01:54 AM
Observatorium· TV Praise the doctor and pass the low-fat no-fry chicken fried steak!

Four years ago after I quit my 9-5 job, I started watching Oprah now and then. I discovered that every Tuesday (I think it was Tuesdays) was Dr. Phil day. I had never heard of this guy before but he had a good down to earth, common-sense style, a bit of a Texas Twang and he didn't expect to solve everyone's problems in seven minutes (he even said so :)).

So I made sure to watch or tape Oprah every Tuesday. Then two years ago, he got his own syndicated show and I started watching that. I didn't catch it every day tho because it got to be a bit much going from once a week to five times a week. A little advice goes a long way.

Last winter I started watching a bit more regularly, he had moved from a problem of the day format to following various couples and families for weeks/months and so it had a bit of a plot going on. One day each week was the family with the pregnant teenager and another day each week was the couples from the relationship retreat he'd done and another day each week was the Morman couple with four kids, one from the wife's affair and a fifth kid on the way and he filled in the other two days with miscellaneous things.

These families/couples were all kind of depressing because he couldn't fix them all in fifteen minutes in between commercials, so I only watched now and then. In the last couple years, he's become a male version of Oprah, he's gotten two more books out, one's a cookbook, he's got a magazine, a website, a web-board and all sorts of stuff. He gives away money and stuff to help the various people who turn up on his show, just like Oprah. He hustles troubled kids off to all sorts of expensive treatment centers and schools, all paid for by Dr. Phil, he gives them vacations and pays bills and gives them exercise equipment and kinds of things, he's become a regular miracle worker.

I watched his show today and (as he noted loudly) it's the first show of his third season and I see now he's completed the transformation to book-thumping psycho-preacher! He went to a town somewhere in the midwest, I missed which state, and gave a better sermon than any holly-roller could have done. Pat Robertson should be taking lessons from this guy. He's gonna fix this town, he's gonna cure every ill, he's gonna stop the wife-beating husband, he's gonna sober up the alcoholic, he's gonna get those kids back in school, he's gonna un-pregnate those teenagers! (well, maybe not that last one :))

Oh my, it was something to see, he had that crowd up on their feet, clapping and a-swaying and lawd almighty, singing that old-time religion and a-pledging their solemn promise to follow Dr. Phil!

It was really sumpin' to see...we ain't had us no good preacher-men on the teevee in ages. So you tune into him, y'heah? Dr. Phil will save your soul, I ain't gotta single doubt!

09:08 PM
TV ohmigawd, Lowell's wife is Dr. Weaver!

LOL! I'm watching reruns of Wings on Nickelodeon and there's Bunny, Lowell's wife, it's the actress who plays Dr. Kerrie Weaver on ER! And boy is she miscast, she's great as Dr. Weaver and I've seen her in other things where she's been good, but she's just not suited for Lowell's dumb bunny wife playing cat on a hot tin roof.

I want to go see Bourne Supremacy (it's the only thing that I like Matt Damon in) but I'm soooo pooped, spent the afternoon helping Mom unpack at their house. It poured down rain while we were there, lovely to watch and hear, it's cooled things off greatly. But none of use remembered that Mom had left her car windows rolled down until much later. Eep, brand new van she's only had a few months, it didn't do too much damage (hopefully), just soaked the armrests in the doors and the seats. Hopefully none of the electronics in the door arm rests got damaged.

01:28 PM
TV Review of Rescue Me in New Yorker

While scanning the New Yorker, I found this tidbit, a review of Rescue Me, debuting on Wednesday on FX - watch this show! I've been excited about it, Denis Leary can be a really good actor in the right parts and this looks tailor-made for him. The New Yorker points out the promising things about the show as well as some rather ironic touches (Miller sponsoring the show's commercial free premiere, which has Denis' character falling off the wagon by drinking a Miller Lite) and all in all, it looks very good.

FX has a good track record with doing hard-edged solidly good shows - The Shield remains involving and well-written after its second season, Nip-Tuck (which my brother loves but I can't watch, plastic surgery *shudder*) is another sharp notch in FX's belt and Rescue Me looks to the third winner.

Next January, FX will have Thief, starring Andre Braugher, focusing on 12 days leading up to a heist he's planning and the various people involved in it. Braugher's another good actor with the right role, he did excellent work in Homicide and this new show sounds good for him.

So when you're bored by the reality tripe, insipid comedies and endless ripped-from-the-headlines crime dramas on the big three-four-five networks, switch over to FX and watch the kind of quality shows that used to be on the big networks.

09:55 AM
TV Commercials that make me dance

I absolutely adore that Office Max "Rubberband Man" commercial! It's a great song and it's great advertising, something that makes me smile and want to dance and also makes me remember them without annoying the piss out of me. That's GOOD advertising.

