Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Wednesday, Jul. 18, 2007 - 11:59 p.m.

Some notes before I rant about ABC & Traveler, which most of you probably want to skip. It's more to vent at the tools at ABC who will google themselves to see what people are saying about them than it is anything else.

I rode in a vegetable oil powered car this weekend, which I tho't I'd written about, but apparently, I did not. My friend Mitch bought an old 1982 Benz diesel that she had converted to run on vegetable oil.

Not bio-diesel, vegetable oil. As in corn oil. Or soybean oil. Or peanut oil. The stuff you cook with. As in, her car has Wessonality, and it has it in spades. It's the coolest freaking thing ever. And it's reverse convertible or something like that, which means that in the unlikely event she should find herself without a grocery store in sight, she can swing into a gas station and fill up with diesel. But she doesn't have to. She can go to Costco and buy some corn oil and dump it straight in. She said she buys strained restaurant fry grease from a guy in the Valley for $2/gallon, or she knows another woman who drives a veggie car too, and that woman always has extra oil she just gives away to anyone else with a veggie car who wants it. I am in love with her car. She bought it for $5500 and got it converted for - and I'm not kidding - $700.

Seven hundred dollars.

That's freaking NOTHING. When I go back to work in TV Land, I want to buy a diesel and do the same thing. Because that is off the hook, yo. Restaurants will actually give you their old fry grease. All you have to do is strain it. Which means you can drive for freaking free. AND you aren't polluting the air with petroleum-based fumes and carbons. Veggie oil burns more cleanly and isn't anywhere near as toxic to the environment as petroleum. And since I can't afford a hybrid for God knows how long? I can't wait to get a veggie car. Mitch sure loves hers. :)

Speaking of going green, the new tankless hot water heater is in!!! It takes a little longer to get hot water to the tap when you first turn it on than the old hot water heater tank did, but it's a neverending supply of lovely hot water. And we can even take a shower, do laundry, AND run the dishwasher, all at once, without ever running out. 'Course, the water pressure would suck it, but we would never run out of hot water. And it's tiny, compared to the big ol' honkin' water heater tank. It sort of looks like something out of Star Wars, stuck up on the furnace closet wall. They put it in today while I was at work, and tomorrow, I get to actually get up, stumble into my own bathroom, and take a piping hot shower. 'Tis a thing of beauty, awesome to behold. Thank you, thank you, thank you, tankless hot water heater man. I still love Edwin, but you're up there on my list. :)

Between the new hot water heater, all the flourescenty bulbs TB put in a few months ago, and the new coat of white latex up on the roof, we are saving a lot on power nowadays. Next, we're putting in adjustable skylights like they have in France, and the house should be really comfy during the summer. :)

OMG, people are freaks about the last Harry Potter book. Like, seriously, yo: FREAKS. I can't tell you the number of people calling and demanding we make sure their order is in the system, and today, a woman walked up to the counter and demanded we look up her order, even though the MOD told her at least a dozen times that if you order something off the website, we can not verify the order went through in the store. We are not connected to the website. We can only see what you ordered from our actual store. So they go back and forth on this for at least 15 minutes, and the woman just refused to acknowledge that we have this limitation, and then she insisted - INSISTED - that the manager call the fucking corporate offices and verify her order had gone through. And the reason for this is the kicker: she had placed the order an hour beforehand and had not yet received a confirmation email from the company telling her her copy of Harry Potter was on its way. Beauty. I got another call from a woman who wanted to know what was going on in the store on Friday. She insisted on mumbling with the phone tucked under her chin or something so that I could barely even hear her voice, let alone understand what the fuck she was saying, so I had to keep asking her to repeat herself, and every time I had to ask her to do that, she would move the phone up to her mouth and literally scream "hello?" into the receiver. She kept mumbling in the most pissy voice possible what activities we were planning. I kept telling her, face painting, a costume contest, some sort of arts & crafts probably involving wand-making, and taking photos of the kids, which she kept interrupting and repeating after me in a questioning tone like either I was an imbecile, or they were the stupidest activities ever conceived, and she couldn't figure out why we would think them worthwhile, and then she'd inaudibly mumble at me to repeat them once again. Finally after being a bitch to me for several minutes during which I seriously thought about hanging up on her (and should have), she finally got around to what was probably her real reason for calling, the query as to whether or not we would have butter beer on hand. When I said no, she said something bitchy I didn't quite catch and hung up on me. The next time someone like that calls, I'm just going to hang up on them. I don't care.

Thanks for the Harry Potter movie comments. I will write email probably tomorrow. For now, I have to try to go back to bed. I fell asleep for a while when I got home, and need to try to sleep again.

And now, the rant.

I well and truly hate ABC. They put a show (Traveler) on in the summer, when no one is home watching television anyway, because it's traditionally nothing but reruns, and then they cancel the show because it had "low ratings."

What the hell else is it going to have? You didn't promote it, you only let it run 8 episodes (giving it the cancellation notice at 6), you didn't run the second episode until THREE F'G WEEKS after the pilot, you changed the night of the week it was on (which is pretty much par for the course for you, but silly me, it still pisses me off), and you ran it in the the 10/9pm timeslot after stuff which wasn't similar programming. Like - and I am NOT kidding, here - after the yawner reality bullshit shows, American Inventor and - seriously - The Next Best Thing: Who Is the Greatest Celebrity Impersonator? .

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???

So you have a show that is actually tautly written, very well-directed, well-acted, suspenseful, surprising, and actually good, and you cancel it without even giving it a snowball's chance in hell. And like you did with Alias, you make the production team scramble to rewrite the last few episodes because you failed to notify them you were cancelling them until pretty much the last minute.

I gave you a second chance with Traveler, ABC. Admittedly, it was entirely by accident, because I didn't realize I was watching ABC until I was already hooked on the show, and for that, you owe David Nutter, big time. But I'm done with you, now. Unless you want to get some balls and give Traveler a decent chance, I can not ever be bothered to watch ABC again. Your programming is for shit, frankly, and none of it has any quality to it whatsoever. Desperate Housewives is trite, boring, and predictable. Like Grey's Anatomy, it's nothing more than a soap opera. Lost? Please. I seriously doubt the writers on that show have the faintest idea where it's going themselves, they've yanked their viewers around so often. I imagine part of that is because they figure you're going to cancel them with a month's notice any time in the middle of their season, so the more incomprehensible and waffly it is, the better. At least it won't be hard to wrap up on short notice. And what are you up to on The Bachelor, now? Season 15??? That show jumped the shark by Jessie's season, at the latest, but you keep trotting it out, year after year. If that's what passes for "quality" over there, it's no wonder Traveler got cancelled. You wouldn't know quality if leapt up and bit you on the ass.

Good day.

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