The Transversal

Last night I wasted a whole hour doing nothing while I should have been watching The Bachelor. Tonight I wasted another whole hour watching The Mentalist while I should have been doing anything except watching The Mentalist.

The show follows a well-worn formula: a brilliant, boylike investigator (Patrick Jane) solves crimes using his uncanny powers of observation, assisted by a bitchy, by-the-books boss (Teresa Lisbon), a bumbling, brawny sidekick (Wayne Rigsby), a buxom (ok, she's not that buxom but she never buttons up her shirts) brunette (Grace Van Pelt), and an uptight Asian guy (Kimball Cho). Not exactly an ensemble cast.

Jane usually starts things off by accusing the murder victim's spouse of having an affair with the primary suspect, which is only true about half of the time. He then sniffs around the crime scene, sometimes eating scraps of left-behind food or staring at family pictures. Finally, he encounters the "weird" family member, usually an autistic or socially challenged child or occasionally a dimwit. He bonds with said oddball, and cracks the case after the next commercial break.

Somewhere in between, he (1) uses an unconventional interrogation method fully against department protocol to gain information, such as hypnotism or sheer befuddlement, or (2) catches one of his underlings doing something embarassing, like hitting on a suspect or falling asleep on the job. He always almost gets fired by the bitchy boss, who never seems to have any idea who the murderer is.

In fact, Jane's extraordinary intellect is heightened by the fact that he works with completely incompetent fools. His team says things like "um, how did you know that?" or "I don't understand..." or "are you trying to tell us that she killed her own twin sister?!" and other stupid shit. The mentalist might be smarter than hell, but he's a terrible teacher.

Oh yeah, I performed an unbelievable parking feat today. Me, Mz and LJ drove out to Brooklyn for an Ikea/Costco trip. That's kind of an unbelievable feat in itself, but here's the real story. We came back home at around 4:00, so every contractor known to man was double parked on my block, with no real parking places to be found. Suddenly, a tiny little Honda squirted out from behind a couple of trucks, leaving a prime (but small) spot empty right in front of my pad. I was two truck widths from the curb, as shown in the accompanying diagram. It was not an easy maneuver, to say the least. First I thought I'd dub my move the double parallel park or maybe the para-parallel park. I finally settled on the transversal.

Anyway, The Mentalist is fun sometimes, but tonight's episode sucked. Even the guys walking in on two chicks in bed together couldn't save the show tonight. Now if only the Bachelor would do that...