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, Midnight – 1 AM:  We had a change of venue this week: (ex) Roommate Kat recently got herself a nice little studio, and she had Mary, Wonder Woman and myself over for a night of TV and pesto.  When I said her studio was nice, I meant it –now we get to see Jack Bauer in Hi-Def, on a TV just smaller than my bed.  My eyeball estimate was 72” – based on the length of my penis (8”, reported) multiplied by the approximate number of my-penises that could be lined up end-to-end along the TV’s diagonal (in a totally not-gay way).   Kat and her receipt insist the TV is a 40”, but you can’t argue with the numbers.

Whatever the size, we gathered around the monolith filled with renewed enthusiasm after Jack’s last awesome hour.

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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 11-12 PM:  A couple minutes ago, Jack had he saved the day.  Not only that, he’d done it in record time, with seven hours to spare.  He had to have been feeling good, and you know what that means: cue the Buzzkill!  You know the feeling when you get home from work and your shoes are half off when you realize you forgot to pick up the laundry, and now you have to schlep out all over again?  That has to be close to what he’s feeling.  And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s never risk your life for a girl who’s comparable to forgotten laundry. 

Jack has seven hours to save Audrey, but he’ll have to find out what the Chinese want first, and that means he has to call them from a secure line.  Luckily Jack just met like six or seven guys who all have secure phones.  Even better, they won’t need their phones, seeing as how Jack killed them all.  Now all he has to do is steal one from the table where everyone is gathering the evidence.  So he walks up and pockets one with a smoothness implying years of pubescent petty theft.  But I’m disappointed.  There was no pizzazz.  Compare it to my routine from those days:

First I’d walk idly into the store, looking around aimlessly.  Suddenly my eyes go a little wide: clearly I am interested in something.  I’d pick it up, furrow my brow, turn it over a few times.  A York…Peppermint Patty, you say?  Interesting, interesting (hold it up to the light for affect).  Then I’d shake my head, communicating to any interested parties that after careful consideration I’ve decided it would not be a wise purchase at this juncture.  I would set the item back.  What you did NOT see was that I actually took TWO of said item off the rack - genius! - (not very) discreetly pocketing the second item.  As a last flair, I would nod to the cashier on the way out, as if to imply that I would return shortly; I just needed to call my broker and liquidate some assets so I could buy that pack of Doublemint I had my eye on. 

If Charlie Chaplin and Marcel Marceau had a child, but the child had a few too many chromasomes due to flaws in the cloning process, and it shoplifted, we probably would have looked very similar.

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This weekend I received an email from Jackie Treehorn with a link to the story you’ve probably all seen, about the crocodile who bit off the zoo keeper’s arm in Taiwan:

Now, the first two jokes that came to mind were the very obvious, “Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!” and “Yeah, but a half-hour later the crocodile was hungry again.” But I’m into rim shots. (Ladies…) Then I got caught up trying to cast my all-Chinese* version of Peter Pan.

Captain Hook: Duh
The Crocodile as himself
Tinkerbell: Bai Ling - petite; seems to frequently partake in fairy dust
Peter Pan: Jet Li – he can fly and is good with a knife
Mr. Smee: Jackie Chan – black belt in physical comedy
Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Republic of China and its upcoming generations of gender imbalance

I was halfway through figuring out how to get the crocodile to swallow a clock (solution: Cha Siu Bao, substitute mechanical clock for 1 pound finely chopped pork) when I read that they fired TWO BULLETS at the crocodile’s neck and it was unharmed.  Bullets.  Two of them.  

Forget worrying about nuclear warfare** - what will we do when our shores are suddenly flooded by brigades of bullet-proof crocodiles with a taste for human flesh?  From the picture, it would seem that Plan B: “Punch Crocodile in Mouth” doesn’t work so well either.   Who will save us?  Paul Hogan is selling Subarus and Steve Irwin is dead.  For that matter, how do we even know that the sting ray wasn’t sent by the Chinese??? 

That’s why I’m praying that this factors into tonight’s episode of 24.  Watching Jack kill a mutant crocodile with nothing but a cell phone would not only revitalize my interest in the show, it could very well be the key to winning World War III.

*I know, I know, the guy is Taiwanese.  But as soon as we decide Taiwan is a country, Catalina is going to start getting ideas.

**Personally, I’d love it; I hear that shit gives you super powers.

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, 10-11:  Sure, it’s getting late, but just because you’re putting the kids to bed doesn’t mean Jack can take it easy.  He may have apprehended the terrorist, but there are still two suitcase nukes commuting around Los Angeles, and President “Look Who Decided to Grow Himself a Pair” Wayne just launched a nuclear missile at a non-descript, non-existent Muslim country.  All last season Jack was clearly uncomfortable whenever Wayne had a gun in his hand; I think we now know why.

Yet I’m confused.  We only have eight or so more shows left; not enough for a nuclear war (though that could be good for next season).  Therefore Jack is going to have to solve this thing before that missile detonates, as if he doesn’t have enough deadlines.  How the hell is he supposed to do that?  The man is fast, but he’s not missile fast.  Then again, we are talking about Wayne.  He can grow himself a bushel of testicles; they’d all have a label reading “Property of J. Bauer”.  Jack could fix this with a phone call.     

