What's My News IQ?

Yeah, yeah, I suck. I haven't blogged here in approximately eight years. I do hope that you guys are checking out Boston Daily. Writing all day long has forced me to "hone my craft" (barf, but true) and it's probably funnier than what I wrote here. Also, I am tired after writing all day and don't have much energy or material left for here. I'm not as dedicated as Gov. Patrick and won't write much on nights and weekends.

Another bonus of working for a "real" publication is that the PR people occasionally parade the writers around like show ponies. Last night I took my first spin around the ring on Jim Braude's NewsNight News Quiz. Every Friday, three media-type people answer questions about the week's news for nothing more than bragging rights and free publicity.

I went up against Joe Joyce and Bill Fallon. Both had been and felt pretty confident heading in since I was a newbie and a blogger. Unfortunately for them, they neglected to realize that my job is to obsessively read the news.



Enjoy. Hopefully they invite me back soon.

We're Doing a Special for Dateline NBC. . .

Now, if we could talk about me for a minute. . .

My love for Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC (that's the name on his birth certificate) grows exponentially with every episode in which he appears. Last night, CHfDNBC took the night off from nabbing pedophiles and identity thieves to nab i-Jackers, the hip name for people who steal iPods.

Through some ingenious plan, NBC laid boxed iPods in various areas around the country with a bogus CD that sent personal information to Dateline's producers, who then corralled the thieves/unsuspecting recipients of the iPods into describing why they would do such a thing. Most of the iPods were stolen by teenagers (hey, pedophiles, there's your new in!) who were immediately repentant when confronted with Hansen's brand of scolding disbelief.

The only reason I can fathom for Hansen not getting the shit kicked out of him by some angry pedophile or iPod theif is that brand of fatherly anger. His voice conveys, "I am both disgusted by you and disappointed in you" which is a pretty paralyzing combination. I am not a pedophile nor an identity thief nor an iPod stealer, and I feel bad about everything I've ever done wrong in my life when Hansen gets going. His poor kids.

Now they need a special where a pedophile carrying a stolen iPod and a fistful of stolen credit cards with thousands of dollars if receipts shows up. That is what they in the business call PAYDIRT.

For those of you who aren't in the know, here is infamous Naked Guy. Enjoy.

Brain Dump

Yes, I'm an asshole. I haven't written anything in nearly a week. I promise I haven't run away with a serial killer (yet) and have just been very busy doing other writerly things. I don't have a whole post in mind, so I'm going to give you the perennial favorite of lazy bloggers, a brain dump. My apologies.


I'm surprised too.

Last night, I watched Victoria Beckham: Coming to America. While I feared that watching this may have been the end of my ever knocking anyone for poor taste again ever, it was actually not bad. I love watching bloggers make fun of Beckham's paparazzi photographs because she always looks miserable, so I expected her to be a complete pill.

Much to my surprise, Beckham showed a lot of spark for a woman who hasn't eaten a sandwich since 1996. Though almost everything was clearly staged, it was still good. Victoria "needs" her driver's license, only to be driven around by a driver for the rest of the episode. Victoria meets botoxed LA housewives. The highlight of the show for me was when Beckham went to "confront" celebrity blogger and ugly motherfucker Perez Hilton and stated that she couldn't eat a cookie. "I can't be caught smiling, having a good time, or-- perish the thought-- eating."

I forgot (mainly because I never wanted to hear the words "spice" and "girl" near each other again) that the Spice Girls where experts at creating an image. Each girl in the group had her own persona, and Posh never let hers go. While Victoria isn't my new hero or anything, I think a little more highly of her than I did yesterday. But I still want to buy her a turkey club and fries.


Sweet God, I love Kyle Chandler.

Emmy nominations come out tomorrow, and Matthew Gilbert at the Globe believes that Friday Night Lights is going to get shafted. In the Boston.com polls this afternoon, 47% of those surveyed say they don't know who Scott Porter is, 45.5% don't know who Adrianne Palicki is, and a whopping 53.6% don't watch the show at all.

If you're not watching this show, we cannot be friends. It's an amazing show-- well-acted, well-written, and beautifully shot. I know I sound like those obnoxious people who yelled at you about not watching Arrested Development but please, please watch this show.

Stormy Weather

Dear Channel 7's 7-day forecast,

Go die in a fire.

