Music

I love The Nerves. This was one of their best.

This song by The Zippers, "You're So Strange" (1977) is very good, too.

The Cell

This is a pretty funny sequence. I am amused, because I've run into that a number of times when working on horror stories -- only I never do pat "no signal" kind of stuff, but come up with other ways that a person can't call their way out of a jam. But it is amusing, because it really does come up as an issue in the era of cell phones everywhere! A related issue is the increased presence of surveillance cameras, at least in urban areas (although not exclusively there, anymore).

Ow.

I think I might've gotten a stress fracture on the outside edge of my left foot. I nailed it the other day, and it hurts like hell when there's any pressure on it. Nothing to be done for it, if it is a stress fracture, since they just have to mend. Just hope there's not a zombie apocalypse over the next few weeks, because I won't be able to run very far. I haven't had one of those since college (stress fracture, not zombie apocalypse), during Tae Kwon Do.

ANTM Roundup: Jessica

So, doe-eyed, babyfaced Jessica finally went down in flames on ANTM. I'm not surprised, really -- she was really pretty, but didn't seem fully able to bring it in the fashion photography. Of course, Tyra et al. can game the results by picking the shittiest pictures for a given model and then critiquing it, which I'm sure they do (since we don't get to see the prospective pictures, we only get to see what they claim was "their best shot.")

Angelea, this season's villainess, coasted through to the final four (as I knew she would), although surely she should've been on the bottom, if they were actually judging on the photographs. Giant-eyebrowed Raina (kind of like Denise Richards on 'roids and prone to saying the annoying "Oh, my lanta!" Which seems like a Diablo Cody witticism, there) was also on the chopping block, but made it through. Krista, the black, man-faced (even by fashion model standards) anorexic, once again sailed through the competition, which seems to have gone right to her head. The other one, Theresa (? I can't remember her name), the so-called "plus-sized" model (what is she, a size 6?) is the other strong contender for the win -- she and Krista appeared to be Heathering the other contestants a bit.

The stand-out moment in last night's episode had Jessica making tacos (?) by, uh, placing the taco shells atop a toaster -- not sure what she had in mind with that. The taco shells promptly caught fire, and she was at a near-total loss of how to tend to it, eventually half-assedly tossed a wet rag on the flaming tacos. After this, I'm thinking of using "tacos on a toaster" in the same way that people used "snakes on a plane" the other year. Just feels right.

The other contestants gave Jessica grief for that, saying "You're a mom, right? Don't you cook?" and she admitted the her husband did most of the cooking. One of the others asked her "Wait, you're a stay-at-home mom who doesn't cook? What DO you do?" I had flashbacks!

There was a photo shoot at the still-there set of Hobbiton, in New Zealand, which I guess they kept hobbitified in the wake of Lord of the Rings. Weirdly, Angelea was like "All the other girls know what this is, am I like the only person in the world who doesn't?" And I'm thinking "Uh, yeah?"

Anyway, next week is the two-hour finale already, so that's that. My dose of trash television!

Lost In Translation

Okay, I tuned out LOST somewhere in the second season, but this list on SLATE amused me. I still maintain that LOST is the biggest flim-flam perpetuated by television writers and producers on an audience in television history. I thought that when I tuned out, and I think it all the more so these days. Maybe they'll brilliantly pull a rabbit out of their hats, but at this point, they'll need to have a big pile of rabbits to do the trick, is my guess. I imagine them pacing around and brainstorming gimmickry to get them out of the the jams they wrote themselves into.

Also, I'm worried about IRON MAN 2 -- so much cross-marketing has been going on with it, so many ads. I see ads for Audi, for Dr. Pepper, for fast food, ads on bus kiosks, ads on the sides of buses. My rule of thumb is usually when so much attention is paid to marketing, it usually means Hollywood's got a clunker on their hands, and they're busy trying to generate a pre-premiere buzz through mass-marketing. The original IRON MAN was an unexpected hit, and didn't have nearly the marketing, of course. That they're doing so much with this one, I dunno. And having Scarlett Johansson in it seems like a risky move. I've always considered her fairly leaden in any role she plays, and having her as the Black Widow seems like a miscasting to me. Maybe it'll be alright, but I am skeptical. We'll see after opening weekend, whether the turnout nosedives, as it usually does if it's based purely on marketing.