I want to inaugurate a series of essays here, called Lucid Thoughts, where I am much more articulate and try a bit harder to talk about things. Perhaps I will even write drafts in Notepad in advance.

But now I see that it is late and I really shouldn't rack my brain at this point. But I'm thinking the first two installments will cover the TV show The Wire, and the comics anthology Kramer's Ergot. I think my talk of the latter will be more critical than what I've seen but my talk of the former will be more blind hyperbole of the type normally associated with praise of that show.

Before that, some inarticulate thoughts on the TV show Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. It's a British comedy that's a parody of eighties British television. Which would place it in the same category as the Owen Wilson/Jack Black/Ben Stiller/Rob Schrab pilot Heat Vision And Jack, if this didn't have more levels. It stars Matthew Holness, who was one episode of The Office, and some people who just seem to flutter around current British comedy. It's funny, with the last episode maybe being the funniest. It's hard to explain why it works. Partly it's because it's parody, and the things that are the funniest don't actually seem like jokes, just come off as very over-the-top moments. Or, because these moments are frequently violent, make the show seem darker than it is- It's very light, it's a parody, but one executed by British people giving bad line readings rather than the staff of Mad Magazine. It shares with The Office the ability to write bad jokes and not have that reduce the overall effect, which strikes me as something hard to do, as someone who thinks of humor as coming very natural and every time I see someone say a joke that strikes me as awful, I think about how even when I am just making stupid jokes for the sake of saying something I don't say things that awful because it's not how my mind works.

Tomorrow there will be lucid thoughts.