I put all of my spare change into a Coinstar machine in Sainsburys the other day and used the paper money I redeemed to buy the dvd box set of "My Name Is Earl", my favourite tv show. Since then I've been watching an episode a day.
If S.P. readers have never seen "My Name Is Earl" they should try it. It's about a guy who decides to make up for all of the wrong he's done in his life by writing a list of all his misdeeds, and rectifying each of them one by one. I'm just trying to be a better person. My name is Earl, he says at the beginning of each episode.
That scenario, in other hands, could destroy a show before it even got started: thank God Michael Landon didn't hear about it first. But somehow in the hands of Greg Garcia and Jason Lee (Earl), it becomes the most politically incorrect show ever made--packed with jokes about colour, disability, religion, and whatever else you would have expected to be off limits to writers in our new puritanical age. I love it.
I've toyed with the idea of righting all of my wrongs, like Earl, in the name of a better life. But where to start, eh? And it's such a question of nuance. My fault/ your fault? It depends on the day for me. I would like to be a better person. But I'd like it a bit more if the rest of you would be better people.
Is that too much to ask?
4 comments:
Yes sir. That's a good show.
I wonder how long my list would be.
I wonder how many lists I'd be on.
On a good day my list would have about 800 things on it, because on a good day I am sure everything that ever happened was nobody's fault but mine. On a bad day it's somebody else's fault if I cut myself shaving.
Hey Bruce!
Technical quetion. Do those Coinstar contraptions give you a full exchange, or do they take out a commission? I've wondered about that for ages....
Simon
They take a commission, but I couldn't tell you how much. You still end up with a fair amount of cash, though. You also get the immense satisfaction of making a horrible noise while you're feeding the coins into the machine. Best time to do it is at 10am on Sunday morning just after they've opened the tills. There's still a lingering respectful quietude in Sunday supermarkets, at least at first, and doing something as noisily self-serving as working a Coinstar machine feels delightfully crass.
Try it. You won't be sorry.
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