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Get a Life (TV series)

Get a Life was a television sitcom that was broadcast in the United States on the Fox Network from September 23, 1990 to March 8, 1992. The show starred Chris Elliott as a 30-year-old paperboy named Chris Peterson. Peterson lived in an apartment above his parents' garage (Elliot's parents were played by Elinor Donahue and his real life father, comedian Bob Elliott). The opening credits depicted Chris Peterson delivering newspapers on his bike to the show's theme song, "Stand" by R.E.M.

The show was a creation of Elliott; his friend Adam Resnick, who, like Elliott, had been a writer for David Letterman's Late Night with David Letterman TV show; and David Mirkin, former writer and producer for Newhart and occasional writer and producer for The Simpsons. Notable writers of the series included Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter of Being John Malkovich; and Bob Odenkirk, co-creator of Mr. Show.

The show was unconventional for a prime time sitcom, and many times the storylines of the episodes were surreal. For example, Elliott's character actually dies in twelve episodes. The causes of death included being crushed by a giant boulder, old age, tonsillitis, stab wounds, gunshot wounds, falling from an airplane, strangulation, getting run over by cars, choking on cereal, and simply exploding. For this reason, it was a struggle for Elliott and Mirkin to get the show on the air. Many of the executives at the Fox Network hated the show and thought it was too disturbing and that Elliott's character was too insane.

Contents [hide]
1 Synopsis
2 The many deaths of Chris Peterson
3 Home video
4 Pop culture
5 External links



[edit] Synopsis
Chris Peterson was a carefree, childlike bachelor who refused to live the life of an adult. At the age of 30, Chris still lived in with his parents and maintained a career delivering newspapers; a job that he had held since his youth. He had no driver's license (instead, riding his bicycle wherever he went). He was depicted being childish, naive, gullible, foolish, occasionally irresponsible, and extremely dimwitted. At some times, his intelligence was exaggerated to absurd levels: at one point, he tried to leave his parents' house but was unable to operate the front door. Another time, he fell out of an airplane after opening the plane's airlock, believing that the "EXIT" sign was a restroom.

Chris's parents (Fred and Gladys Peterson) were a vapid middle-aged couple who were almost always seen in their pajamas and robes (even when they left the house). They would often be shown doing something abnormal like polishing handguns, trying to shoot the deer that ate the flowerbulbs out of their garden, etcetera. Gladys (Elinor Donahue) was a smiling, caring mother who doted over Chris, though often made cynical, passive-aggressive comments about him and his lifestyle. Fred (Bob Elliott) was a much more blunt, wise-cracking old man, who was constantly exasperated by his son, and seemed to have a reckless disregard for Chris's well-being (on one occasion, Chris demonstrated how his father taught him to use a shotgun by placing the barrel in his mouth).

In the early episodes, Chris wanted little more than to spend his days reliving his childhood with his father and his best friend, Larry (Sam Robards). Larry was Chris's friend since childhood, but unlike Chris, Larry had since "grown up", owned a house, worked a dead-end job as an accountant, and had two children and a wife, Sharon (Robin Riker). Sharon was an overbearing housewife who did not want her husband associating with Chris, preferring instead that he make friends with more sophisticated socialites that better befitted their image. Sharon despised Chris, and Chris took any opportunity to irritate her. Larry was envious of Chris's carefree lifestyle, and was often coerced by Chris into joining him in his adventures, despite his wife's wishes. To Chris's dismay, Larry eventually heeded Chris's advice and left his wife and children at the end of the first season to find another woman. This left Sharon traumatized and became more and more obsessed with killing Chris in revenge. In later episodes, the newly single Sharon and Chris often end up attracted to each other or even sleeping together.

In a defiant nod to Fox Network demands that his character "be more independent", Chris Peterson was moved out of his parents' house at the beginning of the second season, much to his parents amazement and joy, and into the garage of ex-cop Gus Borden, played by Brian Doyle-Murray. Gus was fired from the police force for urinating on his boss after a cockfight. He was a gruff, demeaning sociopath with minimal tolerance for Chris's antics, which Chris seemed to be oblivious to, while looking up to Gus as a sort of paternal figure. For that reason, Gus served as Chris's comic foil throughout the second season.

