Note: I live for letters like this one. Enjoy.
- Joe

Dear Joe,

Life had been going pretty well for me this year. In fact, 2008 was possibly my best year ever.

That was all until I opened JoeDonatelli.com on November 13th. Joe immediately knows what I’m talking about. For the rest of you, it was this entry, titled “How will The Shield end?”

About two years ago, my brother told me about that show. I watched the first season, thought it was pretty cool, but then moved to L.A. and had other things to do.

But then November 13th happened. And Joe, so infatuated with this TV series, convinced me to catch up with it so that I could see for myself how it would end and if any of Joe’s picks would be remotely close to accurate.

And so it began: the last month and a half spent wasting loads of free time watching every single episode to this hateful TV drama filled with negative energy. And I got hooked. Bad.

The more I watched, the more addicted I became. The more addicted I became, the more my life began to unravel. I started losing sleep due to dreams of Claudette Whims and Vic Mackey interrogating me. My blood pressure and pulse rate rose. Work projects suffered. I trusted no one. Social contacts were dropped. I had two of the most miserable, sleep-deprived workouts of my life. I even turned down a Saturday night of easy sex to stay in and watch two more episodes (that and this new protein powder I’d been sampling gave me the most awful gas of my entire life.)  I even considered finding Lt. Kavanaugh and killing him myself. I would never prescribe this much police drama to anybody, even one of JoeDonatelli.com’s family members.

To make matters worse, on the morning of my birthday, I watched my favorite character get blown to pieces by a hand grenade. I nearly lost it.

All in all, I envision that I destroyed about 60 hours of quality time due to JoeDonatelli.com - time that could have been spent working with customers, marketing the Web site, reading useful business books or god forbid having sex. Instead, I watched spiteful, deceit-filled drama until I either fell asleep or snapped at my roommate for breathing the same air as me.

But finally, on the night of Christmas day 2008, I made it. I watched The Shield up to the last episode. I went straight to the now-hated JoeDonatelli.com and found his post from November 13th. I agreed with none of his ten predictions, and muttered “what an asshole” under my breath.

And then I watched the final episode, and had the same contemplative reaction as just about everyone else did. And I went back onto JoeDonatelli.com to read his final review and noted that the pick he gave 1,000,000-to-1 odds was the closest one to coming true! What an asshole indeed.

I’ll continue to read JoeDonatelli.com in the important matters of dating (warming up your sets), the misery of being from Cleveland, and the massive differences between Marina Del Rey, CA, and Santa Monica, CA, (which when thinking about while in Cleveland right now seem quite miniscule). But when it comes to popular culture and media, I will gladly pass.

Now, your typical JoeDonatelli.com writer would probably say, (in some nasally and insulting writer voice that shows poignant indignation), “Well that proves what a great show it was. It was so well-written that you were drawn in and it affected your life, never to be the same again.”

To which I say, “Fuck you, JoeDonatelli.com, fuck you.”

- Mike, of PricePlow, Los Angeles

The final episode of The Shield was brilliant. It was perfect. It was the ending I did not see coming - but should have. Vic Mackey, who always got what he wanted, often by force, must live in a prison of his own creation. I could not be happier with the way the show ended. Bravo to the writers, actors and creator Shawn Ryan. 

There is an ogoing battle in my head between The Wire and The Shield. Which is the better cop show? Until tonight, I would have said The Wire. But The Shield ended on a stronger note — with a stronger last season and episode. It will take me days to sort it all out. Look for a Shield-Wire column in the future.

Overall, there were just a ton of great moments, including the darkly humorous conclusion of Vic Mackey’s crime-fighting career. My only criticism is that I would have liked to have seen the Dutch versus the serial killer kid plotline play out more. I felt like it got short shrift. It deserved a more Shield-ian ending.

Otherwise, the episode was everything I could hope for in a series finale.

There are two episodes left. I am starting a list. Please feel free to add to it.

