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Katie called to say that her friend Julie got a block of tickets to see Choo Choo Soul at the Radisson Star Theater in Merrillville because she’s interning at Radio Disney in Chicago.  She had about forty tickets to give away and asked if we could help her distribute them.  The boys liked Choo Choo Soul on the Disney Channel, so we decided to go.  We had previously gone to see the Imagination Movers, another Playhouse Disney property, and we enjoyed it very much.

The concert, if you could call it that, was about a week away.  Chrissy called around to see if others would like tickets too.  Since we had free tickets, several of Chrissy’s friends brought their young children to see the show with us.  In all, we used about thirty-two tickets and filled up three rows at the theater.  We picked up the Choo Choo Soul CD at Borders so that we would know all of the songs ahead of time.

The show wasn’t terrible, but I kind of expected more from Disney.  The television show centers around Genevieve, the shapely conductor on a cartoon train, and DC, who is the engineer.  The show has a train that kind of grooves its way along the track to different locales while Genevieve sings about numbers or letters or colors and DC drives the train.  The stage show was completely different.

The biggest difference was that there was no Choo Choo.  We got to see Genevieve in her conductor outfit.  DC was there as well, and he had a turntable on a podium, the front covered by a Choo Choo Soul banner.  I was wondering what he was going to do, since he had no train to drive on the stage.  He was doing something like performance art that you would see in a public park, with some breakdancing, beat boxing, and doing the robot, complete with voice vocoder.  But no Choo Choo.  As it was, I had seen similar shows on Hollywood Boulevard.  You toss quarters at people doing this type of thing in Grant Park.

Considering that the show is about the Choo Choo, I would have expected to see the train there.  But there were only two people on the stage against a black backdrop.  The Imagination Movers concert had a large projection screen against the back wall where are the Warehouse Mouse made a virtual appearance.  I would have expected to see the same thing with the Choo Choo at the very least.  The train could have made an appearance that way, if not in a real physical way.

The boys loved it.  Aiden was dancing in the aisles along with all the other kids that came along with our group.  The performers actually encouraged this from the stage.  Katie and Felice had come with us, so there was no shortage of people to hold onto Gavin and Aiden when they got tired.  The boys seemed to have a good time and were excited to see Genevieve and DC.  Overall, we were happy that we got to take our kids to the show, but we would have been upset if we had paid for it.  We saw that the tickets were being sold for $20-$30 each online, so we were happy that we saw it for free.

I was watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special with my son Aiden last week, and I can’t help but feel that I was missing something.  I used to watch it every season as a kid, but I hadn’t seen it in the last fifteen or so years.  Now that I have kids of my own (and a copy of the movie on DVD), I thought that I would start up the tradition again.

But had something changed since I was younger?  The whole thing seemed to be about the commercialism of the holiday.  Charlie Brown complains about his dog who’s only in it for the money, and his sister who’s only in it for the gifts and the cash (despite not being old enough to write her own Christmas list), and the implication that you can’t have a good Christmas without a gaudy aluminum tree.

I wondered if the Christmas marketing blitz (and subsequent merchandising) started the day after Halloween in 1957 like it does now.  A lot of things were different back when the show first aired.  Maybe I was just too old to get it now?  Aiden liked it, however, and he helped me to remember what I had loved most about the show: Snoopy.

Snoopy, snagging Linus’s blanket on the skating pond and sending Charlie Brown into a tree.  Snoopy, decorating his house with tons of lights and stuff.  Snoopy, dancing at the play with everyone else while they all ignore Charlie Brown’s direction.  Snoopy, laughing at Charlie Brown’s ridiculous tree.  Yes, I still love Snoopy to this day.

Although I’m older now and have a firmer grasp of the anti-capitalist agenda of the show, I still find myself drawn in.  Railing against a cash-driven society is just a means to close with a reminder of the reason for the season.  And that’s a lesson that I’ll gladly pass on to my boys.  So I’ll probably watch Charlie Brown Christmas every year from now on, or at least until my youngest son goes off to college.

Chrissy and I watch new episodes of “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” on television every Monday. These people have eight kids, so it’s fun to watch them suffer through the same problems that regular parents have (except eight times over, all at once). Kate manages this herculean task by implementing highly effective organization and planning skills. Chrissy, being an organizational maniac on crack, often emulates Kate’s parenting efforts.  This is how we got a “Naughty Spot”, which is what Super Nanny would have called their “Time Out Spot“.

Ask not for whom the Naughty Spot tolls; it tolls for thee.

To keep their six toddlers in line, Jon and Kate put them in “time-out” when they act up.  Each child has their own Spot on which they have to sit during time-outs.  Chrissy decided that she had to have one.  We actually ordered two, in anticipation of wearing one out (or just having one on hand for Gavin when he’s old enough to require one). They arrived in the mail about a month ago, but have remained unused.  Generally, Aiden is a very good boy, so we ended up with a circular, decorative rug in the corner of our dining room.

