U.S. president Barack Obama, after weeks of watching the cream of the idiot crop in America claim that he was not an American citizen, released his long-form birth certificate today revealing that he was, in fact, born in Honolulu, Hawaii after it became a state.
But did that shut up the loudest of the birthers? Of course not. This episode which, for whatever reason, was most recently helmed by Donald Trump. While he first claimed he wanted proof that Obama was born in America, he's changed his tune today to say that he wanted Obama to release his birth certificate to silence the birthers.
"I am really honored, frankly, to have played such a big role in hopefully, hopefully, getting rid of this issue," Trump says to reporters in New Hampshire. "Now we have to look at it, we have to see is it really, is it proper, what's on it, but I hope it checks out beautifully. I am really proud, I am really honored ... I'm taking great credit."
Either way we've learned yet again that Donald Trump is an unabashed attention whore who will align himself to which ever stance fits his mood that particular day.
Then there are those who will never be happy with proof of citizenship. The Drudge Report seems to be the loudest of those fools -- even mere hours after the birth certificate's release has that website with links questioning the document's authenticity, whether it was doctored by the White House or not and the latest Donald Trump consipracy -- how was Obama accepted in to an Ivy League school?
Hell, George Bush got in to Yale so why is it beyond the realm of possibility that Barack Obama actually attended Harvard? And what's to gain from these frivolous conspiracy theories? If anything, spewing these silly theories further proves that the people spewing this nonsense are uneducated racists who will make the 2012 presidential election one of the most race-fueled and ugly episodes since the era of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The timing of Simon Cowell announcing his rather lackluster judging panel for the American debut of The X Factor debuting on FOX this fall is convenient. The smug British bastard is a master of timing, publicity and manipulation. While still at the helm of American Idol, he shook things up with the departure of the constantly drunk Paula Abdul and the addition of Ellen Degeneres and that other woman whose name nobody can remember (Karen Dioguardi).
Apparently d Paula Abdul was ditched from Idol a couple years back for no other reason than for her to be a free agent when it came time for Cowell to Americanize The X Factor. But with a judge panel consisting of record producer L.A. Reid, British X Factor judge Cheryl Cole who is a nobody here in the states and experienced judge and laughingstock Paula Abdul, The X Factor seems rather bland. Where's the gimmick? At least NBC's The Voice has blind auditions and "mentors" (Blake Shelton, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine and Christina Aguilera) who area t least recognizable names to the target audience. While I don't expect The Voice to do even remotely well when it premieres tomorrow (Tuesday) at 8 PM C/T on NBC, I don't think the announcement of Cowell's latest batch of judges is going to seal its fate.
Both shows are essentially the same and they both are copies of American Idol which itself is a hyped-up version of Star Search done in the vein of a classy karoake competition. If I want to see people singing along to songs I already know, I'll stroll a few blocks and catch karoake night at the neighborhood bar. But if I want to see carbon copies of singing shows, I'll watch both American Idol and The X Factor because from an outsider's perspective they are both the same and both shows are utter garbage. Hell, even the local county fair has a singing contest and at least there I don't have to witness smug pricks past their prime judging the singing.
If I had a gun to my head and had to choose, I'd say that NBC's The Voice has the edge when it comes to originality but it also has a significant handicap -- it's on NBC. If I had to choose one of the three to watch, I'd put a bullet in my TV and finally admit that TV has run its course as a viable form of entertainment.
Late summer seems to be the hot time to release a movie overflowing with crude language and killer sight gags. And based on the trailer for 30 Minutes of Less, it should have a decent run in the theaters with a cast like Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Asari (from Community) and America's favorite dirtball actor Danny McBride and lines like "You deflowered my sister", nailed by Aziz Asari.
With a FUCKING CLIP SHOW! That is no way, after a months-long hiatus, to treat fans. Oh, sure, it wasn't actually a clip show but past clips from the show's previous seven season comprised the 18th episode of One Tree Hill's 8th season. With that one move it became painfully obvious that this needs to be the final season of the highly-rated (for The CW) but rather tired One Tree Hill. And I say this as a casually regular viewer of the show for 5 or 6 of the show's 8 seasons. I hope that the tired and thought-deprived writing team does the right thing and writes a proper final episode -- hopefully including as many of the huge cast of characters from the show's history and let it become some sort of historical marker of how not to drag a show on beyond its intended lifespan.
Chad Michael Murray and Hilarie Burton obviously saw the writing on the wall that the series had run its useful course and opted to leave (or were lowballed and left) after the sixth season but it's time to shut it down and move on.