Piss off,
Amy

This shit ain't right. I have a four-day weekend this weekend. I start my new gig on Tuesday. Marathon Monday is my favorite holiday of the whole year. Seriously. No need to buy expensive gifts, no cards, no sense of familial duty, no religious connotations. Just a reason to have a day out of the office on a fledgling spring day, the ability to watch a Sox day game in the comfort of your own home (or Local), a reason to start drinking at 10am, the putt-putt-putt-putt of helicopters hovering over Beacon Street, the cheering of little kids and psyched adults as the first wheelchair racer comes by, then the elite male runners, then the elite females, then the droves of regular joes running for charity or their own goals, with marriage proposals scrawled across their arms, pushing through muscle cramps and bleeding nipples, the crowd cheering them to keep moving, keep going.

But no. This year, many of the regular-guy runners will just decide to stay home and watch the Sox since it's going to be about 40 degrees and rainy. Many of the spectators will just stay inside and root the runners on from their couches. The fun, as-close-to-Mardi-Gras-as-Boston-gets atmosphere will be dimmed. All the winter we missed in December has been tacked onto the end of April. When I need the sun on my shoulders most, Ma Nature decides to have the rain come down. What if the Sox get rained out? What will I do all day? It's not as fun to get drunk to Ellen or reruns of the Cosby Show. I guess I'll just hunker down in my friend's covered stoop and watch the miserable marathoners slog down Beacon Street along a sparsely populated route.

Whatever. I'm still going to enjoy my little break. Friday I am going to babysit and get my hair cut. Saturday, I am going to sleep in, sit on my fat ass and watch Phantom Gourmet (Am I the only one who has a deep, disturbing crush on Dave Andleman?), bake some complicated strawberry cupcakes, dye my hair, and go out to dinner. Sunday, I'm staying at a fancy-pants hotel downtown to give myself a relatively inexpensive change of scene. Monday, despite Mother Nature's best attempts, I am going to watch the Marathon. I will stand in the freezing rain in my big ugly winter coat I swore I'd not wear again until late 2007, beer in hand, yelling my fool head off for the dedicated and crazy souls who still come out to run. It's the least I can do for them.

Barefoot and in Love

For those of you who've been around this little corner of the wide world of web for a while, you may know I have a propensity to have Food Network celebrity chef girl-crushes. At first, it was Rachel Ray, back when she had only two shows on that network and zero syndicated talk shows. Now she's been overexposed in a boy's magazine and overexposed in my heart. For a while, it looked like Paula Deen was coming up as the heir to Rachel's throne. While Paula isn't as beautiful as Rachel, Paula has a hot son, a cute house, and a propensity to cook with butter I deeply admire. During my Mom's hospital stay, I got up to watch Martha Stewart's talk show (mainly because I want to be there when Martha cuts one of her clueless starlets who ruins what Martha is demonstrating). One day, Paula Deen came on. Paula was appropriately in awe of Martha's sheer awesomeness, because while Martha Stewart may not be a cuddly ball of cotton candy and puppy dog smiles, the woman knows her way around the home. After pleasantries, Paula started talking about her assistant waking her and her husband, Michael Gruber, up in the morning.

"You let your assistant in your house?" Martha asked incredulously.

"Why yeis," replied Paula.

"I try to keep my assistants out of my house," Martha said, almost to herself.

"Well, this one tiime, my assistant came in twirlin' a baton and singin' to me and Michael..."

"Do you let people wear shoes in your house?" asked Martha out of nowhere.

"Oh, yeis," said Paula, not skipping a beat. Martha looked like she was about to vomit.

But I grow weary of Paula as well, as she now has a pseudo-talk show on the Food Network and my Mom said her restaurant, which I really hoped was good, is not. While Dave Lieberman is my eye candy on the Food Network (seriously, Dave, I'm free most weeknights, call me!) and Alton Brown is hot in the way that he is smart but not physically hot (and he has a KitchenAid with flames on it!), I need my girl-crush.

Enter Ina Garten.


Someone's making cookies!

My love for Ina has grown ever-stronger as I watch her show. I get to the gym shortly after 5, so I start watching Barefoot Contessa when it's already started. Her recipes always look so good. She has a potato salad I'm dying to make. I've made her tomato and feta salad and it's amazing. She likes a cold cocktail, which she makes with liquor I generally can't afford and with simple mixes that I bet taste better than anything you can get at an average bar. She advocates for the consumption of bellinis. Like Paula with less brashness, she also has a deep love for butter and cream. Like Giada with less conspicuousness, Ina correctly pronounces foreign foods and techniques. Like me with more money and a nicer kitchen, Ina also cites Julia Child as one of her culinary heroes.

Mostly, I want to be Ina Garten. I want her absolutely breathtaking house in the Hamptons. I want her huge pantry. I want her firsthand love of France. I want a doting husband who loves everything I cook for him. I want her kitchen. I want her rich arty friends with boats. I love her pretty blue eyes, big smile, and sense of beach-chic style. I want to be able to ask rhetorical questions at the end of a recipe or instruction ("...How simple is that?") and pull it off without sounding like a snob. I want to have a slew of gay male friends in Nantucket red pants over for dinner. I want to have a home that I can make very comfortable for my friends. I want everything to be simply fabulous.

