I’ve been watching Defying Gravity, or what I affectionately call Grey’s Astronomy. Because, really, it’s Seattle Grace in space. We have our little cliques with the newbie astronauts and the instructors…they all flirt and drink (at Major Tom’s of all places) and compete and show us that life in 2052 is pretty much exactly the same as it is in 2009.

MerDer has been replaced with…Zonner. Yeah, we’ll go with that. Zoe is the doe-eyed new astronaut and Donner is her instructor. They meet cute in astronaut school and hook up after a drunken night at…sigh…Major Tom’s. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Flash-forward to now and they clearly still carry torches for one another…and I assume we’ll find out what happened to the mysterious baby, who was conceived because Donner was told he’d been given a vasectomy…but apparently he wasn’t really given one. Yeah. How’d you like to find that out, guys? You went through the pain and had the bag of frozen veggies on your veggie for a couple of days…all for naught. Bummer.

The great thing about Donner is he unloads voice-overs the likes of which both Meredith Grey and Mary Alice Young would be proud. Last night’s episode theme was “doors”…let me paraphrase an excerpt of Donner’s wisdom:

Doors. They’re these things you walk through, that have hinges and locks and knobs. Sometimes they’re white, sometimes they’re other colors. They always open though, and always shut. It’s up to the opener or shutter to determine how the door will behave. Doors, like life, have an finite lifespan. Sometimes you need to replace them because they’re worn out, other times because you just don’t like the style anymore. Doors…when one opens, one opens.

Maybe I’m lacking in things to watch on Sunday nights…God knows I don’t have enough programming to keep me occupied. With Bridezillas, Army Wives, Entourage, and Iron Chef America on right now and Mad Men starting up next week…clearly I need more network entertainment to balance out the basic and premium cable offerings.

BUT…I draw the line at hokey lovemaking scenes like the one last week between Rollie and Jen. I get that he’s leaving and she’s stuck behind (presumably to die), but it was the floaty-naked-bodies-intertwined-in-the-airlock schlock that sort of did me in. Fortunately, there was only one scene like that. In an environment like the one on Antares, I don’t want cuddly wuddly sex…oh no, I want sex that uses every space metaphor known to man and alien. I want Antares hookups to be cosmic! White-hot! Other-worldly! I want Donner to set his phaser to stun!

We have some other characters, too…like the mission commander, Ted. BTW…I totally expected names in 2052 to be names like Zoltar, Kahn, or Mildred. Ted was apparently duped by his wife into getting involved in these shenanigans. We also have the tech nerd, the psychiatrist, Puck from Real World: San Francisco, the Professor, Mary Ann, Don Draper, Vinnie Chase, Heidi Klum, the gang from Pigs in Space, and Astronaut Jones. I’m not kidding, it’s crazy up in that space ship. It’s so crazy they all have to wear this thing called a HALO device (“Hormone And Libido Oppressors”) to, um, oppress their hormones and libidos. Yeah.

Is Defying Gravity going to save ABC? Probably not. Will it help President Obama get his health care bill passed? Unlikely. Because I like the show, that probably means it will be cancelled before Thanksgiving. But…it’s entertaining and it’s Canadian…which might be enough to carry it through an entire season.

Besides, I’m dying to know how Zoe’s tomatoes turn out…aren’t you?

Twitter’s down…Facebook’s down (or at least for me it is…), so I guess in times of technological turmoil you go back to the basics; in this case, my blog. I’m too insignificant to have anyone come at me with a denial of service attack.

So. Whatcha all doing? I just finished watching The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and am enjoying some banana bread. Just ordered a poodledrug refill…and trying to decide if I want to go to the gym when Seth gets home, or beforehand.

Twitter was back up for about ten seconds…and when I tried to log in I was told my username and/or password was incorrect. Fabulous.

Every morning in my email, I get a Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Publishing. Usually it’s something from the No Shit, Sherlock department like, “To bring out the best in your employees, put your trust in them” or “How to write an email that will escape the Outlook rule your employees have set up to automatically delete anything from you”. Today’s topic though, revolved around the concept of lean production-by-way-of-minimizing-desktop-clutter, which just also happens to tie into an article in the Wall Street Journal today about how to make Starbucks operate more like Toyota (subscription required).

Before we get started, I’d like to point out that I had a cube full of tchotchkes for many years…and I fully believe they increase inefficiency. Why? If you need to throw something at someone, you’ve got items at the ready.

Anyway, the gist of the WSJ article is this: Starbucks is looking for ways to improve efficiency, get people coming back in the door, economic downturn, cash for clunkers, Brangelina, etcetera etcetera etcetera. My eyes and ears perk up when I read articles about Starbucks, because I spent twelve weeks this past Spring working on a strategic plan for Starbucks. So, Starbucks assigns a “lean team” to a “VP of lean thinking” and sends them out on a round-the-country tour of Starbucks stores playing Mr. Potato Head with managers to get them to understand the concept of efficiency and how it relates to plastic, faux-starchy vegetables. Sort of The Apprentice meets The Amazing Race.

I don’t dispute the idea, nor do I criticize it. What I want to know though, is…where did this particular idea originate?

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