So many commercials yell at me, bang at me, and just plain make me scramble for the remote to hit Mute as fast as I can. Because so much of advertising is obnoxious these days, I end up taping most shows so I can easily fast forward the commercials. On the rare occasions I watch a show live, I have the remote sitting next to me so I can hit Mute the instant the commercials start.

Good advertising:

Those 7-UP commercials with the funky Up Yours guy talking to passersby on the street.

The McDonalds commercials with the Hispanic guy dancing his way there, it's all a bit unbelievable but still it's got a good beat and it's fun to watch.

Almost every VW car commercial made in the last five, six years, especially the ads for the Beetle when it came out again, I loved the UFO thing. And the VW Cabrio commercial with Nick Drake singing "Pink Moon" was brilliant.

Actually, there's a lot of good car commercials done by the carmakers, although I tend to like the ads for sedans since they tend to emphasize smoothness or fun, while truck and suv ads are more likely to be obnoxious as they emphasize their "toughness". The local ads done by dealerships suck rotten eggs tho, the majority of them yell at me and there goes that Mute button.

The Gap commercials led the way in commercials as art and music, although most of their Old Navy commercials didn't play well after the first viewing or were just plain awful to begin with.

Ikea, that's another good one, the Swedish guy is great, they've done enough variations that I don't get totally bored by any of them and I love the garage one where he finds a car buried under all the stuff the old owner left.

Target has some good ones, and they use their logo and color well in their commercials. The Target-Martha Stewart ads were pretty good although of course they can't run those anymore! ;)

Bad advertising:

Any commercial for any reality TV show. Granted, I don't like 99.999% of reality TV anyway but the commercials highlight the worst stuff.

Any commercials for local news on the three major networks where I live. Local news shows have gotten as bad as reality shows, everything they put in their commercials is based on scare tactics, scare the crap out of people about something, anything. This is why I rarely watch local news anymore, it's degenerated into really bad yellow journalism. I don't know if it's just here or if local news in most cities is like this now but it's been terrible here for the last six, seven, eight years now. The local news on WB and Fox is much better, they do more straight news without the scare tactics.

Hmmm, I guess I hit Mute so fast these days, I don't pay much attention to the bad commercials, I'll have to start actually watching them so I can critique them. Ugh!

Caveats: IMHO. YMMV. HTH. HAND. :)

02:24 PM
TV X-Files finale, "The Truth"

(Yes, I'm a little behind, I taped the finale ages ago but kept putting off watching it.)

Is it just me or is this really boring? I'm almost halfway thru and the best thing I can say if that at least I'm halfway thru. The first half is just meaningless exposition, just in case people haven't been watching for the last nine years???

Ah, here's Marita, maybe it'll get better now.

01:46 AM
TV The Sentinel

When the Sci-Fi channel reran the Sentinel earlier this year, I taped it all. It's been so long since I saw it and I didn't watch it in order. Now that it's summer and there's nothing on TV, I threw in the first tape and the pilot for the Sentinel was better than I remembered. I expected to be bored quickly and decide to recycle the tapes without watching them but now I'm stuck! :)

09:15 PM
TV A Working Actor

Lynne Thigpen died a little over a month ago, she went home from work, and died that night from a heart attack. She was an actor, not a well known one, she didn't fit the Hollywood image of beauty that's a requirement for stardom so she never was a star. Instead she was a working actor, the kind that shows up and does all those secondary roles that are so essential to making good movies and tv shows. It's not just the stars that make a show or movie great, it's all those other people in the scene who play their parts just right, who hit their marks on time and say their lines like they're supposed to, so that the star can give that great performance that everyone raves about.

I was watching an outtakes show awhile ago, showing scenes from Will & Grace, there was this one scene were this bimbo student nurse is brought in to take blood from Grace who's totally freaked out about needles. The actor playing Grace kept cracking up laughing and they kept having to reshoot and this little blonde girl had to repeat her lines over and over and over while the star kept ruining the shot. It struck me as so amazing that she was doing the same lines just right each time, hitting her mark every time, getting just the right inflection in her lines over and over, that's a professional actor. If it had been reversed, if the little blonde girl had been the one cracking up and ruining the scene, you can bet she'd have been out of there in a hurry.

Twenty-four years ago, Lynne Thigpen played a small role in a movie called Warriors, her face was never shown, just her mouth close to a microphone, a DJ on the radio, and her sultry, sardonic voice chronicling the gang's journey home to Coney Island. Just a small part, but she gave something extra to the movie, made it more than it would have been without her part. And I've seen her since in countless supporting roles, always doing a good job with whatever part she was playing.

