about. Paulson is sweet and totally entertaining–her Holly Hunter impression is ear-poppingly accurate–and the rest of the cast, notably D.L. Hughley, are working hard to make it look easy, and it’s effective. Amanda Peet is keeping it low-key; she’s a wait-and-see for an emotional moment for her character, but the one who’s impressing me the most is Steven Weber. He’s a great foil for Peet’s character, and who knew he could do that if, like me, you’d only seen him being goofy on Wings?

I will say there is one aspect in which I would like to see Studio 60 emulate The West Wing a little more: Timothy Busfield, you are sweet and charming. Please regrow your beard. Thank you.

The new Pirates of the Caribbean is a waste. And that is such a shame.

I simply cannot understand how some screenwriters can write awesome first movies and then turn out the worst sequels imaginable. To be fair, there are other writers credited for both Zorro movies and for the story of the first Pirates, but Chest is apparently, lamentably, all their own.

I don’t even have the heart to rev up a full review. Suffice to say that in the first film, Johnny Depp ruled; in this he was a victimized afterthought going through the motions. In the first, the characters’ motivations were made clear and their behaviors compatible with them; in this there were extraneous characters thrown about willy-nilly and supposedly known quantities acting bizarrely contrary to their former natures. The first was sharply sequenced and well paced; this had about five expositions that didn’t give us the information we needed, split the supposed protagonists up into too many parties to reliably keep track of, and spent far too long on meaningless action scenes that weren’t even that enjoyable for their own sake. Interesting side note: the writers evidently love Return of the Jedi not wisely but too well; a few clumsy nods to Lucas & Co. in no way made up for the faults of the scenes they inhabited.

I’m too depressed about the writing to bother scoring off the actors. They just didn’t have enough to work with. When Johnny Depp is phoning it in, you know you have a serious problem. And the worst part of all? **SPOILER** (more…)

Though I’m depressed as hell to find out the Lebanese army isn’t just cowed, but will be actively assisting the Hezbollah jihad, there isn’t much I can do about that, or even say, except that when the “legitimate” Lebanese army fires on the Israelis, we will officially have arrived at WWIII.

So for a little weekend escapism, let’s review two of this year’s romantic dramadies, The Break-Up and The Lake House.

The title of this post and the description “dramadies” are somewhat misleading, since Break-Up isn’t romantic and Lake House isn’t a comedy. The former is a depressing real-life “comedy” starring real-life couple (long may they last) Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston, while the latter is a redemptive escapist romance/fantasy drama starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. As something of a disclaimer, I would see a movie starring Reeves and Bullock as romantic leads if it consisted of them reading the newspaper to each other for two hours … which, let’s face it, is a lot like what they do in Lake House. But their chemistry remains right on throughout; has been since Speed.

I saw these two in back-to-back weeks. Break-Up left my jaw on the floor because–**SPOILER**– (more…)

Late to the party, I know. I watch a lot of TV during the season, some less hot but still watchable shows get recorded and left till the summer, and 24 is a newcomer–this was my first season. And it was awesome. Kiefer Sutherland is fan-frickin’-tastic as Jack Bauer, and although the rest of the show at first had me struggling to suspend disbelief regarding the technical wizardry, timing, and inhuman task management of these people, I soon learned to forget all that and go along for the ride.

But I’m a little surprised that in his detailed summary of the show, Rick Moran apparently made no comment on the 24‘s skate-near-the-edge portrayal of President Logan as a corrupt, oil-motivated, power-mad executive who’d do anything, include endangering American citizens at the hands of terrorists, if it would satisfy his political aims. I flew into a huge rant at the screen when I realized where they were going with this. Isn’t it bad enough that people actually believe these kinds of things are possible in Bush’s world without having a major network TV show stir the pot?

I guess it’s fortunate that the frustrated writers, if they really do believe their own concoction, are left to vent through fiction. I’ll still be watching next season, but it would be nice if their agenda wore a few more clothes.

Warning: Written in emotional aftermath.

Warning x2: Huge **SPOILERS** for Doctor Who S2 below the jump. (more…)