friendless in seattle?

i'm getting dangerously close to cleaning up on friends.

sometimes, just sometimes, when i lounge on my futon in a artificially-generated-laugh-track-induced stupor i press pause on the dvd player and spend a minute looking at the patently ridiculous expressions on screen. i memorize their facial arrangements. after ten minutes i repeat the exercise. their bodies are in different places but their faces look the same. and from this i came up with a magnificient theory.


they make the 'friends' act that way to save on bandwidth.


come on, it's a perfectly obvious explanation for why their facial expressions seem to cycle every 33.452 seconds (the time between laughs).

when they send the video signals across the wire they send frame data about the background, the body movements and other action. they don't send data about the faces though - they just send data like "ross:3,monica:16,joey:1,chandler:2" where the number stands for a certain expression. for example chandler:2 is chandler with the 'duh-aha' expression.

for the next frame they send "joey:4,chandler:2,rachel:8".

they used to have to send more data for chandler but then he grew really fat and you can't tell between his facial expressions anymore. so he's stuck at 2 - the 'duh-aha' expression.


i started re-reading the douglas adams' second-best masterpiece over the weekend. yes, they're all masterpieces but dirk gently's holistic detective agency is the best. hence, the first in the hitchhiker's trilogy (although there are actually 5 of them?) takes second place. if you disagree you can take it up with my pet vogon. i found the entire set, used (of course - i'm cheap) at elliot bay. i can't believe they actually have 'pattern recognition' in the bargain book section now.

may they be struck by the curse of mildew. lots of it. especially in their prominently displayed copies of 'the da vinci code' which is a featured selection of the incomparable 'oprah book club'.
the oprah hangout is a pretty exclusive club. you need to wear a bookmark and a post-it to enter. dog-ears are discouraged but the drinks are free.