Executive decision

I've decided to copy all the content from syp's and my older VM blog, "Wholehearted Approval Without Reservation," into this blog, giving it the original posting dates. (Content is king, after all.) Love the title, love the argyle sidebar . . . completely weary of every other aspect of the design.

This will give me something to do while watching the first 30 minutes of a baseball-delayed "Cheatty Cheatty Bang Bang" before switching to the season premiere of "Rescue Me" at 10 p.m. That's a highly entertaining show, by the way.

A/V aids make the summer pass quicker

The charming folks at Neptune Pirate Radio have released the first of their "commentary" podcasts. They have wisely chosen "the majority of you's favorite episode" (their term). And in case you can't guess which episode that is, let's just say it has a holiday theme.

But, waaah, the commentary is meant to be played while watching the DVD. I don't have the DVDs, sadly, but I'll be borrowing them from syp in the near future, after she and I are finished indoctrinating our current victim.

These podcasts are available on iTunes, by the way.

Note that two-thirds of these Neptune Pirate Radio hosts are lawyers. That's right, lawyers are cool.

Scarlett: [Darling Scottish accent] "D'ya know what I love, is how Logan has Pirate Points when he does nothing."

Now they are commenting on how the main loss when the Echolls house burned down was "the kiss jacket." I love that jacket.

Primetime Nielsen Ratings: Season Wrap-Up

The season ratings are in: #145 out of 156 shows. Ouch. I have heard of exactly one of the nine shows that finished lower. And just take a look at all those crappy shows that beat out television's finest.

Obviously there are some methodological problems here. The shows seem to be ranked by average weekly viewership, with no account given to how short a time a show may have been on the air. So the immediately-cancelled "Emily's Reasons Why Not" comes in at #99 and the execrable "Just Legal" has our girl beat at #136, on the strength of the viewership it got before The WB gave it the Meg-Manning-alternate-ending treatment. If you cross off all the dead and dying shows above VM on the list, the picture looks a little better, but it's still sad.

A larger point is that UPN wasn't equipped to deliver the viewership numbers of a real network. The lowest-ranked show on a Big-Three network came in at #115. The 19 lowest-rated shows were on The WB and UPN.

Last season's SMPs

Part of me steadfastly believes that someday, somehow, that secret message pen ("SMP") is going to come back into play. But most of the time that beautiful moment seems awfully remote. Sometimes a MacGuffin is just a MacGuffin.

Defining SMP broadly as any unresolved mystery or detail on the show, last season left us with a number of SMPs on our hands. Let's try to identify them. They can probably be categorized as either one-off "it is what it is" details, loose ends, red herrings (that reminds me of an anecdote I'll have to drop into my main blog) or plot points for season three. Let's speculate about which are which. I'll get the ball rolling:

• Sally - loose end


• Madison "on the Lam(b)" - plot point?


• the Mannings and all their weird crap - red herring or plot point


• why Liam removed the leprechaun / Notre Dame decal from his car - red herring


• Woody's creepy wife - red herring (actually, it just occurred to me that maybe she was normal and Woody was just making up stories about her to control his son and dissuade him from telling her about Woody abusing him. Ew.)

What other second-season SMPs are there and where do they fit in?

Logan & Veronica -- periodic summer romance?

The question that nags in my little brain is as follows: Will Logan and Veronica's romance make it past the summer hiatus? I have this awful feeling that Rob Thomas is going to turn this into an "every summer, Logan and Veronica get together and then break up by the start of the next season." Now mind you, they should not have an easy time of it; they are both very complicated personalities, but please Rob, let them at least make it through the first few episodes.

I agree, wholeheartedly, without reservation. Really, I would be happy if they could make it past Christmas.

I don't think the flashback-to-summer bit would play well this time--we've seen it--so I think RT is going to have to do something different. They definitely need to avoid the Sam-and-Dianne pitfall where once the two star-crossed, sniping lovers actually get together the interest level of the relationship and the show end up tanking. I'd say they could write a long-distance angle into it all, but since both characters are regulars that would be tough. Keeping us happy with that relationship, but not satisfied/bored with it is going to be a major challenge for the writers next season. They can't very well have her think he's committed a foul crime (again) or have him rape her (which she has already thought once, and which was a rather unsatisfactory response to a similar character problem in Buffy).

Maybe Logan could join some kind of weird religion and Veronica could have issues with that. Something tells me that JD might be able to pull off that type of role fairly convincingly. Art imitating life.

Ha. I seriously think Jason Dohring is the only Scientologist actor I actually like.

But anyway, I think their best hope for complicating Logan and Veronica's relationship is to bring back Duncan. NO! I mean, she's pledged her undying forever love to the Donut, but did you see (in this week's repeat) how quickly the yellow came on her freshly-shtupped self when she saw Logan come out of the neighboring room at the Neptune Grand? Well, unquestionably Duncan "didn't do it right." Of course, if Teddy Dunn really is going to law school and has left Neptune for good, so much for that idea. Could someone please figure out which law school? He graduated from Andover and Northwestern, so it's probably a law school we've heard of. As Bubbles will tell you, I need know these things because I am so very "classist."

Administrative notes

Okay, I already switched colors. I think the one I had originally was too dark. I blame monitor issues. If anyone else wants to switch, let me know.

I've added some new features to the sidebar and changed the column proportions to increase readability. Let me know if you have comments or suggestions.

I don't think we need many style rules, but let's use sentence case ("downstyle") for our post headings to maintain a consistent look.

If you want to post an image by uploading, or by using an "img src" tag, make sure the width doesn't exceed 345 or it may screw up the sidebar. If in doubt, just insert "width=345" (without the quotes) just before the final ">" in the image tag. Here is an example:


Of course, some images will be small enough already.

Coming NOW to a ventilation duct near you . . . Secret Message Pen!

Welcome to a new blog for discussing the wonderful television show Veronica Mars (Japanese title: "The Tiny Blonde One Detective"). Just kidding. The blog will be written jointly in a free-form way by a group of friends who adore the show. To see who wrote what, just check the colors of our Blogger names under "Contributors" in the sidebar. Everything related to the show is fair game, but you all don't strike me as fanfic types.

I'll get us started off on a charming note. Did anyone rewatch "Normal is the Watchword" last week and notice that Beaver's only comment on the field trip was something directed at Woody about the Sharks' lousy pitching? Hmm, what did he mean by that? (Hey, be glad I am sparing you the finer points of my chlamydia research--though my conclusions would surprise you.) I wonder how much we will see in a new light as we watch the second season shows over again. Probably a lot. I continue to see little things between Mulder and Scully in syndicated repeats that seemed meaningless the first time, before we learned THE TRUTH. It could be the same way here.