TeeVee Tawk

America seems to be having a good time watching sexual predators get trapped & humiliated on NBC's Dateline, & I can certainly understand why. It is somewhat gratifying to see the bad guy get caught & cuffed & taken away, after having to endure the embarrassing questions of the mannequin-like Chris Hanson. That is my surface response to it, I feel that gratification. However, there are underlying thoughts that are not so pleasing. For every Bozo they snare in their nets. we all know that there are countless others out there typing in the dark, searching for children who are vulnerable. As I watch these creeps, that realization is everpresent. Also, the fact that we see them booked & driven away in the wagon does not mean that their compulsions will stop. That was proven on last night's show by the bonehead who was caught a 2nd time. I will continue to watch, for that surface gratification. My favorite moment last night: when the perv called Matthew did not immediately respond to demands from the police to put his hands up & drop to his knees. I laughed my ass off when they tasered him & I saw where he grabbed himself in pain. Nice marksmanship, officer, that's exactly where I would have aimed too.

You may have heard that CBS has cancelled Armed and Famous. It just couldn't compete with American Idol. It probably wouldn't have been able to compete with reruns of Green Acres either. No one wants to see those "celebrities" in any context, especially not where they are carrying guns. If CBS had blown some extra coin & gotten people who were actual celebrities with interesting personalities, it might have had a chance. The Who's in Muncie Whoville did not get to decorate for Christmas because of a show that lasted 3 episodes. And worse, they now have to live with Jack Osbourne. Show business sucks.

A prediction: The year's funniest moments on TV will occur tomorrow, Thursday night on NBC. Paul Reubens is making a guest appearance on 30 Rock. My DVR is already set.

The Prince & the Pepper

I have spent the winter months, thus far, feeling poorly from a strenuous tussle with pneumonia. I was so listless & inert over the holidays that my family considered decorating me. Since mid-November I have felt disassociated from the world because it moved at a pace that I could not match. The man I've been dating has been working non-stop, so I have felt rather distanced from him as well. I have been in Ohio, where my doctor "Little Jimmy" practices, & he has been state-hopping because of his job. We speak every night on the phone, but it is very difficult to get a hot phone conversation going when one of the parties is wheezing & coughing, & both are exhausted. Needless to say, I have also been feeling a tad depressed & powerless.

Saturday night all that sadness disappeared when a Prince came to town & rescued me from my melancholia. He arrived bearing fresh fruit, flowers & 2 loaves of amazing bread called Limpa. (I'll bet Olivia's heard of that) He also brought movies, games & barks of white chocolate. His job had him working in Canton, Ohio briefly, so he requested a 3-day leave because of a sick friend. Just when I (the sick friend) thought he couldn't possibly do any more to make my world better, he suggested we go to see Dream Girls. He offered to get a wheelchair, portable oxygen, an iron lung, an air lift.....anything it took to get me into that cinema to see that particular show. I didn't need any of that; I went in under my own steam. I've waited 20 years for that musical to be made into a movie, so my body found enough auxilliary adrenaline to get my peppertail from the car to the Cineplex. (my review is in the next post)

I laughed, I cried, I was outraged, I sang along....I had a wonderful time. It was better than CATS. (but then everything is) My companion was elevated to Prince status that evening because, although he absolutely hates musicals, he sat there beside me watching.....& then listened to me chatter about it for the next several hours. I consider his behavior nothing short of noble.

Dream Girls

"We're your dream girls, boys, we'll make you happy...."

The show is very tightly based on events leading to the creation of Motown Records, & the artists who were on its label. It focuses on Diana Ross & the Supremes, thinly disguised as Deena Jones & the Dreams. Eddie Murphy steals the show as James "Thunder" Early. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Murphy had to come out from behind the make-up & his own strong persona & actually act. I'll bet he's glad he did; they keep giving him awards for it. The songs are powerful & Jennifer Hudson delivers the goods when she belts out her showstopper. Murphy's songs make you want to dance in your seat & wave your coat over your head.

I resented some of the major script changes. They softened Deena a little too much & I don't understand why. She starts out naive in the play, then becomes manipulative & somewhat evil. In the film she's an innocent little cupcake all the way through. It made the character banal & ineffective. They added a child to the mix, which provided for a rather implausible, maudlin moment at the end.

I would like for everyone to go see this film. If you buy tickets, they will continue to make more musicals & I will be a happy pepper. Even my musical-hating companion sat up & laughed when Murphy performed, so there is something for everyone in the show. Let that good music drag the soul right out of you.

Go HEELS! Go HEELS!

Do you remember when George Foreman was a big old grouch who never smiled unless he was looking at his German Shepherd? He went to Zaire to fight Ali & scowled through every press conference, every interview. On his behalf, he did have to spend weeks hearing the local villagers shouting "Ali! Boomaya!" (Ali, Kill him!) That would dangle from anyone's last nerve. Watch the great documentary When We Were Kings & you'll see what a total crabapple Foreman was. After that fight in 1974 he became the lovable smiling grillmaster we know & love today. He transformed from a boxing Scrooge to a happy family man, a benevolent reverend & an informative & vibrant commentator. George nice'ned up.

