I lied.

Yesterday I was forced to go out, after all, and in the most stressful way possible. Just after I made that post, I realized with horror that my car needed to be moved due to street-cleaning regulations. Like, ten minutes ago. So I yanked on jeans and shoes and my Detroit Tigers cap and braved the light and exposed myself as a fraud. Will you ever trust me again?

The lazy day yesterday gave me ample opportunity to enjoy the best freebie I’ve received since accidentally rubbing up against Jennifer Love Hewitt’s left breast at a crowded Fox press event in Hollywood in 1998: The X-Files: The Complete Collector’s Edition, given to me by the nicest publicist in the world for my interest in interviewing David Duchovny back in July. (Sadly, just before the sex-addict story came out.) What I’ve been reminded? There is no better sci-fi show in the history of television than The X-Files.

[On a side note, I’m beginning to lean more toward writing that without the hyphen: The X Files. It just seems more punctuationally precise. It seems to me that the title refers to the files in Mulder’s cabinet, all marked with an “x,” not the (fictional) branch of the bureau named the X-Files, and the former wouldn’t necessitate the hyphen. But I can go either way. (That’s what she said.)]

Not surprisingly, then, I was curious about Fringe, the new J.J. Abrams show that he has described as being The X Files (no hyphen! whee!) without the mythology. A lot of people are Abrams fanatics (hi, GG!), but I’ve always thought that Alias was vastly overrated and in fact bordering on being unwatchable. (Don’t get me started on Felicity, definitely among the top ten most annoying shows of the past decade.) Sure, I love Lost and think it’s one of the best shows currently on the air, but that’s like saying my favorite meal at Stuckey’s is the waffles. (This makes no sense, but my goal going into this post was to make a Stuckey’s reference.) Based on last night’s premiere, Fringe isn’t worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as The X Files, its fatal flaw being that it presupposed that we cared about the characters before we got to know them. And sadly, once I did get to know the characters, I cared even less about them; they simply aren’t interesting enough to lead to anything but detached disinterest. Anyway, we’ll see where it goes from here, but so far it’s more Felicity than Lost.

Anyway, here’s my Q+A with Chuck Klosterman for Time Out New York. Maybe this will get me a free box set of Cocoa Puffs?

WHY I’M ANGRY TODAY
This article in today’s Guardian is probably the most depressing thing I’ve ever read — because it’s so perfectly true.