One of the more controversial episodes featured a character named Spewey the Alien, an extra-terrestrial who secreted mucus from under his scales and projectile vomited when he became emotionally overwrought. At the end of the episode, Peterson and his landlord Gus barbecued and ate Spewey, although the creature was resurrected inside their refrigerator. Spewey was a parody of the films Mac and Me and E.T.


[edit] The many deaths of Chris Peterson
Chris had a string of bad luck which often led to him dying, only to be brought back to life by the next episode. This concept was later used heavily in South Park with Kenny McCormick's occasional tragic accidents. The examples below describe Chris's many deaths:

Chris and the other paperboys are fired by their boss, who hires a robotic Paperboy-2000 to do all the work. When the machine runs amok, Chris tries to stop the machine by destroying it, which he succeeds, but he ends up getting beaten to death in the end.
After saving up $100 to buy a Chrono-Sync 2000 Underwater Watch, Chris realizes that he has been ripped off when it falls apart in the shower. He goes on a quest to find the crooks responsible for the hoax, only to get caught up in their illegal sting operation himself. This proves fatal when the cops believe him to be part of the gang and shoot him in the head.
Chris falls in love, gets married, goes to the Colorado Rockies on honeymoon, narrowly avoids getting in an avalanche, and gets divorced all in one day. After getting his heart broken, he gets crushed by a giant boulder.
While on his first trip to the city, Chris gets slipped a mickey and realizes his wallet is missing. A local news crew films his plight and dubs him "Walletboy", making him the darling of the city. Everybody shuns him when it turns out that he just left the wallet at home. Chris dies of old age while waiting for them to forgive him, but in the end, fifty years later, Chris's skeleton gets a parade by the now-forgiving townspeople.
Chris gets a two-man toy sub in the mail that he ordered twenty years ago for $19.99. He and his father test it out themselves in the bathtub. This nearly kills them when they get stuck inside and the shower head breaks, until the bathtub gets overflooded, causing them to crash through the ceiling below. Chris later dies of old age while waiting for a refund on the sub.
In another episode, Chris dies twice, once choking on his cereal and having a near-death experience, coming back to see visions of people's futures. Later, Sharon strangles Chris to death after he repeatedly stalks her while trying to warn her about her "fate" which he allegedly saw.
Although he does not officially die in the second season premiere, it is implied that Gus hacks Chris to death while he is sleeping. While he sleeps, Gus is shown sharpening his axe.
When Chris goes to the doctor to treat a sore throat, he is stunned to learn he will need a tonsillectomy and lose his voice briefly. The doctor assures him he will be fine as only .001% people die from tonsillectomies. His voice returns immediately before he dies as one of the .001%. The narrative voice gives a subsequent service message informing viewers not to become a statistic.
After Chris's prison pen-pal Irma comes to visit after being released, she takes over the apartment building, holding Chris, Gus, and everyone else hostage as she rebuilds her criminal empire. When the police come to take her down, Gus accidentally shoots Chris five times while trying to shoot her. Chris was the only death in the hostage crisis.
While Chris tries to stalk a beautiful doctor in hopes she will go out with him, another stalker follows him and kills him by stabbing him. He is left bleeding in the street, as cars repeatedly run over his half-dead body.
Following the brainwashing of Gus and Sharon to make them do whatever he wants, Chris gets his head ripped off by them, which they use to play soccer with in the front yard.
Determined to go back in time to prevent Gus from urinating on his boss who will get him fired, Chris makes a time travel potion to help him go back to 1977. In the end, the alternative universes following the change he makes are worse than they really are, so he decides to leave the past the way it was. Completely forgetting about those unintended consequences, Chris then chooses to fix his own past. He accidentally drinks the wrong potion and explodes.
As he goes on his first plane ride, Chris opens the exit door of the airplane thinking it was a restroom door and falls through the stratosphere. After reliving most of the events in the past year, he dies when he lands on a bed of explosives.

[edit] Home video
Rhino video has released best of videos and DVDs of the shows. They released four videos with two episodes each, then released two DVDs with four episodes each, as well as one or two bonus features. The eight episodes on the videos are the same as the ones on the DVDs. The DVDs were released in 2000 and 2002 respectively.

