Brain on Tap: A Couple of Things I Learned Sitting on my Ass.

LOST is AWESOME. Okay, I knew that one already. But it is amazing. Season 6 FTW!

Running out of shows to watch(Some cancelled, some coming to the end of their seasons for now), I gave a look at "Psych", an American show that I think was run on Sci-Fi here in the UK, but for a show into its third run(Renewed for a 4th), Sci-Fi seems to have dumped it - Their site only lists the first season episodes. Either way, I jumped into it for a bit. Here's the thing:

Psych is a combination of Scrubs and Dexter.

It's mostly Scrubs though. Seriously, the whole thing feels like "What if J.D. and Turk never went to Med School, and instead ran a fake psychic P.I. agency". That may just be down to my conviction that Psych star James Roday either spent many summers growing up with Scrubs star Zach Braff, or Roday is doing a pretty dead-on impression of Braff. Me saying that is also a little hard on Psych co-star Dule Hill, who still looks about ten or fifteen years younger than Scrubs' Donald Faison. The wiki page may say their names are Shawn and Gus, but to me, they're always Scooter Pie and Brown Bear.

left; ex-West Wing "bag man" and current "Psych" star Dule Hill and

right; Scrubs and Clueless moustache, Donald Faison

The Dexter comparison arises because much like Dexter, Roday's character Shawn has a mysterious intuition(Mentalist-style powers of observation that arise with parody-like frequency), that he gets a sort of "hard-ass training" from his hard-ass swine of a father. All that said though, every episode makes me feel like I'm watching a classic ep of Scooby-Doo. Not in a bad way - in fact it is a genuinely comfy feeling, as a small team of idiots come to solve a mystery over the course of the episode, all in a very, very Scooby-Doo way.

Some days, football is a very difficult thing to love. Very much depends on what part of football you love. Sometimes, no matter what you put into the relationship, no matter how much hope and optimism for things being great, no matter what you do......that love hurts like crazy when everything you hope for is cruelly insulted by the exact opposite of what you want, coming true on a Saturday afternoon. I'm a Newcastle fan, and I'm hoping that Sunday the 24th of May 2009 isn't marked by my deciding to take a trial separation from my team. But this? This hurts.

I really don't miss Facebook, and I'm glad I never got into MySpace. Second Life seems like too much effort on what works out as a virtual reality equivalent of a train set(Spend weeks, months, years, building and crafting something nerdy for very little reason other than to show it off to the other train set makers that inhabit Second Life), and I just don't get Twitter. True, I do read the odd feed once a week or more. PVP writer/artist Scott Kurtz makes for an affable soap opera to read, Stephen Fry is as close as I want to get to reading about the life of a celebrity, and that's purely because he's one of the only public figures I can think of whose mind impresses me. Plus he's a Norwich fan, so if the Maggies do get relegated, his Twitter feed may contain some pearls of wisdom for dealing with the heartbreak of loving a rubbish team. I check in on the feeds of friends that I know of, such as Ash and Phill, but I gave up posting feeds a while ago. It just isn't something that appeals, so I hardly ever update mine. If someone wants that badly to know what I'm eating, where I'm walking or how I'm feeling, then there are other less nascent, more involving forms of communication.

On the other hand, walking away from one other technological, sports relationship has done me some good. By "technological, sports relationship", I mean the 25+ hours a day I used to spend with Football Manager. And by "walking away from", I mean setting fire to the disc so I couldn't retrieve it from the bin, then putting it into the wheelie bin and putting other rubbish on top. Seriously, if I was playing that game, I'd be at my most obsessive/compulsive, failing to take losses as losses and repeatedly saving the game prior to kick-off, then re-loading from that save-point if the match didn't proceed like I wanted. I guess realising that the game had become some sort of "Quantum Leap"-style life quest, where I was consistently trying to put right what once went wrong helped me to ditch it. Even if I wasn't playing it, I'd be considering strategies, squads, formations, and on my craziest of car journeys, I'd be hoping that all the other drivers thought I was on a bluetooth or speaker phone, while I was having imaginary press conferences about my virtual reality Magpies and their chances against Derby in the cup this weekend. So yeah, much better without I think.