Lately, with the TV season over, my wife and I have been perusing the networks' websites for episodes of shows we hadn't seen before. We do this instead of, say, reading, or talking, or other, more productive activities. It's bad enough that we watch good TV; watching shows we don't even care about is just an exercise in self-loathing.

But our latest find, October Road, has been entertaining. Not because the show is entertaining (which it is, mildly), but because it features some of the worst TV writing we've ever heard. Hearing some of the strange, awkward phrases that come out of the characters' mouths is an endless source of amusement.

Consider the scene where our hero, Nick, decides he's really in love with his old flame, Hannah. We're treated to a montage of Nick sprinting along a picturesque Massachusetts neighborhood street, interspersed with shots of "the other girl," Aubrey, packing her bags and crying. Cheesy enough, but nothing surprising. Nick arrives, out of breath, at Hannah's door.

Now, what does a guy in this situation say? He just sprinted to his true love's house. He's going to put himself out there. He's going to make his feelings known, right away, in no uncertain terms. He's out of breath, so he's going to be blunt, monosyllabic, and brief. Basically, it's going to be the Jerry Maguire "you had me at hello" speech, the one that makes your sweetie's knees weak. Right?

Wrong. Nick belts out this gem:

Everything about this place reminds me about my mother; everything. Her memory haunted it all, and when I left here, and put some distance between myself and the Ridge, it got easier. But just the thought of me coming back here, the pain of it, kept me away. It's indefensible, I know, but I was a kid, I was grieving, and I was dumb. I lost my way.

Huh? You sprinted halfway across town to talk about your mother? Then:

What I remember is you, barefoot, in your prom dress, pumping gas into my truck, laughing beneath the lipstick sky.

Yes, he actually utters the words "beneath a lipstick sky."

Now, I'm not a TV writer. But I know that there are things that look all right on paper, but that no one in their right minds would ever say out loud. I'd have to put "beneath a lipstick sky" in that category.

October Road is full of this purple stuff. The story is actually pretty engaging, with a good mix of characters. To their credit, the actors do a reasonable job of getting through their lines with straight faces. But I'm constantly feeling sorry for them because of the ridiculous things they're made to say. That gets old.

Here's another choice bit from the same episode:

Eddie: And then I was thinking about you, and the way you smile, and the way it starts in your eyes and spreads across your face like a rush of ink. I was thinking about how, when I see you, or I hear your voice on the phone, I think to myself, "Oh goody, now the fun begins."

Goody. Just for a little perspective here: Nick is a writer, so you could argue that he has an excuse. Eddie mows lawns.

Imagine my amusement when The Daily WTF happened to post this excellent screenshot today. It was meant to show how programming can go wrong, but as any software developer will tell you, sometimes bugs are actually features.

(An aside… my original comment on the Daily WTF post mentions Dean Koontz. When my wife and I lived in Germany, we used to go to the library and look for novels in English. They didn't have a lot, but they did have Dean Koontz. So we picked up a few, took them home, and read them. We still chuckle about that. I've long since forgotten the particulars, but Dean Koontz has this habit of overanalyzing his characters. Most novels would describe someone's behavior and allow you to reach your own conclusions as to their motives and mindset. Dean Koontz lays it all out - you get the action (say, X punches someone), the generalized mindset (X is an angry person), and the relevant back story (X's dad was a drunk and punched people), all in one or two convenient paragraphs. This gets the character development out of the way so we can move on with the plot. Handy, no? October Road reminds us a lot of Dean Koontz.)

Honestly, as weird as the dialogue is, we'll probably still watch October Road. At its core, it's driven by its characters - it owes a lot to Ed, Dawson's Creek, and similar shows - and they're likable, believable, and well-acted. They just need to stop with all the pseudo-Shakespearean speechifying.

Note: because I couldn't bear to watch the episode again, I ganked the quotes from TV.com. I'm not sure they're verbatim, but the important parts are.

How can you not be amazed at this:

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron's curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac's spiral-bound journals for "On the Road"; and Ezra Pound's copy of "The Waste Land," in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: "For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E." Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of "Comus," containing corrections in Milton's own hand? Or the manuscript for "The Green Dwarf," a story that Charlotte Bronte wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of "Ulysses," on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center's archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.

Read more in The New Yorker.