Junior's Joint. Junior and his friend are trying to figure out how to turn on the TV, and are apparently having problems remembering that the cable box has to be turned on first. Morons. I've got two cable boxes, two TiVos, a DVD player, an X-Box, a PlayStation, a video mixing board, and my PC all hooked up to my TV, and it still only takes one button to turn things on. God bless universal remotes. The guys who tabulate my electric bill each month, however, are all infidels who deserve to die. They eventually get things straightened out, and settle down for a nice afternoon in front of the all-seeing, all-knowing, life-giving God Box. They flip through the channels, passing one with the hilariously meta audio of a guy announcing, "Tony's whole life was horses." Heh. They finally settle synergistically on HBO's own Curb Your Enthusiasm, and an increasingly out-of-it Uncle Junior seems to think that he's Larry David, and that Bobby Baccala is Larry's fat friend whose name I don't know because I always end up watching that show on mute while I write my recaplets. ["Jeff." -- Wing Chun] This fortuitous bit of intramural mistaken identity is clearly supposed to demonstrate that Junior is beginning to suffer from Alzheimer's or something similar, but I'd have to think that a much more reliable indicator would be the fact that he doesn't even seem to recognize that the old guy who plays his only friend in the world here has been recast. Oops.

Bada Bing backroom. Tony is at his desk, doing the Newark Star-Ledger word jumble, which is already funny enough on its own that I don't even need to make the almost de rigueur "Marmaduke" joke. Bobby Baccala shows up for a sit-down, and after the small talk, he basically asks Tony for the opportunity to do a little more earning and a little less purchasing of "stool softeners" for Uncle Junior. Ew. But also, heh. I mean, can you picture anyone else on this show buying stool softener? Christopher would probably snort the stuff, and I don't even want to think about how Paulie would administer one. Tony is sympathetic to his new brother-in-law's plight, but also admits that Bobby is the only one he can trust to take care of Junior, presumably for the reasons I just mentioned. "And believe it or not," Tony adds, "it's important to me that he's cared for." Uh huh. Remember that one in about ten minutes. Tony also asks after Janice, and Bobby diplomatically replies that it's hard because "she sleeps a lot." Tony makes a crack about her purported travails with Epstein-Barr syndrome, and then softens his tone to confess that "marriage, or any partnership for that matter, is a give and a take." Yeah, because Tony is definitely the guy you'd want to turn to for help on this subject. On the other hand, it probably is true that the only person in the world pathetic enough to actually need Tony Soprano's advice on marriage is someone who'd be dumb enough to marry Janice in the first place. Tony promises to find something for Bobby, and the meeting breaks up. The best part of the entire scene, however, is totally the bear hug at the end, because both guys are so big they can barely reach around each other. Hee!