I’ve been catching up on The Modern Family from last season. One of the characters is the perfect characterization of the Doofus Dad with the Henpecker Mom. I find that it doesn’t bother me as much for the reasons that Sheila has laid out. In this case, his part is because his part is by far the more humorous and fun and interesting. If I were an actor, I would much rather be him goofing around and trying and failing to be cool than her constantly rolling her eyes.

I caught part of the first episode of Outlaw, Jimmy Smitz’s new series about a supreme court justice retiring at a young age so that he can affect change rather than be a neutral judge. I say “part of” because I turned it off after 15 minutes. It takes an exceptionally bad show to turn me off so irrevocably so quickly. The format of a former conservative realizing the error of his hold ways in new and inventive episodes week after week made itself extremely quickly apparent and holds little interest.

Last year I complained about how so many shows took place in NYC, LA, somewhere else on the coast, or in Chicago. This year we’ve got one new show in Las Vegas, one in Detroit, and two in Texas. Progress, I think.

I have got to figure out something to do about sneakers. I’m wearing them again because of dog-walking duties, but I still gravitate towards the old pair that I’ve had since high school. Somebody, somewhere must have made a comfortable shoe for my large feet.

I finally found the old scale. It was hiding under the seat of Clancy’s car. The good news is that if the new scale is correct, I have lost 65 rather than 57 pounds. The bad news is that if the new scale is the more correct one, I weighed more than I ever thought before I started losing the weight. I lean towards the new scale being the more correct one because smaller scales (as the old one is) tend to underestimate my weight because my feet hang off the end. Clancy leans towards the old scale because it more closely matches the one she has at work.

Somehow a small pile of dirt found its way on the floormat by my computer in the office. I have no idea how it got there. It predates the dog, which would otherwise be the likely culprit.

I upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP on my laptop. A site crucial to some work I was going on the laptop has been down, so I figured it was a good time to back everything up and F&R everything. It doesn’t look as pretty, but it’s amazing how much faster the computer is with XP. The only downside is that, for some reason, it keeps moving to the cursor every few minutes. No idea why it’s doing that.

I really get a kick out of Google’s add algorithms sometimes. Bob Vis and I go back and forth on the con jobs that some for-profit universities with questionable accreditation are running and of course the ads on GMail become littered with ads for the for-profit universities we’re badmouthing.