10:00: Then again, what’s the hurry?  A general just informed Wayne that the missile will hit in five minutes.  I’m not surprised Wayne managed to pick the slowest nuclear missile in the United States arsenal.  Realistically I’m sure five minutes is quite fast for a missile strike, but on the alternative Earth where 24 takes place, you only need five minutes to do a load of laundry.  (And fold the sheets.)   That missile might as well have been launched from a steam-powered riverboat. 

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Some of you may have noticed on Monday around 10 PM EST that the universe had not imploded.  If anything, it seemed to be functioning perfectly.  Perhaps you were happy; perhaps your next thought was “Fuck!  Now I gotta go to work.”

Turns out, the world was saved by Passover.  I went to a friend’s house and didn’t get home until late, preventing me from watching Jack Bauer in real time, the resulting paradox of which would have torn the universe in half, if I’m understanding “Back to the Future” correctly.  Still I’m thinking about waiting until 10 PM to watch tonight’s episode on DVR.  I’m crazy like that.  I live on the edge.

But never mind what I was doing last week.  Sometime between Cups of Wine #2 and #3 (of four, I’ll explain), Jack was getting ready for the next of his one-hour adventures.   Remember, when we last saw our hero, he had just made his first successful apprehension of the day, though he needed the help of a heavily (and poorly acted) autistic character to do it.   Still, a win is a win, and here at the Underpants we’re all about positive reinforcement.

Jack’s Day, 9-10 PM:  As to be expected in these matters, the Russian is ready to give up the terrorist, in exchange for immunity and not to be extradited.  Unfortunately Jack doesn’t have bullets that can accomplish either of those things, which means he’s forced to call Buchanan.   Then Buchanan shows why he’s the boss, saying, “It’s your call, Jack”.  I get the feeling that if Buchanan were a real person, there would be a lot of self-help books on his bedside table.   Buchanan also tells Jack that the Vice President is challenging the President’s ability to perform his duties, since the President was blown up, placed in a coma, and now doesn’t want to nuke a made-up Middle Eastern Country.  Then Jack notes that if there is a challenge to the Presidency, it would invalidate the immunity agreement.  That makes no logical sense.  I call shenanigans, and this is precisely why I get my legal advice from Law and Order, not 24.  Jack also adds, “Bill, I need you to understand that I have no intention of honoring this agreement.”  

Personally, I’m not okay with this.  Jack just endangered a mentally disabled guy, now he’s relying on a chintzy legal loophole (that doesn’t even exist).  Furthermore, he just explicitly indicated that his honor isn’t important.  I think this is a big mistake.  We like characters like Dirty Harry and Batman because while they’re willing to break the law in the pursuit of justice, it’s only because the law doesn’t align with they know to be right and wrong.  But this is just wrong.  The writers keep beating us over the head with the theme of ends justifying means, and they seem pretty determined to see how far that can take them.  Since the terrorists no longer can use the unmanned drones, I suggest they strap the nukes to baby seals trained to swim to Catalina.  I want to see Jack racing around on a Jet Ski with a baseball bat in his hand, desperately trying to club the seals before it’s too late.  Or maybe he’d just cause an oil spill.  Whatever it takes.

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When you live with someone, particularly with someone you love, you really get to know them.  It doesn’t work the same way for everyone, but maybe you get a sense of what they’re going to do even before they do it – between his wife and me, Big Brother hasn’t won a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors since ’98.  Or maybe you know what they mean, regardless of how they say it. 

The other day, Wonder Woman asked me if I wanted to have a date night.  It sounds romantic, sure, but by now I know that she really just wanted sushi from the place down the street, and the only way she could convince me to drop forty dollars on a Wednesday night dinner is if something special was going on.  Meanwhile, I know that after date night I can pull out the sex menu and order one of the Market Price items, so I was fine with the arrangement.  I love me some Sex Lobster.

But for some reason I decided to inform Wonder Woman that while dinner sounded good, I saw right through her flimsy “date” scheme, and I already knew exactly where she wanted to go, what she’d want to eat, and what she’d tell me to order so that she could have all the stuff she wanted.

Meanwhile, Wonder Woman perceives herself as a highly evolved mammal whose complex thought processes lie beyond the ability of man to predict.  (Then again, so does Big Brother, AKA, “Scissors, Scissors, Rock”.)  There’s no way I could have known all that about the sushi unless I was some kind of mind-reading superhuman.  She asked me how – HOW - I could possibly know that. 

My reply:  “C’mon.  It’s like predicting the behavior of a toaster.”

Now, I’ll concede that it probably wasn’t a good idea to imply that my girlfriend is simple.  Funny, maybe, but not a good idea.  Before I opened my mouth, she was a little in awe of me – I could have convinced her that our love had given me some sort of sixth sense of her, an empathic bond that I feel even when we are miles apart.   It’s corny, but she would have swooned, and as everyone knows, swooning women become a lot less particular about which of their orifices you can put your penis in.  At the very least I could have told her I was a Jedi; how many times does THAT opportunity come along?  Instead, I pull back the curtain on my own magic trick.  Not very smart at all.

But to choose a kitchen appliance as an illustration… now that was phenomenally dumb.  That took the stupid I already had and simmered it down to moron gravy.  Now I want to say that to her credit, WW didn’t even get mad; we’ve been around this block enough times that we should see if any of the houses are for sale.  But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make it up to her.  What about a poem? Here’s what I have so far: “I must come clean; no need to inquire / I love you; you’re my free-standing washer-dryer.”

Word.