In her last part, on the tv show The District, she played a black woman, a single mother, an older working woman, she gave the show a heart, a realism that it sorely needed in contrast to the main character's flamboyance. The character dealt with a variety of issues, her sister's murder from domestic abuse, a custody fight for her nephew, a recurrence of cancer, struggling to make a living, and dating and romance as an older single mom. All of that could have been over the top, too melodramatic, become just maudlin soap opera stuff, but Lynne Thigpen grounded it in reality and made it believable.

She was a working actor. I don't expect to see her in any of the memorial tributes at the Emmys this year, she was just another working actor, just one of the countless actors who do their job day in and day out, role after role. And that's the highest praise I can give, she was a working actor.

Lynne Thigpen (December 22, 1948 - March 12, 2003)

07:11 PM
TV The Networks must die!

Arrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh! Stupid Fricking Networks that have to have dueling Michael Jackson specials so Third Watch isn't on and Miracles isn't on! Which leaves only shows I hate, Everybody Loves Raymond (NOT me!), CSI: Miami, Fear Factor and other dreck!

I've had a gawdawful headache all day from muscle spasms, I finally got my prescription and was really looking forward to relaxing with my favorite shows tonight!

10:04 PM
TV TV Idiocies

DATELINE NBC will do an hour show devoted only to Michael Jackson's face.

Only an hour??? I would think you could do at least a four hour documentary on it.
 

08:08 AM
TV Non-sequitur

From the Which Season 1 ep of Smallville are you? quiz:
 
You're in a store and you can buy only one of the following items. Which one do you choose?
A long-sleeved, flannel shirt.
Tight white pants.
Some dark glasses.
Slinky black pants.
A grey sweatshirt.
A black trenchcoat.
A white leather jacket.
A long-sleeved purple shirt.

For some totally odd reason that white leather jacket caught my eye, I like leather, not white tho, but this morning, it just sounded right...

10:06 PM
TV Fresh Meat

There's stuff on TV to watch! Finally after weeks of nothing, there's lots of cool stuff, Third Watch, Boomtown, Buffy, The Shield and OZ! Look at all that stuff, I'd forgotten all that had happened last season.

09:49 AM
TV 57 channels and nothin' on...

Wow, I have cable again. See, my cable access here sucks, I have the digital box and I use Roadrunner but in the living room, alot of the digital channels, anything above 80 just won't work, either it cuts in and out continually (all the little squares redrawing the screen continually) or I get "this channel will be available shortly" on the screen only it never was. Used to be I'd call the cable company, the tech would come out and replace some splitters and cable and it would work great...until the next thunderstorm when it would go back to the same old crap of constantly redrawing or "available shortly". So after a few times of that, I gave up. I could get HBO on 66 which was the main thing I cared about, I wanted to tape Sex and the City and The Wire.

But then even that got bad so I thought I'd try it in the bedroom, the line from the pole goes to the bedroom first and the reception has always been better in there, FX comes in much clearer in the bedroom than the living room so I taped most of the Buffy reruns in there. I moved the digital box and yep, it was better, I could even see some channels I hadn't been able to access in a while (although not TVLand and the Fox Movie Channel which I really wanted!) and so it was great...for awhile. I got thru taping the end of The Wire and Sex and the City but it was iffy, even the lower channels like 66 were flipping out. So I gave up on it, left the box in the bedroom but didn't hook it up.

Last night I wanted to tape a movie on one of the digital Encore channels and I figured, what the hell, I'd give it a try and I plugged it all in and wow, look at that, not only does the channel I want work, but so do lots of others that didn't work even in the bedroom, like TVLand and FMC and all the HBO channels and Trio and BBCAmerica, cool! I decided to take another chance and I moved the digital box back out to the living room and plugged it in, not quite as many channels as in the bedroom, I really wish I could get the digital all video MTV and VH1 channels cause then I could play that when I'm working but I can get the digital Country Music channel and I can get TVLand and Trio (I want to tape Profit when they rerun it next month) but not Fox Movie Channel. I can get Encore, some channels anyway so that'll do. And a bunch of the HBOs come in pretty good too.

So I have cable again, most of it, anyway, and it's been poring rain for a week so I'm really surprised, they must have boosted the signal to this area or something because I haven't had them do anything to fix it after it got bad about a year ago.

03:56 PM
TV Life in Black and White

Some days I can set the TV to TCM and just watch it all day, like today:

Holiday (Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant) The Apartment (best movie that Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine ever made) The Maltese Falcon (Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor) Sweet Smell of Success (Burt Lancaster)

I can't recall Holiday, it's an early Hepburn movie although I may have seen it, I've watched some Hepburn marathons and sometimes they run together. And The Apartment, great movie, great portrait of cubicle life in the 50's. The Maltese Falcon, I've seen this in bits and pieces before but never really followed it. This time, I'm seeing it from the beginning and it's good. Sweet Smell of Success, it's an unknown factor, I feel like I've heard of it before, maybe in a remake or something, but Burt Lancaster is good, especially in the 40's and 50's. I finally saw from Here to Eternity the other day, remarkably good film, all I'd really seen before was the famous beach scene.