Volume 1 of the DVD has the episodes

The Prettiest Week of My Life
Bored Straight
Spewey and Me
Girlfriend 2000
Bonus Features:

Deleted scenes
Alternate audio versions of all shows with laughtrack removed
Volume 2 of the DVD has the episodes

Zoo Animals on Wheels
Married
The Big City
Neptune 2000
Bonus Features:

Interview with Executive Producer/Director David Mirkin
Alternate audio versions of all shows with laughtrack removed
These have all gone out of print. No word from Fox if it plans to release Complete Season DVDs of the show; however, in an undated interview, Chris Elliot mentions working on a Season 1 set with supplements that it is currently being held up in legalities [1].

Elliott appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Thursday, November 10, 2005, and reiterated the claim that the DVDs were being held up by "suits." He also stated, "Adam Resnick and I recorded commentary for the first season. Hopefully it will be released next year."


[edit] Pop culture
The rap group Handsome Boy Modeling School takes its name from an episode of Get a Life titled "The Prettiest Week of My Life", in which Chris enrolls in a men's modeling school with that name. The group's album, So... How's Your Girl? includes audio clips of the show between songs.

Charlie Kaufman (writer of such movies as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malcovich) wrote two episodes of Get a Life.

The title of the show, Get a Life, originated from a common taunt in American popular culture, directed at people as a way of disparaging an apparent lack of motivation, achievement or stature. The taunt was popularized in the early 1980s as a sarcastic and even more biting comeback to the then common taunt, "get a job", which had similar connotations.


PS - I HATED THIS SHOW WHEN IT WAS ON.....

[brooklyntam]

Cactus Gas

Cactus Gas is a novelette written by controversial Pakistani writer and critic, Nadeem F. Paracha. It was written for famous South Asian website, www.chowk.com in 2004. It was part of a series of short stories and novelettes written by Paracha during his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Starting with his novelette Acidity (Novelette) these stories which also include Gabriel's Bike and Graffiti Christ were all written for chowk.com and are part of his on-going series of social science fiction satirizing organized religion, dogma and capitalism, especially the sort plaguing modern politics and societies of India and Pakistan. Just like Acidity and much of Graffiti Christ, Cactus Gas was also written using experimental writing tools such as Surrealist automatism and the Cut-up technique.




Contents [hide]
1 Plot
2 Criticism
3 See also
4 External links



[edit] Plot
Cactus Gas is considered to be Parachas most bizarre and stark statement on the workings of capitalism and religion in India and Pakistan. However, Cactus Gas is more hostile in its satirical attack on the institution of Feudalism in Pakistan. The story takes place in the year 2040 and revolves around Ranjan a rebellious son of a wealthy and powerful feudal lord. Ranjan rebels against his feudal background and tries to find existential refuge in modern urban surroundings in the cities of India and Pakistan. However, his experiences here convince him that the modern capitalist cities of these countries may not be as restrictive and dogmatic as the people in his village, but the mindset of almost all urbanites is as feudalistic. His pursuit to find meaning beyond old feudal traditions is driven by accusations by some village elders that his father was born from dung(!). Paracha uses the happenings of Ranjans quest to find the answers as a way to comment on Islam, Hinduism, capitalism, feudalism and most bizarre of all, the clash between religion and Darwins theory of Evolution.


[edit] Criticism
Taken from chowk.com I remember finding this rather off-putting at first, because the protagonist (Ranjan), comes across to me as being somewhat misogynistic and xenophobic. . . his words certainly come across as such. Words describing this as sick then are really of no surprise because this is a comment on certain segments of our society, and it is sick.

Dung is a metaphor here that Nadeem has built the piece around, rather reflective of his humor. But this piece has a lot to do with identity. The protagonist is constantly in quest of answers in terms of his identity, and he ultimately becomes the identity he is so focused on throughout his life. How much should we focus on one particular identity to the exclusion of all else? This is what I get about this, and what I like about it, a few reads later is that in the exchanges between the various characters, there are critiques/questions on nationalism, ethnocentrism, religion, the feudal system, all these things that are such strong elements of our identity. And of course the non-surprise: Parachas continuing references to Coke and Pepsi.