My Hollyblog Player of the Week is ibleeduncblue. I told the Foreman story because I think the same thing happened to BLEED. The first time I read BLEED's profile, I was surprised at how snarly it was. There was complaining, maybe a threat or two; it was a "leave me alone, I bite" profile. I think I poked him once & said "warm profile". He ignored me. In the last year or so, he has completely thawed & is now quite toasty & warm. He doesn't sit in the corner, hovered over his beer at the tourneys, he chats & laughs & teases. His profile has changed from hostile to happy. The women of EXOX gush when they greet him. He is friendly Tony now. And Tony has become a skillful, steady Wordox player who keeps on improving, a welcome opponent at any tournament.

I have sermonized about the blue seat before. I look stunning on blue, it's close to the exit, it looks great with purple....yada yada. When we are paired & I am the one to set, I give the blue seat up to Tony. (that will get a gasp from Mummykins) I have superficial & somewhat neurotic reasons for preferring the blue seat, but Tony's desire to sit there is based on his very public & shameless love for the UNC Tar Heels. Because of his love for that team, he has a much bigger emotional investment in the color blue than I do. Other blue-seaters, don't come at me with sob stories about why you might need the blue seat, it won't work. You would have to prove that your commitment to the color/seat is at least as strong as BLEED's. Because of my own personal curiousity, I looked up the origin of the name Tar Heel. If anyone is interested: Origin of the Tar Heels

If you run into ibleeduncblue at the tables, give him a hearty hip bump for going from grouchy to groovy & becoming completely Foremanized. He just might send you one of his great jokes with the subject line: ENJOY!

Armed & Flatulent

I watched the first two episodes of Armed & Famous & I wondered why, if CBS is such a high-powered, big budget network, they couldn't have attracted better "celebrities" to this project? They could have gone the classier route & had ex-was's like Richard Dean Anderson, Jaclyn Smith or Jerry Van Dyke out there on patrol. They could also have gone completely shabby & had Gilbert Gottfried, Mike Tyson & Phyllis Diller. I'm sure most, if not all, of those individuals might have been available. If you put the quasi-cops they have on the show into a lump & squeeze them really hard, not a drop of talent would come out. Erik Estrada may still be a working actor in parts of Panama & Paraguay, but the rest are all on the fringe of show business. Actually, in the first episode, Erik did get squeezed in a take-down during training camp. We all know what came out when Osbourne giggled & squealed "he fahted!"

Despite LaToya Jackson's idiocy & her uninteresting co-stars, I'm going to give it a few more chances. I like the format & it's fun watching for people I recognize from Muncie. Once in a while there's a funny moment. As Weeman, the height-challenged cast member patrols at night with his actual-cop partner, the radio call comes, "Suspicion of prostitution...". The little cop beams as they speed to the site "I hope we catch 'em in the act!" And they did. Why on earth would a woman in such a small town consent to be on that show when she's just been caught gobbling a knob in someone's pickup truck behind the Wal-Mart? I hope she took whatever money they gave her & high-tailed it outa town.

One person who will not be skipping town is Jack Osbourne. Apparently he has grown fond of Muncie because it reminds him of his home town in the UK. He has rented an apartment with a one-year lease.

A Moooovie Review

About a decade ago there was a movie made called Shining Through with Michael Douglas & Melanie Griffith. The secretary (Griffith) of a top-notch CIA official (Douglas) convinces her boss to let her go undercover in Nazi Germany to seek information from those closest to Hitler. How does she convince him? She makes him a batch of very good streudel. After seeing it, I was certain that this movie was the stupidest one ever made. I've seen porn with more plausible plot twists. I was certain until I saw Lady in the Water.....

M. Night Shyamalan started out as a whale of a director with a very new vision. After he made The Sixth Sense the viewers liked it so much that they kept the ending a secret. Someone somewhere always blabs an ending. Everyone knew it was Norman dressed up like his mother in Psycho before they saw it because people blabbed. They didn't for the Bruce Willis film, it was a bit of a phenomenon. Shyamalan should have stopped after making that one hit film because he has gone progressively downhill since then. Signs was a load of yak dung & Unbreakable was so inane I've wiped it from my memory. The Village had a few interesting moments in it, despite the fact that everyone guessed the big secret 20 minutes into it. And now Shyamalamadingdong has given us a real tossed salad of lunacy in The Lady in the Water.

