Labor Day 2007

Well, the summer of '07 has now officially come and gone, so I guess it's good to take stock of things. Labor Day, of course, is a time to reflect on the hard work and sacrifices made by the American worker. As a recent article shows, that hard work and sacrifice seems to be more the case than ever. We now lead the world in worker productivity. You know what I say to that? I say I don't want to see or hear about any more stories dealing with how many hours of productivity we lose because of NCAA Tournament office pools or Fantasy Football or any of that. We lead the world in productivity, we can afford to lose a couple million hours!

With summer in the books, we can also reflect on some of the things that happened in our country. Not anything of substance, mind you (I deal with enough of that in this blog), let's just skip the sublime and go right to the ridiculous. Like fashion trends. I used to rant at length in this blog's predecessor about how stupid styles of the past (ex. corduroy) just seem to get randomly recycled due to either sheer boredom on the part of marketing execs or by apparently throwing darts at a dartboard (which I guess you would do if you were bored). That's gotta be the only explanation I can think of for why people my age and younger are suddenly wearing those UGLY plaid shorts that your dad or grandfather used to wear. You know what I'm talking about, the shorts that he thought went well with black socks going up to his knees. The ones that made you feel embarrassed that you were his offspring. I have no idea how anyone could possibly think those look "cool" when that's all they remind me and many others of.

And then there was the "Most Annoying Song of the Summer", another past topic of mine from the old blog. The song that gets replayed ad nauseum, gets stuck in your head endlessly, and then finds its way into TV commercials so you literally can't get away from it. Thanks to the advent of cell phone ringtone ads that are on cable TV every 5 minutes, this is even more of a headache. And you can thank those ringtone ads for hammering my nominee for this summer's most annoying song home: "Lip Gloss" by Li'l Mama. Muting the TV doesn't work either, by the way. All I have to say to her is I DON'T CARE WHAT I KNOW 'BOUT YOU!

I do have to say that this summer was a nice one here in upstate New York. We didn't roast like the rest of the country apparently did, humidity was low for the most part. Most days you could actually go outside and do stuff and not feel dead on your feet after 20 minutes, so I guess we lucked out.

After all the hype and excitement about the summer movie season, I guess most of it paid off in the form of the first $4 billion summer at the theatres. Of course, most of that increase may have just come in the form of higher ticket prices, you never know. All I know is that unfortunately not much of that $4 billion came from my wallet. I did get to see "The Simpsons Movie", and I thought that was really good. Other movies will just have to wait until their DVD release, and the August movie I was most looking forward to, "Charlie Bartlett", has been pushed all the way back to a February 1st release. Maybe by then, I'll have the money to go see it...

Summer TV didn't offer much, as usual. The one show I was most psyched about, the U.S. version of "Creature Comforts", lasted a whopping three weeks before CBS pulled the plug. Apparently, "Wallace and Gromit"-styled humor doesn't play well to a mass audience; that's why it's always been more or less a cult phenomenon here. I also liked "Thank God You're Here", but I can never remember to watch it. Other than that, it's the usual "Big Brother" (which should have been canceled years ago), "So You Think You Can Dance", and one forgettable episode of "Anchorwoman." My TV of interest for the summer has been Mets games (of course), and also thanking MSG for the brilliant move of replaying Buffalo Sabres games from last season every Monday night, which not only keeps fan enthusiasm up despite the free agent losses of Chris Drury and Daniel Briere, but also enables us to think cool thoughts on particularly muggy Monday nights.

I also have disappeared into the classics a bit. Some of us who are fortunate enough to have digital cable have a channel called "American Life TV", which reruns classic TV shows at night (like TV Land, but a little more obscure). Monday nights, they rerun all the MTM classics: "Mary Tyler Moore" (of course), "WKRP in Cincinnati", "The Bob Newhart Show" and also "Newhart". All much better viewing than yet another warmed-over "All-Time Funniest Commercials" special, and probably also much better than "Cavemen" or "Carpooling", which ABC will force us to endure shortly in the new fall season.

But I'm getting ahead of myself and I don't want to reveal too much of the old "State of the Tube" address for when that time comes, so onward we go... What's up next for this country? Oh, that's right, the Petraeus report and more congressional debate over withdrawing from Iraq... Joy...