What happens when someone finds a piece of food which resembles the image of someone famous? They sell it of course. But 500 British pounds (about $13,500 U.S. dollars - just try and doubt my math) doesn't sound like an exorbitant amount for a jelly bean whose mottled coloring resembles the likeness of the future princess of England, Kate Middleton. Sure, it doesn't feature her bust (which would definitely increase the asking price because everyone loves breasts) but the best part about the fluff piece of journalism, which The Independent recognized as such, is the URL which the assigned the article... utter-PR-fiction-but-people-love-this-shit-so-fuck-it-lets-just-print-it-2269573
That's seriously what the URL is. Click thru and see for yourself or just stay here and look at the jelly bean image of Kate Middleton who, according to some supermarket tabloids I saw on Saturday is pregnant. That announcement will supposedly come after the wedding.
It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brownhas to be one of the worst holiday-themed specials in the Charlie Brown franchise. It's so bad, in fact, that I can't seem to find it being aired this week on ABC which owns the rights to the entire Charlie Brown holiday franchise. But if you want to kill 25 or so minutes, watch it above but try not to fall asleep.
If casually watching ABC has taught me anything it's that there are a TON of Charlie Brown cartoon specials. From Christmas and Halloween to Valentine's Day and Thanksgiving, it's seems that America's lovable loser, Charlie Brown, has them covered with his own bland form of holiday entertainment. The one, though, that I can't seem to remember ever seeing an advertisement for is an Easter-themed special.
Maybe Easter, with all of its murderous celebration of Jesus Christ, isn't something that Charles Schulz wanted to cover. Maybe the Easter Bunny wasn't kosher with sharing the spotlight with another animal, Snoopy, for a televised cartoon special. Whatever the case, an Easter (or Passover) Charlie Brown special seems to be either missing from the library of Charlie Brown cartoons or missing from my vast memory of TV events. I'd even take some sort of Charlie Brown/Rachael Ray crossover special where a live action Rachael Ray shares some of her favorite Easter recipes with Charlie Brown and friends to make it more culturally relevant. But that's probably just a pipe dream.
While I don't expect a written explanation to come from the family of Charles Schulz explaining the absence of a Charlie Brown Easter (or Passover) special from teh archives of the Charlie Brown library which ABC somehow came to own, I would be interesting in hearing your thoughts on this travesty.
Chalk up another victory for piss-poor unscripted filler programming. ABC's decision to give two of their three daytime soaps the ax is yet another slit to the throat of scripted television. Think I'm wrong? Flip around next time you're home sick from work and see the sad excuses for programming that exist during the daytime hours. Outside of a few cartoons for the kids on a couple cable channels and the mostly decent offerings from PBS, the rest of the channels are tenth-run movies or talk shows.
Maybe we have Oprah Winfrey to blame for the proliferation of talk shows. After all, her's was the first barnburning success story in the daytime talk format but those that have copied and badly altered the format are the ones to truly blame. I get it, though. Daytime TV viewership is home to some pretty dismal numbers due to the fact that the stay-at-home mom crowd is about as large as the number of polar bears living in Iowa but even a mom who spends her days wrangling a gang of rugrats deserves to be entertained and that entertainment used to come in the form of scripted daytime dramas (soap operas) but now comes in the form of 4 hours of the Today show on NBC, an hour of local news, Rachel Ray cooking something and a couple hours of doctor-themed talk shows.
That seems recipe seems like an awful lot of the same ingredients. Take, for instance, local NBC affiliate KARE-TV. KARE-TV is home to one scripted hour of television outside of the 7-10 PM primetime block. The rest of the hours consist of local or network news/entertainment programming, Jeopardy! and many hours of talk shows which all seem to cover the same topics. I understand that a talk show costs far less to produce than an hour of scripted television but with ABC bringing shows entitled "The Chew" (a food/cooking show) and "The Revolution" (a weight loss series) it seems like, in an effort to cut costs, the networks are almost desperate to copy or even sink below their cable television competition.
With each passing day I lose more hope for the continued existence of over the air network television and while I'm no fan of daytime soaps, today's loss -- bringing the remaining total to four soaps across the big three networks -- seems to say that the networks will do whatever it takes to cut costs to the bone while still raking in the same amount of advertising dollars as always. Hell, none of the big three networks actually program new content on Saturday evenings and Friday evenings are mainly reality fare so it's only a matter of time until the big three networks take on The CW model and go five nights a week with only two hours each night.
I'm only half joking with that last prediction but it's time for the networks to get serious. Slashing costs and going the route of more unscripted content is not going to one-up their cable competition. Like any business, it's time for the suits to be held accountable and it's time for them to come up with real, long-term solutions because drivel like "The Chew" and "The Revolution" are nothing more than placeholders.
A quirky late-season comedy complete with an insecure gay guy who doesn't seem gay, a recently split couple, an obsessive woman and her black husband and an insecure woman who is desperate to find a boyfriend. My description makes ABC newest comedy offering, Happy Endings, seem shallow but it is anything but that.
