No Tears Shed

• Random Pop Culture:
• To my surprise, as this evening approached I found myself more excited about the return of Community than any other show. Based on the premiere, my anticipation was justified. They did a superb job of wrapping up the finale and setting up the dynamic of the new season while being very funny -- the war between Jeff and Britta, in particular -- in the process.
• While Community used a Twitter gag to harshly mock [Bleep] My Dad Says, the problem of different time zones presented itself. Hence, I got the actual tweets once the show had aired on the West Coast and the tweets wouldn't ruin the jokes for that audience. Necessary, but annoying.
• 30 Rock was also pretty funny, but I'm mostly just thankful that they've left it open for Matt Damon to return in the future.
• I did watch the critically-maligned Outsourced for a few minutes, just to see how bad it is. It's really bad. The world definitely needed a sitcom that is blatantly racist and unaccepting of other cultures, because we're Americans and we like to eat cows instead of worship them, unlike other funny-sounding people.
• The premiere of Grey's Anatomy did a good job of dealing with the aftermath of the shootings in last season's fantastic finale. The real story is going to be whether that aftermath hangs over the show for a while or whether it is forgotten relatively quickly like George's death was. One imagines that the post-traumatic stress of a workplace mass killing is something that sticks around longer than makes sense for a TV show that has to keep pushing the plot.
• I've now seen all of the new shows I'm going to see besides No Ordinary Family and FX's Terriers is far and away the best so far. Boardwalk Empire has the best chance to pass it. Terriers is really, really good though, funny and well-acted.
• Random Thought: On Nostalgia
• Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy, an action that has been coming for quite some time. There was a time not so, so long ago when people lamented the death of the locally-owned video store that came at the hands of Blockbuster. Blockbuster seems to get no such sympathy from people for its death at the hands of Netflix and Redbox. I think a small masochist part of me will miss spending way too long perusing shelves to decide which movie to get. However, I mourn neither Blockbuster nor the previous smaller stores, like I do not mourn the locally-owned bookstore or whatever kind of store Wal-Mart and Target have replaced. That kind of nostalgia makes no sense. Progress is good. In the state of this economy, would those who mourn these smaller stores have stood for the higher prices and smaller selection when compared to the big box chains? Would they realistically stand up for it even if the state of the economy was great? These stores have gone because our consumption habits have changed. Nostalgia in this case is just us lying to ourselves.
• Random Video:
• Birthdays today: Ray Charles, Julio Iglesias, Bruce Springsteen. Amazing. Oh, and Toni Basil!