And then at 11pm tonight is a hokey horror movie, set in Germany, a count suspected of killing his brother tries to uncover the real murderer, looks wonderfully bad!

Part of the reason I like watching old black and white movies is to look at the sets, all the real 40's and 50's furniture, knick-knacks, clothes, hairstyles and hats! The hats on women and on the men, I like a man in hat.

10:10 AM
TV Belly Laughs

There's some kinds of slapstick I don't like, the Three Stooges for example. But cartoon slapstick, like Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner and Tom and Jerry, I grew up with these and even tho I know what will happen, I still laugh every time! I just realized that the Cartoon Network is airing these cartoons on Saturday mornings! So I can watch them just like I did when I was a kid and got early on Saturdays to see them! And they're just as good with the sound off, the stories are perfectly understandable without the dialogue so I can listen to the birds sing and the wind blow and the rain come down while watching them and getting a good morning laugh!

01:16 AM
Music· TV Now that's pop music!

Watching Hidden Hills on TV and the theme song is the Monkees' Pleasant Valley Sunday so I just had to put on the original on Winamp, along with Last Train to Clarksville, Daydream Believer and I'm a Believer. Pop music! and still managing to make a statement and stir up all my old memories of where we were living back then, another pleasant valley sunday....

Take the last train to Clarksville and I'll meet you at the station, you can be here by 4:30 cause I've made your reservation...

06:24 PM
TV Boys of Autumn

What is it about helmets and pads and skintight pants that make a man look so good? Ah, football! All those lovely butts and long legs and well muscled arms and broad shoulders....

10:37 AM
Observatorium· TV· Weather Stacks and stacks of tapes

As you might have guessed by my last entry, I've been lost in TV land this week, watching the premieres of new and old shows all week! After the long rerun hell of summer with only two new shows, one fabulous (The Wire) and one a dud (Witchblade), I finally have a lovely stack of tapes with all sorts of new stuff sitting next to my vcr waiting for me to watch them. I love fall!

And it is fall, finally, really, amazingly, it's actually cooler here in September for once, temps in the 80's instead of 90's like most years or 100's like we had two years ago. I've got my windows open and the A/C turned off and it's wonderful!

My aunt wrote this:

This morning I realised FALL IS COMING. There was that SNAP to the air this morning. October country will soon be here.

For some people, it's the closing of the year.......for me it doesn't feel like that. It's an END to the oppressive jungle funk of summer....of baked dry creek beds........mosquito and tick and chigger bites. It's the OVEN heat inside a parked car. It's the unending BUZZZZZZZ of the cicadas. The itch......the sweat......the MELT of summertime, when the "livin' is easy"......ONLY for catfish.

The leaves are starting to turn to cool flame in the woods.....the sky is achingly blue and clear and the mornings are downright CRISP. There's the hazy dewfrost on the grass in the morning. There's the smell of woodsmoke on the evening air.....and the eyeblinking brightness of dappled light in the woods. There's the snort and rustle of surprised deer.

The smell of fresh pumpkin pie and roasted turkey and the mouth-watering fragrance of sage cornbread stuffing.....the hot buttery aroma of turkey gravy. The clink and whisper of silverware and table linen and special glasses as the table is set in the dining room. The distant roar of football games on tv.......the hiss and crackle of burning wood in the fireplace.

Fall is coming.

She lives in the country just a bit further north than me so she does have deer wandering around her house in the mornings and the trees do turn colorful but it's all the same things to me, she's 12 years older than me but we have most all the same reference points, the 60's, rock and roll, being liberals and all those Thanksgiving dinners together when I was a kid.

Fall has always been my most favorite time of year, I did hate the summers with my cousins up in Wisconsin coming to an end, especially when I got a big crush on one of the boys across the lake but especially since I got out of school and started working and don't have those three month vacations up there anymore, I love the fall. I love winter too, I love the cold and the steely gray skies and bringing out winter coats and sweaters. I love walking in it, feeling the cold on my cheeks, the chilly wind thru my hair and turning my ears to icicles. And dragging out the big thick quilt for the bed and the cats sleeping next to me, one on each side, pinning me to the bed and slipping reluctantly out in the morning to jump in a hot shower.

My favorite time of year!

06:14 PM
TV An Important Announcement

We interrupt this blog for a very important announcement:

      SMALLVILLE IS ON TONIGHT!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogs.

09:12 PM
Music· TV· Weather Weather music

I like the music on the Weather Channel, nice upbeat bouncy stuff while they're showing the local and regional forecasts. And holy cow, she's pregnant! The weather woman, and she really needs a bigger jacket, that one is practically popping its buttons across her tummy! I guess Junior is bigger than she expected when she bought her expecting clothes. :)