Elisha Cuthbert, easily the most recognizable name in the series, definitely does not steal the show in this six-person ensemble and my earlier assumption that Casey Wilson (formerly on SNL) is anything but funny was definitely wrong. The ensemble works well. After tonight's two episodes it's tough to pick a favorite character and I hope they continue to explore each of the six characters somewhat equally as they both have plenty to build on from the inaugural episodes.
I don't know if I'd compare Happy Endings to early episodes of Friends because this series actually has more potential. There is already an established relationship and one failed relationship that has the possibility of being rekindles but the romantic entanglements amongst the group of six has less repetitive potential than that of Friends. In addition, Happy Endings makes excellent use of sight gags, cut scenes and flashbacks without overusing the concepts.
In short, Happy Endings is a decent surprise among a sloppy heap of less-than-appealing late-season offerings across the major networks. If it were up to me, I'd make this an early pick to be back next season. Call it a surprise hit if you'd like but it's a definite must-see. Check out Happy Endings in its regular timeslot next Wednesday on ABC at 9 PM C/T.
Elisha Cuthbert, who had a television role in the FOX drama "24", returns tonight to network television in the ABC comedy "Happy Endings". The basic premise of the show is a guy gets left at the altar by his fiancee, played by Cuthbert and is left to pick up the pieces with some help from his quirky group of four friends as well as his now ex-fiancee. The show also stars Casey Wilson who was fired from SNL at the end of the 2008-09 season so it's got that going for it. Given its extremely late season premiere date and the fact that ABC is showing two episodes back-to-back leaves me thinking that this must be one helluva poorly conceived series but, as always, I'm giving it an episode or two to leave an impression on me (Hey, I watched "Extreme Couponing" last week so I'll try most anything once). I'll have a review of it sometime tomorrow and if you're curious how good or bad it is and wish to make your own judgment before you read mine, check it out tonight on ABC (locally on KSTP Channel 5) at 8:30 & 9:00 PM C/T. If it's really bad, I just might have a reaction in my Twitter feed (@sornie79) so follow along.
This fake trailer for When Harry Met Sally 2 is actually hilarious. Especially good is the role which Helen Mirren plays. Even more proof after her hosting run on SNL this weekend that she is game for anything -- especially this spoof which she really sinks her teeth in to.
Tonight was the premiere episode of yet another reality/documentary series on cable channel TLC (remember when it used to be "The Learning Channel"?) entitled Extreme Couponing. The premise is as simple as it sounds -- a camera crew follows a couple coupon clipping psychos around as they prefer for one mammoth grocery shopping trip. The preparation -- usually scouring seemingly endless stacks of coupons from Sunday newspapers, itemizing their shopping list complete with quantities of each item and even going as far as one woman's compulsion leading her to have a spreadsheet detailing each and every item her favorite grocery store stocks and where the items are located within the store is showcased.
All of this borderline insane preparation leads to the big trip. The two women I saw showcased tonight ended up filling a minimum of four shopping carts each. The quantities of items purchased were either totally impressive of straight up insane. Dozens of packages of cold cuts, dozens of boxes of cereal and even 60-plus bottles of mustard.
Yeah, 60 bottles of mustard. That one sort of jumped off the screen at me. Unless you are literally eating a bowl of mustard for dessert with a meal once a week -- as a family -- there is no conceivable way that a family of five would use that much mustard in a lifetime. During the 8 or so warm months in Minnesota, I tend to grill 4-5 meals a week which means brats, hamburgers or weiners for approximately a third of those meals. Even with that kind of frequency I have only used two bottles of mustard in the past six years. That's where the hoarding aspect of Extreme Couponing began to become obvious to me.
These women put 6-10 hours into just the planning of their grocery shopping trips. Then there's the time spent actually gathering the massive quantities of each item into their train of grocery carts. But the big sticking point for me, personally, is the fact that the checkout process takes between one and two hours. If I did this at the local Cub Foods I'd probably have my tires slashed because the thousands of people waiting to check out would have one less checkout to go through -- for an hour or two. Once they return home, the hoarding aspect again becomes obvious -- they have entire rooms where they store their hauls. Having 2-plus dozen bottles of laundry detergent stockpiled seems ridiculous. Buying 50 or so cups of yogurt at a time is almost wasteful and to the woman who purchased 26 packages of cold cuts -- donate a few of those to your local food shelf.
I applaud anyone who can manage to save 90-99% on their food costs -- and to me doing that once a year would likely give me a raging hard-on because I hate spending money -- but this goes beyond extreme couponing and extreme savings, it comes down to buying massive quantities to prove something to yourself and even show off to those around you. It makes me a little angry to think that even some of the food they purchase may go to waste but this is America, the land of excess, and if a family of five feels the need to come home with five carts of groceries for six bucks, so be it because getting a rain check for another 20 cups of yogurt is definitely a first world problem.
