Vacation-At-Home Log, Day Three:

• The Man Cub is generous and Fang sleeps all the way till 5:30. Kudos to The Missus for all the middle-of-the-night Man Cub Wrangling. I usually sleep right through it.

• I introduce the youngling to Superman, the old black & white TV series. The first episode on the disc climaxes in an epic-length food-throwing scene between most of the principals. Huh?? The Man Cub found my tennis shoe much more interesting. I want to watch another episode, but he wants to eat. So he eats. Formula, not the tennis shoe.

• Next, the Sunday morning news shows come on. We always watch these. I explain to the Man Cub that all the headliners, the politicians and appointed officials, are really boring and just repeat that week’s party-line bullet-points. From the Homeland Security guy to Barbara Boxer, it’s all blah blab la. The host tries to trip them up, they try to say nothing they hadn’t been prepared to say, and the commercials are all love notes from multinational corporations. The good part comes next: The reporters and editorialists roundtable. It’s their job to be interesting – as opposed to the politicos’ job of being vague.

Holy Cow, Meet The Press is great today!! The panel consists of NBC’s newly-combative David Gregory, Paul Gigot (some right-wing dude), Cheney shill Mary Matalin and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Right off the bat, Matalin and Dowd really seem to hate each other. It was super cool watching Matalin snipe at Dowd on camera and in her presence, and Dowd just absorb the blows like a lady. Even when she had a chance to respond in kind, she just made her point and let it go at that. That Maureen Dowd is all class. And I was disappointed in how shrill Matalin was (she’s fun when she’s on with her husband). She even called ‘the press’ obsession’ with Cheney’s obsession for secrecy a ‘jihad,’ to which David Gregory took justifiable umbrage. Then Matalin snapped back at him. And on and on. In the end, it was damned good TV, and that’s what’s important.

• Then it’s time for a little more STNG. We hit a slow patch of episodes (in one of them, poor Patrick Stewart is required to cry out authoritatively, “They must not be permitted to destroy us!”) then before we know it The Missus is up and The Day of Atonement starts in earnest. This leads indirectly to...

• The long-awaited Brokeback Mountain review: Long, slooooow and deeeepressing. Like Rob Zombie’s “House of a Thousand Corpses,” it’s a great date movie to take someone to who you don’t ever want to see again. Director Ang Lee unspools his movie in dream time: small moments take forever, then next thing you know, it’s suddenly years later. I don’t like art films (Terrence Malick films excepted), and I don’t like niche films. This is not limited to films in which guys spend lots of time making out with other guys; it includes Kung Fu flicks, any subtitled foreign language stuff (unless it’s mostly guns and explosions and dirty sex), anything southern Gothic/Tennessee Williams or featuring rappers playing criminals – my cultural xenophobia crosses all lines and boundaries. Basically, in my perfect world, every new movie would star middle-aged white hippie slacker males and be directed by James Cameron. Through the miracle of computer trickery, Scarlett Johansson would do a girl/girl love scene with herself featuring excessive gratuitous nudity, and the bad guys would all get blown up in a really big explosion at the end. Run credits, everyone goes home happy. Well, I do anyhow.

"Brokeback Mountain" failed to meet the bar on almost every level. It gets half a star for having sheep, because having horny guys guard sheep is always funny, gay or straight.

• Now Day Four has dawned… at 3 a.m. When this is over, I’ll definitely need a vacation from my vacation.