1. Vic takes down the Mexican cartel, gets a job with the feds and continues to clean up Farmington. Seeing the error of his ways, he becomes the good cop he never gave himself a chance to be. Odds: 1,000,000-to-1

2. Claudette and Dutch take Vic down and send him to prison. Odds: 50-to-1

3. Claudette and Dutch must choose between taking down Vic, who is a murderous cop, and letting Vic take down the Mexi cartel, which, with its money and power, is even more loathsome and evil than Vic Mackey. Claudette and Dutch let Vic go. Odds: 5-to-1

4. Much like Vic did to Terry, Dutch goes Mackey and puts a bullet in Vic’s brain and gets away with it, citing self-defense, or possibly pinning the murder on Shane. This ending would keep Mackey’s philosophy alive. The only way you can get justice on the streets is to get dirty. Odds: 25-to-1

5. Vic goes rogue and works for the Mexi cartel full-time. This would explain why he currently is withholding info about the Mexi cartel’s intentions in Farmington from the feds. Odds: 75-to-1

6. Vic puts a bullet in Shane’s head. The show would start with Vic killing a team member and end with Vic killing a team member. There is a nice symmetry to that. Odds: 20-to-1

7. Shane puts a bullet in Vic’s head. The show would start with Vic killing a team member and end with Vic getting killed by a team member. There is a nice symmetry in that, too. But it assumes that Shane will outwit Vic, which is a longshot. Odds: 40-to-1

8. Claudette, who is ill, puts a bullet in Vic’s head. She only has a few months/years left to live, she figures, so why not? What good will her remaining days be if she can’t bring Vic to justice? Odds: 10-to-1

9. Lt. Kavanaugh (Forest Whitaker), driven mad, returns from Vic’s past and blows him away. Odds: 200-to-1

10. In order to secure his mayoral election, Aceveda must rely on Vic to do his dirty work once again and in return Vic gets his old job back at The Barn, running another strike team. Thus proving my theory: On the gritty streets of Los Angeles, Vic Mackey is the ultimate survivor. Odds: 7-to-1

A lot of people complain about television. They say things like, “There is nothing on TV,” or ”TV sucks,” or “My television is broken and I don’t have enough money to get it fixed.”

Whiners.

I am living through a personal mini-golden era of television right now. I am sharing this to counterbalance all of the bashing my good friend TV takes by snobs, media elites and other people who are idiots.

For the last few weeks I have been enjoying:

The final season of The Shield. My favorite non-Wire cop drama is racing to a spectacular conclusion. I want to know how it ends now, but I want to milk every moment of every episode before the final episode. If not for The Wire, I might call it the best cop show of all time. It might be. I think I will have to write about this after the final episode.

The Office. It is probably the best comedy on television. That is not saying much, compared to the competition, but it is consistently funny. This season has been a bit of a letdown with Pam out of the office. I hope she returns soon. I did not realize how integral she was to the show’s chemistry.

Mad Men. Go ahead. Take my Man Card. I deserve that.

Friday Night Lights. Great show. I’m probably not the target demo. Don’t care. The show’s characters have grown on me. Last year’s writers’ strike knocked the second season short and really killed its momentum. The show is finally rounding back into form. Spoiler. Seeing Smash get his scholarship was great. Same goes for the trials and tribulations of Principal Taylor.

Other reasons to watch television right now: The Soup, South Park, the baseball playoffs and World Series, college football, the NFL, Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football.

Also, 30 Rock will be back soon and Lost returns in early 2009.

If the Mayor of Television existed, I would thank him.

What a week. Barack Obama called Sarah Palin a Max Factor-wearing barnyard animal. The NFL lost Tom Brady to a season-ending injury. And I just found out that the voiceover guy who was known for doing those “In a world gone…” movie trailers died. His name was Don LaFontaine. He was 68 years old.

Oh, and the world almost ended.

What’s that? The world almost ended?

