Underpants On The Outside

I’m a big fan of 24. Sure, the story is good, but I’m mostly impressed by how much Jack Bauer manages to squeeze into a day. To illustrate, I’m going to compare each hour of Jack’s day to the corresponding hour in my own day.

Jack’s Day, 3-4 PM:  Okay, home stretch. Now a question: You’ve just been blown up because your ex-girlfriend betrayed you.  What do you do?

a)    Call up your buddy Will who totally told you that that chick sucked, and you should have burned that bridge a long time ago?
b)    Call your buddy Curti- oh….nevermind this option.
c)    Order up a tac-squad and climb back on the killing horse.

Pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it?  When Jack comes to, the widow and the hunk from IT are running from some bad guys, who have chased them to an alley that does not exist in any parts of West L.A. I know of.   What cracks me up is that they’ve run like three blocks and the Widow is huffing and puffing in a full fledged asthma attack.  And I’m supposed to believe she had sex with Jack?   Please.

The hunk from IT fires a lot of bullets and manages to hit absolutely nothing.  He was trying to give the Widow some cover so she could make a run for it, but the two of them are putting the fun back into futility.  She stands there like an idiot, and he takes a bullet in the arm before he can yell “what the fuck!  I was covering you!”.  It just goes to show you that pretty people don’t belong in anti-terrorism.  Pretty people belong on the sidelines, keeping the real (ugly) fighters sexually satisfied and focused on their goal.  These two would better serve their country back at CTU, with the Widow up in the Bauer Suite and the hunky IT guy giving Chloe a back rub.

Luckily Jack shows up to kill two of the bad guys right quick.    There’s a third who takes the Widow hostage, but Jack yells “drop your weapon, or I will use mine,” and the guy does it.   I think he realized that Jack hadn’t specified which of his “weapons” he was threatening to use, and seeing as how he was standing directly behind the sexy widow (who is breathing awfully hard, mind you) there was a risk of serious pelvic injury if he didn’t get out of the way.

Jack goes through his standard arrest procedure, which involves a lot fewer Miranda rights and a lot more yelling than how the police do it, and once the bad guy is secured, Jack takes a look at the Man Candy from IT’s arm.  In and out, no arterial bleeding.  (That’s what SHE said!  Count it!)  Jack looks disappointed; I think he was hoping to eat the bullet as a snack.  Then he grabs the widow by the neck and throws her against the wall, proving yet again that he was not raised by my mom.

3:07:  The widow tells Jack that his father is behind the betrayal and is responsible for Graham’s death, sending Jack through his entire repertoire of Sad Faces.  Keep in mind that the last time this happened, Valencia blew up.  (Heads up, Encino.)  Speaking of the sad faces, they’ve been getting a lot of use this season, but you can still see the rust on them.  See, Jack’s emotions are like a roulette wheel.  Sad and Confused are like zero and double-zero: flukes that only assholes would bet on.  Fortunately the rest of the numbers are either red (anger) or black (kill).  It’s only a matter of time.  And seeing as how Jack suddenly has one less kill than he previously believed, me and my inner Wesley Snipes are going to put the house on Black.  (For the record, I spent ten full minutes trying to find a way to put in the actual quote “always bet on black”.  But I just kept hearing it in my  own voice, which sounds considerably less cool than Wesley’s.  I just couldn’t do it justice.  Maybe if I stopped paying my taxes…Ba Dum Bum!  I’m on fire!)

See, everyone still believes that the widow knows where the Russian General is.  (BTW, where was my head??? That’s another bad guy.  Seven of Twelve, and I’m feeling better about my initial guess.)  Both Jack and his father want to find him so that he can lead them to the terrorists, but Dad wants to cover up his role in the bombing, and Jack wants to save Northridge.  Neither warrants more than a shrug from me.

Everyone wants what the Widow’s got, but it seems to be making her flustered, though I would have thought she’d be a little more used to the attention, having a vagina and all.  When she tells Jack the address, he orders his tac-team to the address without him, though without Jack I imagine them like a team of those vibrating electric football toys: a bunch of guys spinning in circles, falling down and flopping on the ground in spasms.

Then Jack tells the Widow to refuse to tell Dad the address until she has seen her Bastard.  Jack even loans her his testicles for the phone call; that was nice of him.  I’m also starting to doubt the little guy’s parentage.  He figured out that something was wrong with Grandpa, but tried to come up with some limp-ass lie about going out to get a soda.  Gramps saw right through that shit.  If he was really Jack’s son, he would have said he was going out, and if Gramps asked any questions, he would have yelled “Damn it, Grandpa, there’s no time!” until the old man did as he was told.  That’s how Jack rolls.