So, Ina, if you ever need a sous chef for your show, you need someone to help you polish off a bellini or fourteen, or just want to talk about boys or shoes, email me. Just make sure you bring Dave Lieberman along to keep me company when Jeffery comes home from work. Wouldn't that be to die for?

It's Time to Play the Music...

Isn't it funny how Friday is still as sweet, even after an abbreviated week?

Yesterday, I got The Muppet Show season 1 in from Netflix. As any good child of the 80s, many of my earliest memories are of the Muppets. My brother and I watched Muppet Babies when we were little. According to my baby book, the first movie I saw in a movie theater was The Muppets Take Manhattan. Apparently, I preferred to sit in the bathroom and have my Mom read the "story wall" to me. (Nosy from the beginning.) I had a Miss Piggy lunchbox. To this day, I enjoy doing a Swedish Chef impersonation. ("Bork bork bork!") I also remember when Jim Henson died. There were kids on TV in classrooms writing letters to Jim's family and my Mom explaining to me that Jim had died of the same kind of virulent pneumonia my dad died of, and it was probably the first time I'd felt a celebrity's death as more than a sad thing for someone other than me. Jim Henson also looked a lot like my dad, so I kind of related to him.

Anyway. I watched the first episode last night, which opened with Kermit introducing "a manah manah. Whatever that is." And I finally saw the video to correspond with the song "Manah Manah" which is just brilliant. Of course, YouTube has it, so here you go. A little something trippy to lighten up your Friday afternoon.



(Apologies to Amy, who has probably run screaming from the internet since I've posted this everywhere.)

The Queen of White Trash is Dead...

Long live the Queen of white trash!

As the news of Anna Nicole Smith's death spread around my office like news of a car wreck outside on the street, I wasn't sure how to react. My first thought in my head was I'm surprised it took this long. Which is a horrible thing to think, so I just kept it to "Holy crap!" aloud. I think the media took this tack too, with Boston.com posting a photo gallery called "Anna Nicole Remembered." Which was kind of funny since you had to be 18 or have a dad who subscribed to Playboy to see most pictures of Anna Nicole in her heyday in the early '90s. The lofty title of the photo gallery bothered me. This isn't exactly as deep a national period of sadness as when President Ford died but Boston.com gave it the same treatment, probably to keep people clicking on their homepage instead of moving to E! online.

I'm sure a lot of hipsters and people who aren't really into pop culture will wonder what the big fucking deal is about a woman who showed her boobs for money dying. In the global sense of life, Anna Nicole Smith didn't matter very much. She didn't try to forge mideast peace. As far as I know, she never did any charity work. Her reality show made me want to take a shower so powerful was the smell of trash when I watched it. Why do we care about this woman who came from nothing and pretty much went back to nothing at the end of her life?

We care because Americans love people who lead the lives of the rich without any of the responsibility that comes with money. People paid out $39.99 to look at videos of Paris Hilton doing blow with that Girls Gone Wild guy. We love that Paris has all this money and fame without doing anything to get it. Our Horatio Alger stories have shifted significantly since the 1900s from working hard to get ahead to doing little and getting further ahead. As Dire Straits and Sting said, we want our money for nothing and our checks for free. Anna Nicole Smith basically lived that dream for us. She met J. Howard Marshall at a strip club and eventually married him, becoming an oil heiress who posed for Playboy. Then she got into fights over the estate of her late husband, had that horrible TV show, and made more money than most of us will ever see for doing comparatively little. On some level, that's what we all want (without the old guy husband).

I may be coming across as a bit crass, which isn't the case. I do feel bad for Anna Nicole-- she had a rough emotional life, especially at the end-- and her problems with drugs didn't help. I'm not belittling the loss to her family, but why should we who didn't know her care? I think it's because she got ahead without intellect or talent, which has become the new American dream.

Big Bird Needs You

Won't you help them?

Through various email petitions I've signed, I receive MoveOn.org emails. Generally, I delete them without reading them because it is my greatest fear that Jack Reed or Sheldon Whitehouse (BOO!) will know my name and address and forward all my calls to voicemail because I'm the constituent who bitches about everything under the sun. When it comes to gay rights, abortion legislation, or new Supreme Court appointees I take the time to write out an email. I have my short list of things I worry about because I care about them.

