Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Somebunny Loves Me...

Aww... this explains a lot. Or actually not much at all:



If I'm Laura Bush, I am not standing for this floppy-eared homewrecking. Hey W... less bunny hugging, more Osama hunting please.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Sound Advice

I was watching MTV last night, and saw the following commercial:



Yes, it's Nehemiah and Johanna from the Real World: Austin counseling America's youth on career information. That would be great, if only either of the two actually had a career of their own. Instead, they are just doing Real World/Road Rules Challenges and otherwise hanging out and capitalizing on what little they have left of their 15 minutes of fame. Ah, the epitome of the MTV role model.

Marathon Sessions



One of the things that I love about Bravo, MTV, and VH1 are that they allow you to catch up on their shows by running a marathon of past episodes prior to airing a finale. It definitely helps to build an audience for the finale that may not otherwise tune in. It also allows viewers who have never seen one episode of a certain show to get hooked on a lazy weekend afternoon.

The one thing I hate about these marathons -- during the commercial breaks, they always show a teaser for the finale. I assume this is to let users know what day and time to tune in, but for folks who haven't seen the episodes leading up to the finale, these commercials are total spoilers. Hey look, it's the two finalists for Top Chef. Yay! But I'm only on episode 4, and now you've just ruined every other episode for me. Boo.

Can't these channels put a modified promo during marathons that just say "you're watching the marathon for America's Best Dance Crew, tune in for the finale on Thursday?" It would keep people happily watching the marathon AND get the date and time of the final episode in their minds. Seriously. Is this too much to ask?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

An Idol Question


I was watching the results show of American Idol this evening -- yes, I somehow got sucked into watching this show again this season. The thing that struck me today is that the bottom three contestants, ie. the ones that received the fewest votes, get to sing their song again before one of them is sent home.

I guess this has always been the case but for some reason I never noticed until today how utterly ridiculous this is. These are admittedly the absolute WORST three performances from the night before, so why would the producers of the show force us to listen to them again? Wouldn't it be better to keep viewers' interest by showcasing the three best renditions instead? This just doesn't make sense to me.

Ah yes, I know why I never really thought about this before. I hardly ever watched the results show, since it stretches out something that should take 2 seconds into one full hour. I'll just go back to my old habit of just tuning in next week and figuring out who's missing. Or maybe I'll just stop watching this ridiculous show. Um, yeah.

Random Thoughts, Canadian Edition



Some random Canadian thoughts for the day as I am sitting on a plane headed back to New York from Vancouver:

  • Whistler/Blackcomb is a nice resort for snowboarding. Just a nice variety of terrain for all levels. Although $84 bucks a day is damn steep, especially since the dollar is so weak. Sigh. Stupid U.S. dollar.
  • And just to illustrate how weak our dollar is now, I bought lunch from Burger King in Vancouver airport which ended up being $3.84. I whipped out 4 U.S. dollars, handed it to the cashier, and got just one lame Canadian penny back. Ouch.
  • I just finished watching No Country for Old Men on my trusty laptop. Can someone please explain to me what the hell the last 30 minutes of that movie were all about? If you looked up anti-climatic in the dictionary, I think a DVD of this movie would be sitting right there, slapping you in the face.
  • Why are planes the only place where the bathroom is referred to as a lavatory? No one ever refers to the bathroom as a lavatory outside of this setting, do they? I just find it strange. It would be like if people just started calling a telephone a snog simply because they were using it on a boat.
  • In any case, in aforementioned lavatory, I saw this sticker on the toilet (and don't worry, my hands were clean when I snapped this shot, honest):



    Ok, so I'm not supposed to throw cups, bottles, or handkerchiefs in the toilet. I'm not sure why I would think to chuck a bottle into the toilet anyhow. I mean I don't do that in a normal toilet, why would I suddenly think to start doing that on a plane? Even more puzzling, what is that last drawing supposed to be? A bar of soap? A pencil eraser? Why would I even have those things in my possession? I even asked the flight attendants and they were equally puzzled. If nothing else, I think I've sparked a debate that will go down in Air Canada lore of what that drawing is supposed to represent.
  • I saw South Park reruns on TV every single night in Canada. Shouldn't Canadians hate this show? All the Canadian characters on the show are morons, and they even wrote a song called "Blame Canada" for the South Park movie, with the lyrics, "blame Canada, blame Canada, it seems that everything's gone wrong since Canada came along, blame Canada, blame Canada... they're not even a real country anyway!"
  • I had heard that curling was a huge sport in Canada, but I didn't really believe it until we were flipping channels and saw TSN (the ESPN of Canada) with non-stop curling coverage. They even did that picture in picture thing where they cut away from your match to show you some split screen live action of another curling match in progress. We sat there for 45 minutes watching this thing, and we still couldn't figure out what was going on. Just to give you an idea of how athletic one needs to be in order to compete, there was a guy who was nicknamed "The Kid" and he was nearly 40.

That's all for now, eh?