Dad gives up the address to a hotel, and Jack, the Widow, and the captured bad guy head over there.  In the parking lot, Jack gives the Widow a vest.  Mary points out that Jack just wants to get her clothes off, and now that she mentions it, that vest is awfully thin.  I worry that later Jack will offer her a “bullet proof pill”, that would work better if she drank it with a Cosmopolitan.

3:43:  Looks like Jack’s not the only one pulling a fast one; it runs in the family.  The hotel room is empty, and Gramps calls Jack from a roof across the street.  He’s got a gun to the Bastard’s head, so Jack offers to surrender himself.  I’ll check later, but I’m pretty sure that’s the third time Jack has surrendered himself today.  Before he leaves, Jack punches the handcuffed bad guy in the face.  That oughta impress the Widow.

Things go pretty much according to plan after that.  Jack surrenders, the Bastard runs away, and Jack’s father makes him kneel.  My theory is that he’s trying to save himself from future prison rape in case he gets caught.  The old man may look frail, but when you find out he killed his son execution style, you’re probably going to go off in search of a nice plump marijuana smoker to sodomize.

Now, several times during the past few episodes, family members have made veiled reference to some episode in Jack’s past that led him to go off, join the military, and take his first step down the road to ultimate baddassery.   Jack feels that now is the time for explanation:  “I just had to go my own way.  Do things for myself.  I was never good enough for you.  I’m sorry.”  Jack just apologized to the guy who is going to shoot him.  It’s touching, but Jack must have realized that “I’m sorry” was about to be his final words on this planet, because seconds later he’s screaming “DO IT!  DAMN YOU!”  Then he turns around and…Dad is gone!   Holey moley!  I can’t believe it…I…uh….oh, I can’t even fake it.  That makes no sense and is boring as fuck.

For the hour:

• Kills: 2
• KO’s: .1 (the guy was handcuffed.  Way to protect the free world, Jack.)
• Surrenders: 1
• Tac-Teams Ordered: 1 (as I expected, they accomplished nothing.)

Worse, as Jack’s hour ends he finds a phone his father left for him with a number for him to dial, leading to this week’s shocker: Ex-President Logan answers the phone, and he knows everything that’s going on.  For those of you who don’t remember, Logan was last season’s President, who spent the every show being alternately bossed around by Jack and his wife.  He was useless as President of the United States, but now he’s got a beard and all of a sudden he’s a mastermind?  You can slap a beard on Jar-Jar all you want; it doesn’t make him a Jedi.  Somehow, knowing the right-wing creative staff behind 24, I suspect this is a veiled swipe at Al Gore.

My Day, 3-4 PM:  (Note:  For the 1 o’clock and 2 o’clock hours, I recapped those hours as I spent them today, ignoring out the central idea of this blog-series: comparing Jack’s hour to my corresponding hour on the same day.  You see, those two episodes aired last week, and whatever I did, I guarantee it wasn’t memorable enough to last that long.  But the 3 o’clock hour aired yesterday, and I can remember most of that.)

Yesterday was President’s Day, and my company graciously gave us the day off.  Wonder Woman had the day off too, so she and I took the opportunity for the weekly tradition we’ve begun ever since moving in together: the trip to Bed Bath and Beyond and/or Target.  Yesterday it was Target, followed by a trip to the grocery store.  Jealous yet?

As I recall, I spent the three o’clock hour convincing myself to spend fifteen dollars on a rice cooker, mostly because I’m trying to eat more steamed vegetables.   I’m eating more vegetables because I want to become less fat-like; I’m admitting my purchase of a rice cooker because apparently I want to spend the next two weeks receiving emails that begin, “You know how I know you’re gay?”

To be absolutely honest, I’m not even sure I really wanted the rice cooker.  Sure, it will come in handy, and me and WW have already used it.  Instead, I think I picked it up because Wonder Woman was in the process of buying one of the largest measuring cups I’d ever seen.  You see, I think it’s dumb to have a measuring cup that big: unless we’re opening a patisserie I’m not aware of, we’re never going to need that much of anything.  But I’ve also learned over the past month that it does no good to tell WW that I disagree with one of her purchases, just as she is unable to dissuade me from any of mine.  Instead, they can only be passive-aggressively combated through a series of increasingly stupid purchases.

Earlier tonight, she told me her plan to furnish our bedroom with pillow shams.  She leaves me no choice: first thing tomorrow, I’m finding a Sharper Image catalog, turning to a random page, and buying it.  I don’t know how I’ve lived this long without a Soap Genie.

For the hour:

• Purchased: Tongs, Measuring Cups, Rice Cooker, Doormat
• KO’s: 1 (Libido)
• Kills: 1 (Bachelor Z)