So when I got an email from MoveOn saying that President Bush is attempting to tinker with the already dismal funding to NPR and PBS, I signed the petition. As a kid without cable, I looked forward to watching Ernie (my favorite!), Bert, Big Bird, the Count and Cookie Monster in the afternoons. My Mom looked forward to me watching Sesame Street and Mister Roger's Neighborhood because I was out of her hair for an hour or so and still learning something. When I got older, I loved Reading Rainbow ("I enjoyed this book, but you don't have to take my word for it!"). I have vague memories of 3-2-1-Contact. More recently, I enjoyed watching Ken Burns' Jazz epic that I'd seen in parts in a class at Emerson. I cried when I watched the American Experience episode on RFK. I was enthralled by the episode of Frontline on the meth epidemic in America and how the government totally dropped the ball on preventing the proliferation of meth. PBS has given us Julia Child, the awesome creative work of Jim Henson, Arthur, and NOVA all for free. How can you not get behind that?

Then there's NPR. I spend my mornings with Bob Oakes on WBUR. I love A Prairie Home Companion. Car Talk is pretty funny too. It's talk radio with a brain. We need this.

So be you conservative or liberal, please sign this petition to let lawmakers know that the minimally-commercial programming PBS provides is important to you. Both kids and adults need thoughtful programming that's available to anyone with an antenna and a sense of curiosity.

Adventures in Television

I grew up in a television family. We did other things too, like gardening when my Mom felt good or going shopping or just playing around, but we always loved TV. As a kid, I'd watch Sesame Street and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood on PBS in the mornings and afternoons. When I got older and was left to my own devices on hot summer days, I'd watch Mr. Ed and MASH reruns when it was too hot to move. I knew all about the cool toys from TV, what kind of clothes I should be wearing, and that I always wanted to crimp my hair but my Mom wouldn't let me bake my hair at the age of ten.

I've always admired the people I babysit for and how they've kept their kids away from the commercial aspects of the world. When the kids watch TV, they watch videos of Scooby-Doo. Personally, I hate Scooby-Doo and just admitted this to the kids this past weekend and I don't think they've quite recovered from the shock that someone they love can hate something they love so much. I think they have a video of Sesame Street songs and that's it. It's amazing to me that the kids, especially Eldest, hasn't revolted and demanded to watch something on network TV, but it hasn't happened yet.

Last night, I got home from post-work drinks with my coworkers and decided to watch My Name is Earl and The Office. Eldest stays up until 9pm, so she was jumping around on a trampoline when I flicked on the tiny set. The kids' dad seemed excited to watch some TV while their mother seemed vaguely annoyed. My Name is Earl came on, and before the first commercial break there were about three "dammits" and two "hells" and one "bitch" let loose. I blushed, and looked over at Eldest and her mother.

Eldest had buried her head in a pillow while Mother looked at the TV blankly. I always forget how swearing has become much more mainstream since I was a kid watching TV. When I'm with the kids, I keep my language to a minimum because they're not my kids and I don't want them learning how to insult each other with "stupid bitch" on my watch. If I should have kids someday, they're just going to learn swearing because I can't keep the language to myself for eighteen years. It's just not fucking possible.

We made it to the first commercial break and Eldest watched the commercials with rapt attention. She watched the Ford commercial where the car drives along a building ledge and remarked "that's not possible." Within two minutes of the show starting again, Eldest handed her mother a book and hid behind a pillow as talk of sex started.

"She's at the age where she knows it's not something she should watch, but she doesn't understand why," Mother explained.

"I can turn it off," I offered. "It's not a big deal."

"Also, I think she's a little bored. Don't worry about it."

We got through My Name is Earl and started in on The Office. Which had much discussion of strippers. Awesome. Eldest would pop in for the commercials, diving for her pillow when an ER preview came on with someone trapped inside a burning building, someone struggling for breath on a hospital gurney, and someone getting shot. I tried to explain the Jim/Pam/Karen love triangle to Mother. Then came this exchange.

"Didn't Ben Franklin have syphilis?" Pam asks the Ben Franklin actor Michael hired as a "stripper."

"What's syphilis?" Eldest asked the room. I kept my eyes glued to the TV so her parents could take that doozy.

"It's a disease," Father offered after an awkward silence.

"How do you get it? What does it do?"

Nobody fielded that one.

"I want the ads to come back on," Eldest said, rolling on the floor. "I like the toothpaste ads."

"That was a toothpaste ad," Mother said after a Rembrandt ad featuring two people making out heavily in a tight shot. After that, the commercial where the woman goes for a jog while her boyfriend follows her in a car blaring the Spice Girls came on, and I had to explain that he was doing that because the woman needed her iPod reward from the credit card company.

"Ohhhh," both Mother and Eldest said.

I am going to ruin this family.