To begin, it has the goofiest looking monster since "Slimer" from Ghostbusters. It's sort of a razorback hog made out of grass. Shyammylammy threw in a lot of wacky characters, like the body builder who chooses to develop only one side of his body, & the single father who seeks hidden messages in crossword puzzles. The director himself plays a minor role where he proved that he is distinctly untalented in three areas: writing, directing and acting. It's nice he didn't make his actors stand alone in this idiotic film, but I would rather he stayed away from both sides of the camera in the future. Bryce Dallas Howard plays a sea "narf", a prophetic creature who sits under a running shower looking alternately terrified, then lobotomized. She tried to maintain an ethereal voice, but there was a moment when she was squawking into a walkie talkie & she sounded a bit like Lindsay Lohan. Paul Giamatti stars in this fetid mess & that's all I'm going to say. I like Paul &, after watching this, I wanted to put a contract out on his agent.

Shyamalan has to go away now & stop bothering the decent folk. He gave us one amusing film & we are grateful. Now he should be stopped before he makes another. They get worse each time & I don't even want to imagine what could be worse than Lady in the Water.

See Spot. See Spot play. See Spot win.

My first Player of the Week of this new year is Spot_60. You're not going to hear any "out out damned Spot" when this cookie is around, she is the Switzerland of Wordox & is welcome at any tourney. She rises above the battlefield silliness & maintains a neutral position on all those ridiculous matters that make others run to the Withdrawal buttons. This calm neutrality has allowed her to fly under the radar, so I'm going to shine a light on her & bust her a little bit. Spot is a great Wordox player. When you sit across the table from her you are in deep trouble. Just the other day I watched her slap Richard off his pedestal. I'm always on edge when playing her because she tends to come up with some very creative & different words, not the usual standards. One is always en garde with a player like Spot because you never know exactly where she'll attack.

That's the player Spot. Now let's talk about the woman. I feel a kinship with her on a few levels. She is a garage band mom. Check out her son's band Critical Point & listen to a wonderfully smokey little musical excursion called Tasty (live). GarageBand.com : song profile for TASTY (LIVE!) by Critical Point There's also a song called Harry's Potter, which sounds intriguing, but I wasn't able to download it. My children & I lived in many places that did not always have garages, but we always had a band because my son is a percussionist. I've been an attic/patio/basement/garage band mom. Garage band moms have to nurture that talent, monitor practices, park their cars on the street, & stroke any neighbors that grumble. And they usually have to feed the band, which is not easy. Young male musicians are bottomless pits. They're like piranhas with guitars.

Miz Spot's profile made me smile because she quotes lyrics from a great old Robert Plant tune, Down to the Sea. Robert Plant Lyrics: Fate of Nations "When I get older....settlin' down....will you come down to the sea?" You decide Splat is all about rock & roll until you read further in her profile, where she quotes Goethe: "Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths." There's something you don't see everyday in a Hoyle profile. Yes, Spot is a rockin', classy, funny addition to the leagues. She recently joined my Creatures of the Night where she spread a little warm moonlight on our shabby bunch.

Give the lady a nice Caribbean hip bump when you see her. Then sit down & resign yourself to the fact that she's probably going to beat you in the next game.

Pepperpotpourri

For the time being I have a normal body temperature & am able to function at 73%. I am back in Ohio & catching up on all the news that happened while I was fevrile & singing old show tunes with Care Bears.

Poor Gerald Ford. Isn't it just so Ford of him to die right after the Godfather of Soul went nipples up? They can close the post offices & show memorials, parades & burials on all the major networks, but people will still be talking more about James Brown than him. The poor guy. He walked into an Oval Office of shame & did the best he could, with all the dignity he could muster, while Chevy Chase was portraying him as a clumsy dunderhead on SNL. I'll give him this, he had great taste in women. He married a sassy dancer, he should get some props for nailing Betty down. Nonetheless, his death is rather anticlimactic after we lost the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. It reminded me of when Michael Kennedy skiied into a tree & died at Aspen, then Sonny Bono did the same thing shortly after. The nation was all talked out about the dangers of skiing where there are trees, so Sonny was just a deja vu news bit. To make matters worse, they did not have dignified deaths. Kennedy & Bono met with Wile E. Coyote endings that probably sent them both to Cloud 13, along with people who stuck their tongues in light sockets.

Oprah Winfrey has opened a 30 million dollar school in South Africa, for girls! Fat white men everywhere should be feeling spine tingles these days because they have something before them that has never been seen....a feminist with her own money. She doesn't have her daddy's money, her late husband's money, she has her own mother-grabbing money & she's using it to create educated women. That Oprah is one smart cookie. She knows that it is pointless to try to get the powers that be to enact change, so she is creating a master generation of cognitively charged women who will do it themselves. I'm glad Oprah has all the money. She knows what to do with it.

Since Synergy was a wasteland last night, I also got to check out some movies. I offer a quote from each:

"I'm not a pessimist, I see the glass as half full. But I believe that it is poisoned." (Woody Allen in Scoop)

"Why is the rum always gone?" (Captain Jack Sparrow)