TV stuff; Cool Cops

I've been fighting the flu lately so I've watched more than my usual amount of tv, the highlight of which was Sunday night's Flight of The Concord. To me one of the funniest aspects of the show is that the New Zealand embassy, with which the boys and their idiot agent are associated, is housed not in some great stone monument all gargoyled'd up and splendiferous but in a shabby building in NYC. The third floor no less with the only signage being a piece of paper Scotch-taped to the door. And the office space is not only cramped but falling apart.

Sunday night the boys were visited by the New Zealand prime minister. A fair share of the episode reminded me of Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three and his take on the then Russian bureaucracy. The NZ prime minister goes by one name--Brian--and totes around a "cell phone" (something brand new to New Zealand) like the original cells--the size of a walkie-talkie. And he is constantly calling NZ to see how things are going in his absence even though he's only been gone a day. At one point we overhear him asking "How the environment there? Not good? Well put your cousins to work." In a show with top to bottom morons this guy stands out. In an episode that has look-alikes (well, the point is they don't look alike even though they think they do) of Obama, Elton John, Art Garfunkle, Bono and Elvis and then out of nowhere the real Art Garfunkle appears--even by the Conchords usual absurdist standards this episode is wonderfully ridiculous. Another surprise is that one of the boys actually gets laid!

If you've never seen Conchords this is a good place to start. Check your TV listings. It's also on HBO On Demand.

-------Cool Cops

By coincidence I got three galleys in one week in which the lead character was one of those Dirty Harry type detectives who a) can't work with the constraints of the department b) has terrible memories of bad stuff while on duty c) has a smart mouth and d) is a hunk. Reviewers bitch about romance fiction and how rigidly formulaic so much of it is, especially The Bad Boy that our ladies always go for. The Bad Boy ain't got nothin' on the Dirty Harry copper.