Yes, scientists in Europe almost ended the world. As you might have noticed, they failed. And thank goodness. The final season of The Shield is only two episodes old, and I really need to know how it ends. (My guess is that it ends with detective Vic Mackey saying something cool. My prediction: Right after taking a bullet from Dutch in the final scene, Mackey will say something like, “I don’t get shot in the chest with bullets! I shoot bullets out of my chest!” Then he’ll flex and a bullet will shoot out of his chest and kill a Los Mags gang leader who is about to shoot Dutch. Then Mackey will say, “You’re welcome,” get in his car and drive down Alvarado. In the final shot, in a move that breaks the convention of the fourth wall that separates the characters and the viewers, Mackey will turn to the camera and say, ”On the gritty streets of Los Angeles, Vic Mackey is the ultimate survivor.” Then the credits will roll and I will look for my shirt, which I was not aware I had removed.)
 
Or Mackey might retire quietly with half his pension and start that bonsai garden he’s been thinking about. We’re only two episodes in. It could go either way. I don’t know the answer yet. This is why I need the world not to end.

The end of the world is a topic that has fascinated me since childhood. One day while I was home sick from elementary school, my mom – for reasons I’ll never fully understand – had me watch a video about Nostradamus’s predictions for the end of the world. It included footage of the antichrist directing the battle of Armageddon from an underground bunker. I don’t think I enjoyed a full night of sleep again until I was 19.

I became obsessed with stories about the end of the world. Nuclear winter, meteors, the Book of Revelations – I was all over it. Looking back, I’m not sure why. There is not much one can do about the end of the world. I guess I just wanted to be in the know if it was going down. Ten thousand years later, when highly-intelligent, mutated gor-phins (body of a gorilla, head of a dolphin) discovered my frozen corpse, I wanted one archaeologist gor-phin to say to the other, “This one looks like he knew it was coming – like he was smarter than the rest.”

(An artist’s representation of things to come. Photo by foshie/flickr.)

I still follow these end-of-the-world stories, albeit with a slightly less-morbid outlook. In case you missed the latest reason never to fall asleep again, on Wednesday scientists in an underground lab on the French-Swiss border successfully fired a beam of protons all the way around the 17-mile tunnel inside the world’s largest particle collider. Their goal is to recreate the conditions that existed in the first billionth of a second after the universe was created 14 billion years ago – conditions that were created, perhaps, by another group of scientists 14 billion years ago. Did your mind just explode?

This is my favorite part of the Associated Press story:

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:36 a.m. (0836 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

The world spends $3.8 billion on a particle collider and how we find out it works is through two white dots flashing on a computer screen. Couldn’t they splurge for one font? Would some Helvetica have broken the budget? I also have to wonder, what happens if something goes wrong? If the world is about to be swallowed by a black hole, I want klaxons sounding and lights flashing and jets scrambling and one white-haired scientist pounding his fist against an observation window yelling, “You had no right to play god!”

Instead, we will probably get two red dots.

Yes, I just mentioned a black hole. This is where the end-of-the-world part enters the equation. Skeptics are worried that when scientists eventually fire protons at each other from the opposite direction, the collision could imperil the earth. (“Imperil” and “earth” are two words you never want to see in the same sentence, right up there with “slapdash” and “airplane,” or “naked” and “Hasselhoff.”)

According to the Associated Press:

The skeptics theorized that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars. ”It’s nonsense,” said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before Wednesday’s start. CERN is backed by leading scientists like Britain’s Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.

If you’re not assured by Stephen Hawking, perhaps you can take comfort from the information presented in this accurate rap video, which was created by science writer Kate McAlpine while she was working in the press office of the super collider. It has received over 2.9 million views on YouTube. What it lacks in cohesive choreography and dope-ass beats it makes up for in easy-to-understand scientific explanations.
 
The good news in all this is that the information gained from this experiment could lead to the discovery of a hypothetical particle – the Higgs boson – that is believed to give mass to all other particles. It would be nice if scientists knew what things were made of. It would change the world.

For instance, such knowledge might make it easier for doctors to put an NFL player’s knee back together because they will finally know what a knee is made of. As a Cleveland Browns fan, this would represent a gigantic jump in my quality-of-life. Of course, a Browns Super Bowl victory is a sure sign that the world is about to end, so, from where I’m sitting, all of this progress is a mixed blessing at best.