Premier Week!

Of the brief time I spent living in Los Angeles, I think I miss this time the most. Not because the weather this time of year is better; the weather was pretty much always agreeable. Certainly not for traffic reasons, the traffic was always horrible. No, I liked this time because it was that magical time of the year called ‘Premier Week’! It was during this time of year that I could look out our living room window at Park La Brea and see a 50’ billboard of Jason Lee’s mug advertising his then up-coming show ‘My Name Is Earl.’ But it was more than that, it was as though the whole city was alive with the energy of the impending onslaught of new television shows, and even before those shows reached audiences, the studios were already vying to win our hearts. There was a poster for ‘Surface’ (anyone remember that show?) that took up the whole side of an office building. Anywhere outside of L.A. and Premiere Week is marked by perhaps a small increase in the number of commercials for shows, but that’s about all. But in L.A., in the heart of it all, no vertical space is safe from being festooned with some sort of ad for an upcoming show. The radio was filled with the same ads, and there were more TV commercials for new shows than there was air time for actual shows.

I think the reason I liked the energy of Premiere Week so much was because it formed an intangible bond that brought the entire Hollywood community together. Sure, it catapulted their smugness into the stratosphere because they were responsible for deciding what shows will be cool and what will be canned, and they knew it. But all that aside, there is something to be said for a whole community to almost stand still and hold their collective breath while they wait to see if the rest of the nation agrees with their predictions about what is Must See. One final note about this: as a testament to the eerie, almost German precision with which things are run in Hollywood, Premiere Week lasts precisely from late September until mid-October-ish. Eh, give or take.

In other news, I bought my plane tickets to Switzerland today, so that trip is definitely going to happen. That makes me plenty happy. Also, while cleaning the driveway this weekend, I managed to pressure wash the skin off of the top of my toe. That was not cool at all. It actually kinda hurt. Finally, I discovered with the help of some bicyclists equipped with speedometers that I can maintain a sprint of 18 MPH for a half-mile into the wind on my skates. Yeah, I’m pretty proud of that.

Winner & Loser

Winner: The Doublemint Twins. They’re hot, and there are two of them. I don’t think any rational male needs more reason than that.

Loser: Actually, a collection of losers this time around. There seems to be a rash of school shootings, and those people collectively are losers. Also losers: hard-core NRA freaks who will wave a flag and insists that the people who turned their guns on innocent people still have just as much right to own a gun as everyone else. Losers.