Erik Emery Hanberg

I've been negligent on posting here as well.

Music
Just discovered the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album. What an odd combination of musicians! And with a pretty great result. I've been listening to their cover of Gone Gone Gone by the Everly Brothers.

Here's the Everly Brothers performing it. It's a really fun pop song, though in this case the highlight is definitely the dancers.

Television
Mary's been watching Weeds and whenever I drop in for a few episodes I've really liked it.

I've been interested in Glee and FlashForward but have decided to save both for DVD. The only TV on DVD I've been watching is It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is wonderful when it's on the mark and just so-so when it's off.

For current TV, I'm on a diet of just How I Met Your Mother, The Office, 30 Rock, and The Simpsons pretty much. Looking forward to seeing Lost start up again. Oh, and I TiVo'd "V" last night. We'll see how that is.

Theater
I forgot to mention that The 39 Steps in Seattle was a lot of fun. A good comedy built around a Hitchcock movie with an absurd premise.

Movies
I can't believe I wasted a Netflix rental on Supergirl.

Books
I read Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol in about 24 hours, which is pretty common with his books. Like his others, it's high-octane, can't-put-it-down utter nonsense. Anyone with a passing knowledge of history or science can spot where he's twisted things to suit his facts. The science-y stuff is like a novelization of The Secret (which I didn't read) thrown in with a little Bible Code (which I did read). The book isn't as good as Angels & Demons, which is still Brown's best, I think.

And John Adams, of course, which will get its own separate post later.

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After a summer cable hiatus, Mary and I have re-hooked up our cable.

Originally, we'd cut cable out to save money, and we watched shows via DVD, Hulu, and iTunes. But we found a good compromise. By switching to Click (something I'd planned on doing anyway) we were able to get cheaper Internet and pay Click about $12/month for broadcast channels over cable. This works perfectly. Our monthly costs won't rise, and we can watch The Office (which was great tonight, by the way!), Lost, How I Met Your Mother, Saturday Night Live (the only show we couldn't watch in full online).

The non-broadcast shows we watch we can easily do on DVD (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Weeds) or online (South Park, Colbert, etc).

A very happy solution.

Which is a good time to add that not having cable really wasn't that big of a deal. It was kind of annoying sometimes, but not that bad. If the Mariners had been having an incredible season, I might have wanted FSN. And maybe a great Seahawks season will be a good reason to have cable now. But still, this is my third summer in a row of no TV (again, not counting DVDs) and it's not that big of a deal anymore, whether the cable is hooked up or not.

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Mary and I finished the complete series of Freaks and Geeks this weekend. Unfortunately, that means we're only talking about 18 episodes, since no one watched the show when it was on 9 years ago.

But I really really enjoyed it. And I laughed virtually non-stop. The characters, like the characters on The Wire, were strong enough that I thought of them as real people, independent from the show.

Here's a couple short clips, one from the first episode, and another from one of the last.

I'll miss this show.

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I have a strong emotional reaction while watching the wonderful show Planet Earth that is intimately tied in with my struggle with my faith and spirituality.

On the one hand, watching the show fills me with awe at the beauty of creation. I get filled with an appreciation of the natural world and its inhabitants. This has long been a grounding of my Christianity, something I recognized intimately during my six weeks at sea during college. Sailing on a small ship and surrounded by the power of the ocean, I felt more sure of my faith than at any other point.

But then there's the other hand. And that's when I see how foreign and inhospitable some of the world's ecosystems are to me, and how so much of it goes on with little regard to me personally or humanity in general. I see how strongly life desires to find a way--bacteria in sunless caves that feed on the limestone itself, for example--and then I start to question and doubt that awe I felt, and reflect instead on "my place" here, which suddenly feels very small and fragile.

All this from a TV show!

Well worth watching if you ever are inclined. There's got to be something really great there if it starts making me get all theological.

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If I watched shows simply based on the posters, this poster would convince me to fly through Season 2 so that I was caught up for the new season.

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Every so often you hear, that some show is "the best on television."

The two that come to mind are The Sopranos and The Wire. I would say, "Yeah, they probably were."

Recently, I kept hearing that Mad Men was the best on television. We were excited to watch it and got the first season.

But it just never measured up. Having just finished the final episode of Season One, I'm still not even sure I'll want to keep going.

My biggest hang-ups:

• I don't like the "superiority" it tries to engender in the viewer. I feel like I'm supposed to keep laughing or cringing at the unenlightened society of 49 years ago. It works sometimes, but frequently not.
• They're trying to hard. The Sopranos, at its best, felt effortless. The writing was so good that a viewer could use the symbolism in the show to really connect with Tony Soprano. Here, it seems like the writers want to beat me over the head with it. And, at least once, they seriously betrayed a central character to make their symbolism more evident.
• It often gets into the "suburbs are hell" argument that always bugs me in movies and TV.

That said, there are some good thing going for the show. Great art direction, a good cast with generally good characters. Season One started really well and it end well too. But the middle episodes languished a bit. I also feel like the show, over time, will be showing the collapse of Don Draper and the world he lives in. This is certainly modeled in the opening titles. But I feel like the last image of the series will be Don, alone, standing in front of an office that doesn't want him with no wife to go home to. We'll see.

I think I will probably pick up Season Two. Just not sure when.

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I was interviewing for the job while my college roommate was visiting last week. He asked about what City Club did and I told him they were a civic organization.

"Like the Stonecutters?" He asked. Yes, Joe. Exactly like the Stonecutters.

In fact today's Port Commission Candidate Forum looked a lot like this:

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