Today, Aiden was sent to the Naughty Spot for the first time. He has picked up hitting people (we think from the older kids at Gymboree), but now concludes with nasty scratches from talon-like nails.  Neither of which makes Chrissy very happy.  Aiden had to spend two minutes in time-out on the Naughty Spot.  He loved it.  Big smiles.  It’s his new favorite place now.  At least he didn’t hit anyone afterward.  We hope that, eventually, he’ll equate the Naughty Spot with punishment.

There was a recent episode of Doctor Who where he, Martha and Donna ended up on an uninhabitable world with a group of humans battling a group of fish people (called the Hath) in an underground city.  The Doctor gets his hand stuck in a gene sampler and ends up with a daughter or something.  The really interesting part, for me, was that both sides of the subterranean conflict, both human and Hath, were fighting to possess a mythic weapon of unimaginable power.  The Doctor discovers that it is actually a device that terraforms planets, or takes dead planets and makes them habitable.  That sounds a lot like Project Genesis to me.

So my first thought is: how can we tie in the Star Trek universe with the Doctor Who universe so that there are Klingons searching here for the Genesis Device? Wouldn’t it be cool if Birds of Prey showed up above the planet, and we end up with middle-age Kirk joining up with Doctor Who to keep their quarry out of the wrong hands (all of them). I can just see Christopher Lloyd saying: “So, Doctor Who, you won’t give me the Genesis Device?” Zap! Jenny gets the Klingon disruptor and that’s it for her recurring character.  Kirk howls, “You killed my son!” The Doctor cries, “You killed my daughter!” Great stuff. Unfortunately, that’s about as far as my little fanboy brain-wanderings went. Neat idea though.

I’ve been watching this anime called “Death Note” for a while now, and I really like it. It’s about this college student, Light Yagami, who suddenly finds a way to kill people only by writing their names in a notebook. He’s a certified genius, so his master plan is to use the notebook to wipe out all criminals, thus creating a Utopia in Japan, with himself as the ruler. The notebook is actually a Death Note, which are normally carried by “Gods of Death” in the spirit-world. Once Light activates the Death Note, he inherits himself a God of Death, “Ryuk”, who walks him through the myriad rules associated with the Death Note. The plot actually gets pretty deep, and there are lots of twists and turns along the way.

What I didn’t know is that there was a live-action Death Note movie made in Japan in 2006. This would seem like the kind of thing that would go straight to video here in the States, but it turns out that it is making a limited run at select theaters. I watched the movie trailer online and it looks like they might be able to pull it off. I believe that this one will be a set-up for “Death Note 2″, giving this one a cliffhanger ending, but I’m still interested to see how closely the movie follows the anime. Luckily, the limited run is in English, and it sounds like the voice actors from the American version of the TV show did the dubbing. It will be at the Showplace 12 in Schererville on Tuesday and Wednesday only, so I think that I’ll be going.

I don’t think that I watch all that much television, but I keep seeing this commercial pop up that really bugs me. It’s a commercial for “J.G. Wentworth” where all these people stick their heads out of their respective windows and shout, “It’s my money and I want it now!” It’s annoying and repetitive. Then this old guy says that if you get regular annuity payments, they’ll be happy to exchange that into one lump sum for you. Why in the hell would you want to do that? The prospect of “instant cash” may seem like a good thing, but you would be shooting yourself in the foot if you did that.

I might be assuming that all people inherently know things that I take for granted, but isn’t it common knowledge that the value of an annuity is greater in the long term than in the short term? For example, let’s say that you win the lottery for a million dollars. You don’t actually have a million dollars. You have $300,000 that, if left in an interest-bearing account, will afford you regular payments that will equal a million dollars over the course of twenty years. If you decide to take the lump sum, you only get the original $300,000. Until the government takes their 25% in taxes and you settle your early withdrawal penalty of 10%.

So JG Wentworth wants to buy your annuity from you in exchange for that $300,000 (minus taxes, fees and their cut). If you do this, you now have about $200,000 to blow. Once you buy all your buddies new cars, you’re out of cash again within the year. “It’s my money and I want to spend it now!” Meanwhile, J.G. Wentworth is slowly cashing in your one million dollars worth of annuity payments, because they’re smart enough to be patient and let the power of compound interest work for them. They’re laughing all the way to the bank with your cash!

I might make an exception here for huge medical emergencies or catastrophic loss. If my house burned down with everything I owned inside it, I might have to cash out that annuity. Or if that lottery win was for a hundred million dollars, since I would settle for the lump sum payment of twenty million (how ridiculously rich do you have to be?). But given the status of things the way they are, I find that commercial offensive. It’s obviously targeting stupid people, playing on their greed and short-sightedness.

Even though the “Stargate: SG1″ series ended last year in its tenth season, the franchise is not yet dead.  MGM is bringing back the cast from Season 10 for two direct-to-video movies.  The first, “The Ark of Truth“, is due out in March of this year, and will show how the Ori are finally defeated.  Early reviews from leaked preview copies say that the pacing is too fast and the ending is lame.  Let’s hope that the editing team has time to clean it up before March. 

