House Jumps The Shark

My many readers (last estimated at well into double digits) may recall an early post of mine on Inactivist praising Fox’s House as one of the few broadcast network shows worth watching. Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), the brilliant, crippled, drug addicted misanthrope – what’s not to like? – wasn’t exactly the first of his sort; from Ben Casey through Hawkeye and Trapper John in the original film M*A*S*H, the trope of the cranky and cantankerous but uber-competent physician prevailing against institutional mediocrity and ineptitude is an enduring figure. Let’s just say, though, that Hugh Laurie’s character has managed to ratchet it up a quantum level or two. Notwithstanding the entirely formulaic episode structure (House and his team struggle to diagnose a medical “zebra,” succeeding at roughly 55 minutes into the hour), the banter and the interpersonal relationships among the principal characters have made for three seasons of enjoyable television.

Never mind that no hospital administrator this side of Bedlam would let Dr. House within a hundred yards of the hospital cafeteria, let alone real patients. Ignore the fact that no malpractice insurance underwriter alive would cover Dr. House at any price. Forget that House and his gang are routinely performing surgeries of every imaginable variety in an age when mutually exclusive medical and surgical specialties have multiplied faster than a virus. The show still works, maybe because it is so damned implausible. One need not merely suspend disbelief to watch House, one must drive a stake through its heart.

Last week, however, was simply too much. I refer not to the ultimately discovered medical problems of the almost incidental patient, a Marine claiming Gulf War Syndrome, nor to the nonsense about House’s dream about the Marine and subsequent snooping into his background. No, I refer to what the official website episode recap calmly describes as follows:

At home, House inserts a catheter into his bladder through the urethra and finds instant relief. He shuffles to his bed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me ease your minds about this once and for all. Having once had a Foley catheter inserted through my urethra into my bladder, I know with near Cartesian certainty that there isn’t a man alive capable of doing that to himself. The Marquis de Sade, himself, would wince, grimace and faint dead away at the very notion. Not to dwell on the gruesome details of my own experience, but at the time I was experiencing such acute abdominal pain that I had already received both a shot of Dilaudid and of morphine just moments before and I would still have gladly opted for, say, chopping out my tongue before performing that particular procedure on myself.

It is the curse, I guess, of the series writer to have to top previous episodes, lest jaded viewers lose interest. (“Next week on Lost, Jack discovers that he and Ben were Siamese twins separated at birth!”) Even so, much as I still enjoy the show, next time perhaps they could have House do something just a teeny bit more believable like, oh, say, leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, finding a cure for cancer using ordinary household products or bringing lasting peace to the Middle East?

(Title explanation here.)

Weekend Rotogravure

No theme here. No rhyme or reason for this particular collection of five photographs I found around the internet. I just thought they were amusing and worth passing along.

Worst Family Photo Ever




“Mom and Dad, meet my fiancé.”




Plan Ahead




All Your Gym Are Belong To Us




Unclear On The Concept

"... I'm a man of wealth and taste."

If by "wealth" one means something a bit better than abject penury and by "taste" one means strong opinions, that is. Still, to complete the title quote from "the philosopher Jagger," however dyslexically, please allow me to introduce myself or, more to the point, this blog.

I've been stringing words together and pulling them apart for a living for longer than I care to remember, primarily as a lawyer (and if there's one thing the world needs more than another blogger it's another lawyer, right?) but also, long ago, as a writer of the freelance variety. Having recently forsaken the full-time lawyering racket for the putatively full-time writing racket, this blog is intended both to facilitate and to impede that transition. That is, on the one hand, herewith is Ridgely the citizen-pundit offering to a largely (and appropriately) indifferent world criticism, analysis and commentary from a largely pragmatic libertarian and decidedly ante-post-modern perspective. If those labels, juxtaposed as they are, seem a bit confusing, stick around and perhaps I'll be able to elucidate them for you.

On the other hand, at least for the foreseeable future, the extent to which I labor to fill this virtual space is inversely proportional to the extent I write anything in return for which I might ever see, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, "the necessary." Even so, the state of things being what they are, to quote one of Plum's fellow Dulwich College alums, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Okay, so maybe a little tarnished, worried just a tad and occasionally a wee bit mean.

I came to become a participant in the blogosphere several years ago, having had my appetite whetted by becoming a (too) frequent commenter on a now unfortunately defunct group blog called Left2Right, where I played, if not the Devil himself, at least the Devil's Advocate. I was subsequently recruited to participate in another group blog, of a more libertarian flavor, called Inactivist. For various reasons, the prime mover(s) behind Inactivist have largely moved on after the site crashed some months ago, taking with it a fairly substantial body of my published musings into the nether regions of net space, quite possibly never to be seen again.

Now, I'm no more egotistical than the next blogger (how's that for damning with faint praise?), but that experience finally convinced me that if I was going to bother to do "this thing that we do" at all, maybe I should do it with a bit more control over the process. Being (1) cheap, and (2) a cyber-naif, I've settled for the time being here under the auspices of Blogger, a free service of Google (Motto: "Do no harm that doesn't cut into profits") under the assumption that any company with a market value rapidly approaching its misspelled name is probably a safe haven. We'll see.

Anyway, back to the apologia. I know just enough about law, economics and philosophy to be dangerous, mostly to myself, so one way or another these are the most likely perspectives, however tenuously connected to a given topic, you'll find here. On the other hand, a steady diet of nothing but steak, however salivation inducing it may be at first, gets old really fast. So I reserve the right to blog on just about anything else, especially including films, odd news and adorable kitties non-political news and current events.

Finally, a few words on comments and the ethics of cyberspace. I encourage comments and I'm fairly tolerant when it comes to such matters. However, I reserve the right to delete comments I unilaterally deem to be beyond the pale and to ban any commenter I deem to be too much of an *sshole. Note the asterisk. Yeah, I used "dirty words" from time to time and you can, too; but let's not get carried away. As the newspapers say, this is supposed to be a more or less "family friendly" site. Also, my understanding of the blogging ethos is that, once published, a blog entry should remain as is unless the author informs the reader of any editing or updating. I will follow that rule as far as the substance of my comments goes. However, having no editor, I reserve the right to fix spelling, grammatical and similar errors and occasionally to change a word or phrase here or there if it significantly improves my original intended meaning in my posts without notice. This last may not be strictly kosher by blogging standards, but I intend to do it only rarely and even then only fairly soon (say, within the first 24 hours) after the original post.

This is a work in progress. Much tweaking will need to be done and I haven't a clue how it may evolve. Suggestions and criticism, constructive or otherwise, are welcome. Meanwhile, on with the show!