In the releasing of the cactus gas, and the dung, the question arises (pun perhaps intended) does it really matter where we come from . . . it is what we make of ourselves and the life around us that matters. And how do we do that? And the parodying of melodramatic desi movies towards the end is hilarious!" Azaad Katputli, April, 2004

[Djtron75]

Special road
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A special road is a classification of road in the United Kingdom. For a road to become a special road, it must have a Statutory Instrument sanctioned under the Highways Act 1980. A road which is not a special road is termed an all-purpose road. The vast majority of the roads in the UK are all-purpose roads.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 The Special Roads Act 1949
o 1.1 The first special road
* 2 Motorways as special roads
* 3 Non-motorway special roads
* 4 See also

[edit] The Special Roads Act 1949

The passing of the Special Roads Act 1949 through Parliament allowed the UK to construct roads that were not automatically rights of way for certain types of user. All previous roads were automatically rights of way for all road users, including pedestrians. It was therefore possible to build roads designated only for vehicular traffic. The Act therefore allowed the construction of motorways.

The Special Roads Act was merged in with the Highways Act 1959, and later the Highways Act 1980

[edit] The first special road

The Special Roads Act was first used in late-1950s to designate the Preston Bypass, now largely part of the M6 motorway, as a special road.

[edit] Motorways as special roads

All motorways and associated sliproads in the UK are special roads. The special road regulations allow motorways to prohibit certain types of road user, including learner drivers (except learners of HGVs), agricultural vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, horseriders, invalid carriages, motorcycles under 50 cc and motorscooters. The special road regulations also forbids stopping, except in emergency, waiting in a queue, or under the direction of traffic signals or a police officer.In England, Highways Agency Traffic Officers can now stop traffic.

Unless there are other speed limit orders in force, a special road which is also a motorway comes under the Motorways Traffic (Speed Limit) Regulations 1974, which defines the speed limit, currently 70 mph (113 km/h) for cars and coaches and 60 mph (97 km/h) for towing vehicles (including HGVs).

In Scotland, there is a requirement to sign all speed limits on motorways due to variations in the equivalent Scottish legislation. At the entrance to most Scottish motorways it is normal to see a 70 mph sign.

[edit] Non-motorway special roads

Although the majority of special roads in the UK are also motorways, there are a number of special roads that are not motorways. Quite a number of these are toll bridges, and several others are former motorways which have since been downgraded. In order to charge a toll on a newly built road, special road regulations are usually necessary.

In addition, a small number of non-motorway special roads are relatively newly built dual-carriageway roads, such as the A1 expressway east of Edinburgh and parts of the A720 Edinburgh bypass, or parts of the A55 in North Wales. These particular roads have many of the same regulations as motorways, apart from the speed limit regulations, since that only applies to special roads which are also motorways. The usual speed limit regulations that apply to all-purpose road do not apply to special roads, so a non-motorway special road must define a speed limit as part of its Statutory Instrument.

It may be the case that, with high-profile campaigns against the construction of the M3 motorway at Twyford Down, in order to reduce the possibility of delays and cost due to protests, the Government opted to build the roads as a dual carriageway special road rather than as a motorway, even though many of the regulations are similar.

[brooklyntam]

Tamesis

In Celtic mythology, Tamesis was goddess of water, particularly fresh water. The English name for the River Thames comes from her name. Tamesis was later replaced by Llud as the God of the River Thames.

Scultures entitled Tamesis and Isis by Anne Seymour Damer can be found on the bridge at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. The original terracotta and plaster models were exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1785. They are now on show at the River and Rowing Museum in Henley.

[Djtron75]

Ressources humaines
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Ressources humaines is a 1999 French film (Human Resources) directed by Laurent Cantet. As the name implies, the subject of the film is the workplace and the personal tragedies that result from the conflicts between management and labour, and corporations and individuals. It stars Jalil Lespert. Most of the other actors are non-professionals. It is the winner of numerous international awards, and is one of the featured films at the 2005 Traverse City Film Festival. Subtitled in English, available on DVD.