The second movie, “Continuum” will be a stand-alone entity.  Hopefully, this will be the finale that Stargate deserves, wrapping up the older storylines and putting a cap on the show.  I’m not sure if we’ll see any of these on the Sci-Fi Channel, but I wouldn’t doubt it.   It would be a fitting close for SG1.  At least we won’t be losing Amanda Tapping for a while, since she’s still making small appearances on “Stargate: Atlantis”.

Lately I’ve been watching “Noein” and “Ergo Proxy” every week, but both series are coming to an end this week. “Noein” is on the Sci-Fi Channel’s “ani-Monday”, which was a fantastic idea for them. Although I don’t care for “Virus Buster Serge”, many of the other shows on ani-Monday have been really good. Proxy is on FuseTV, along with “Tenjho Tenge”. I usually pass on Tenjho as well, since it seems to be made by and for 13-year-old boys.

I wasn’t expecting much from “Noein“, but it grew on me due to its great character development. I’m a sucker for multi-dimensional time-traveling shows. This one gets away from the gratuitous time-travel paradoxes by hopping between alternate realities as well as through time. The series started out a little ambiguously, but it gets much more interesting if you hang in there. Towards the end of the series, I was looking forward to see what would happen next.

“Ergo Proxy” was in my Netflix queue before I saw it on TV. I’ve really enjoyed it, despite the commercials that pitch the show that you’re currently watching — I don’t see the point in having advertisements for the DVD set when you’re already seeing the series for free. Unless you’re really impatient and you just have to see the entire series in one night. Personally, I can never get enough Pino, who may be the best Cohito-infected autonomous robot character ever.

A new series on the Cartoon Network called “Death Note” also looks promising. It’s about a genius high-school student that finds a magic notebook that belongs to a Death God. When you write someone’s name in the notebook, they die within a minute. Unfortunately, there are dozens of rules associated with the Death Note, and at least two must be explained in detail each episode. Once you get past the long-windedness of each episode, it’s easy to appreciate the amount of thought that goes into the writing. The Japanese version had three seasons, so this anime shouldn’t run out after 24 episodes like “Noein” and “Ergo Proxy”.

I also recently watched “End of Evangelion“, the Evangelion movie which was basically episodes 25 and 26 of the “Neon Evangelion” series. I saw the first dozen or so episodes on Cartoon Network, but they stopped showing them before I could record the whole set. I think that I might have to go back and watch the entire series on DVD, since I was a little confused by some of the events in End. It was still pretty good, although I might have to officially rename it to “Shinji’s Annoying Whining Continues Even After Everone Is Dead”. The ending was strange, but I later read that even the director didn’t understand what was happening.

I normally keep an eye out for new anime on the Cartoon Network, so I set this one to record even though I didn’t know what it was and there was no synopsis. It took three weeks for me to get around to watching it, since I got better things to do than watch TV shows with no synopsises. But I’m glad that I finally watched it, because it’s awesome. The show might be an acquired taste for some, but Bruce Campbell fans will enjoy it immensely (more on that later).

“Stiff” was produced by the team that made “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and “12oz Mouse” (a favorite of mine). No word yet on whether this will be a series or not. The premise is about a private detective that cannot die and his psychotic girlfriend. They battle demons and Deadites (for lack of a better term) with kung fu and overt displays of firepower. I’m not sure if you could drag that out into eleven episodes, seeing as though the episode slumped a little in the middle, but it would interesting to see what they come up with.

The pilot is clearly an homage to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series, particularly “Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn“, as evidenced by its comedic bits. I was an Evil Dead fan before “Army of Darkness” came out (I actually saw AoD at the theater with my cousin Eric, also a big Raimi fan), so I really like the style that this short movie takes on. Gallons of blood and green bile, impertinent undead and sarcastic one-liners make “Stiff” the perfect stand-in until the release of “Evil Dead 4“.

Chrissy wanted me to watch The Big Bang Theory because she says that it’s like watching me on TV. I wasn’t sure how to take that. I’ve been teaching K221 at IUN every Monday, so I haven’t caught it yet, but Chrissy recorded them all. So we sat down and watched two hours straight. It might be the funniest show ever, in the same way that Dilbert is hilarious to me because I live it on a daily basis. I’ve heard that a lot of people don’t like it (it replaced “The Class”), but they probably don’t relate to the humor the same way that a geeky person can.

The show is about these two physicist roommates, Leonard and Sheldon, who are living the geek high life. Along with their equally out-of-place friends, they play team video games, watch Superman marathons and organize their cereal selections according to fiber content. Now if this doesn’t sound like me and Carl back in the day, then I don’t know what does. Many of the jokes might go over non-geek heads, but I appreciate them because, again, I live it on a daily basis.

Hilarity ensues when you add in their hot neighbor, Penny, who hasn’t got a geeky bone in her body. The comedy is all about the contrast between her lifestyle and theirs. In real life, I would guess that Penny would cross the street to avoid Leonard and Sheldon, but she’s written to be fairly friendly and doesn’t mind dressing down around them. In fact, she doesn’t leave much to the imagination. If I had a daughter, she wouldn’t leave the house dressed like that — but that’s just me getting old. That’s me: old and geeky.