Last week, there was a bit of a ripple involving local top 40 radio station KDWB and a parody song entitled "30 Hmongs in a House" done by the Dave Ryan Show's producer, Steve-O, set to the tune of Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven". The lyrics, while terribly offensive to some had me laughing when the song originally aired sometime during the week of March 21.
The song, supposedly suggested by a listener in some wacky morning radio bit they were doing between one of the eight songs they play over the course of four hours, poked fun at stereotypes of the Hmong population in the Twin Cities. The Dave Ryan Show has a decent relationship with the Hmong population in the Twin Cities and they love to rib that population -- and it seems to be well received.
But after issuing an apology via the show's Facebook page due to a few persons of Hmong descent being offended, an advertiser has now stepped up and pulled their ads from KDWB. HealthPartners, who had been advertising their online clinic VirtuWell, on Friday yanked all advertising from the station indefinitely.
My advice is to get the hell over it. Because a few culturally sensitive people raised their voices over a song which was heard by about 10% of the entire metro population, the station will likely have to issue some sort of heartfelt apology and maybe even go as far as making a donation to some charity which supports the Hmong population (about 50,000 in the Twin Cities metro area) to appease HealthPartners.
It's just another example of advertisers, for better or worse, having far too much influence over the content of commercial media. I'm not a die-hard Dave Ryan fan but I do admit to listening to the mornng show on KDWB. I don't particularly care for the music but the show does have some comedic value to it. For once I'd like to see a media company thumb their nose at an advertiser who jumped ship due to "questionable content" and stand their ground. An apology, especially when the parody wasn't cruel at all, is all for show no matter what the circumstances are. Do stand-up comedians apologize to people who have been offended by something in their act? There's absolutely no reason to apologize for this parody either? After all, what other young-targeting radio station is HealthPartners going to run to in an effort to get the word out about VirtuWell -- 96.3 Now? Sure.
Call it a jaded perspective from a younger thirty-something but Katie Couric isn't exactly relevant and shouldn't be a hot topic. As the anchor of the CBS Evening News, Couric simply never hit her stride and hasn't exactly set the ratings on fire -- even in an era where the network nightly news is about as relevant as the American Motor Company. To begin with, Katie Couric was highly overpaid. It's ludicrous for CBS executives to think that a female anchor along the vein of Couric would propel the nightly news back in to relevance. Coming from NBC's Today Show, she didn't exactly have much in the way of journalistic credibility. Sure, I've seen a few decent interviews from Couric but there's still that lingering stigma that all she had done previously was entertainment-type interviews and fluff pieces.
So maybe that's where Couric belongs. The big rumors are that Katie Couric plans on launching her own syndicated daytime talk show in 2012 but a woman in her 50s may not be so wise in taking that route. For better or worse, she may be nearing the end of her rather short tenure of relevance. It's not that women aged 50 and over can't continue to be relevant on television -- Barbara Walter must be in her 80s and while her niche is televised specials featuring celebrities, she does it well and is respected within that area of journalism.
Katie Couric, though, seems to be eager to be the next Oprah. That won't be easy. Oprah's popularity gained steam in the 1980s -- an era where cable television was still in its early years and had yet to begin producing original content that competed with the fare being featured on the big networks. And Oprah is the rare success story. For every Oprah (and there's been only one), there's a Ricki Lake, Gayle King, Tony Danza and Jane Pauley who have burned out or never really rose to any sort of daytime talk prominence. Katie Couric would likely face the same challenges as Lake, King, Danza and Pauley.
While Katie Couric is likable enough and obviously appeals to women (NBC's "Today" rocketed to the top of the morning heap with Couric as co-host), she'd face the challenge of being out of the limelight for as long as a year. In the entertainment industry, that's ratings suicide. It's not like Couric would be passed the daytime queen baton from Oprah either -- there's that one year gap. In that 12 month timeframe, those hundreds of TV stations airing Oprah are going to fill that hour with something else. Whether it's successful or not remains to be seen next fall but Couric would be starting from scratch. Even on the CBS Evening News, she was handed the framework of a program which viewers were familiar with. Sure, the presentation changed somewhat but the content remained the same -- a rundown of the day's news highlights coupled with some feature segments and the schmaltzy stuff that passes as human interest content.
I don't think that, if Katie Couric launches a daytime talk show, she'll have an easy road to ratings success. Sure, she'll likely be able to secure plenty of stations for a show to air on but they might not be the same top-notch stations which Oprah currently airs on. She isn't going to just ride off in to the sunset but after having a taste of being highly overpaid while not bringing much in the way of success, Couric has a tough road in front of her if she does truly leave the anchor chair at CBS.
Copyright 2003-2012. Content by Me, All views contained here are solely mine and have no association with my employer. Visit Minnesota Recipes for a vast and growing collection of recipes from Minnesotans including cookies, desserts, meals, rhubarb recipes and drink recipes.
