Randomosity – sort of
Sep 29, 2008 Randomosity
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I usually publish a collection of my random thoughts on Mondays, but I haven’t had time to collect them – my family has been out of town for the past five days and I’ve done almost nothing other than clean, organize, and put together giant pieces of IKEA furniture all by myself. Oh, and I broke my toe. It’s a very pretty purple and it hurts like hell.
I’ll be back on my normal schedule in a few days. If there’s one thing that family is good for, it’s keeping up the routine. Without other people’s schedules to regulate mine, I’m up until four in the morning, not going outside unless absolutely necessary, and eating like complete crap. But at least I’m getting a lot done!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom
Tags: IKEA
Photoshop your way to perfection
Sep 24, 2008 What's Going On
I came across a site recently that shows just how easy it is to make a perfectly attractive girl look like what we’ve come to expect from a cover girl: perfect skin, big boobs, and great hair. You go here and click on the magazine cover, and can see bit by bit how photoshopping transforms people from what they are to what we think they should be.
I don’t want to see ugly people on fashion and celebrity magazine covers. I have no desire to live in Harrison Bergeron’s world. But I do want to know that what I’m looking at on a cover is more or less real. Make-up can do great things, and I think that’s fair. And if the cover model has a giant zit on the day of the shoot, I can understand zapping that out. But actually digitally enhancing someone’s breasts, or changing their eye color, or making them thinner, is just fraud, plain and simple. If they can’t recreate the look walking down the street, then it shouldn’t be on the cover.
I really have to hand it to some actresses and models out there who are fighting back against this trend. Jamie Lee Curtis did the unthinkable some years back and put it all out there in More magazine, showing the world what she looks like without a team of people to glam up her hair and squeeze her muffin top into a tight dress. “It’s such a fraud. And I’m the one perpetuating it.”
Keira Knightly revealed in an interview a couple years ago how her breasts were enhanced on magazine covers and movie posters. She was told that her flat chest was a turn off. She said that she OKd having her boobs blown up for the “King Arthur” posters, claiming she didn’t “give a shit.” But perhaps she has gained more perspective in the past couple years because she recently refused to have her breasts enhanced for “The Duchess” posters.
I’ll love Tyra Banks forever for fighting back against the people who called her “America’s Next Top Waddle” and “Tyra Porkchop” after unflattering pictures were splashed all over the place of her in a bathing suit. My weight has gone up and down and all around almost 60lbs in the past 7 years. And sometimes it seems like other people care about it more than I do. I like weighing less, and would like to lose about 40 pounds more. I feel better when I weigh less, and it’s more fun shopping for clothes, and I know The Ass likes me better thinner. But it’s not as big a deal as the rest of the world makes it out to be. And the weight didn’t start coming off until I finally started feeling comfortable in my own skin.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom
Tags: Harrison Bergeron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Keira Knightly, More Magazine, The Duchess, Tyra Banks
This Week’s Time Sucker: Help a Drunk Walk it Off
Sep 24, 2008 Time Sucker
This game, called Home Run, is deceptively simple: You help a drunk walk home by countering his movements. If he leans right, you move your mouse left. If he stumbles left, you move right. But do it too fast, or don’t do it enough, and he falls down.
Apparently, the record is something like 500 meters, but I can’t seem to get past about 40. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been drunk.
Go here and then scroll down to “Play Home Run 2004″. Even on a fast connection it takes about 15 seconds to load, but that’s probably just to force you to watch the pop-up commercial.
Click on “start” and our drunk guy starts walking. Move your mouse and see how far you get.
There may be more to it than that, but since I don’t speak German I have no idea what the instructions say. Thank goodness “Start” was in English.
Every time he falls down I say I’m not going to play again, but then I start thinking that it’s really not that hard and I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it this time! Arrrrggggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom
Tags: Home Run Game
Congratulations to our new baby stuff winner!
Sep 23, 2008 Product Giveaway
Our latest winner is Jamie, of Cool Crafty Mom. She won three great gifts I picked up over the summer at BlogHer: a Medela bottle, a Mod Mum sling, and a Precious Moments footprint kit. Enjoy, Jamie!
Thanks to everyone who entered, and please stop back on Thursday at 9am for the next contest.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom
Did you watch the Emmys?
Sep 22, 2008 What's Going On
I did, and for once I actually watched them the night they aired. In past years I haven’t gotten around to watching them until I already knew who won everything, so it’s nice to be surprised this year! Here are some highlights and lowlights.
The opening was, well, painful. The show was hosted this year by the five nominees in the first ever Reality Show Host category: Tom Bergeron (Dancing with the Stars), Ryan Seacrest (America Idol), Heidi Klum (Project Runway), Howie Mandel (Deal or No Deal), and Jeff Probst (Survivor). I really can’t understand why the Emmys would be giving so much attention to reality TV in a year when writers proved that without them, Hollywood shuts down.
Reality TV gets more than its fair share of attention. I like some of it. Amazing Race is one of my favorite shows. I watched Survivor for the first few seasons, until I realized that they were going to be churning one out every month or so, and I just couldn’t keep up. But now my son and I watch Total Drama Island together, a hilarious cartoon sendup of Survivor (and not even knowing what Survivor is, most of it must be going over his head!). I started watching Dancing with the Stars just last season (yes, I know, very late) and have watched So You Think You Can Dance from the very first show. I’m losing interest in American Idol, but it had a great run for a while. Basically, I’ll check out any reality show that isn’t trying to couple people up romantically. That’s just creepy.
But I digress. Tom Bergeron seemed up to the hosting job, but he was really the only one. Howie is one of those people whose career and popularity confound me. Heidi is beautiful but has zero timing. Ryan really wasn’t given much to do. And Jeff, well, he’s in his element on Survivor, but does not look at all comfortable or natural on a stage, indoors and dressed in formal clothes. If the Emmy people really wanted to pay tribute to reality shows, they should have made a clip montage. That could have been hilarious. But don’t put the poor hosts out there on the stage without “normal people” surrounding them, making them look polished and accomplished in comparison. Jeremy Piven said it best in his acceptance speech for best supporting actor: “What if I just kept talking for twelve minutes? What would happen? That was the opening.”
Julia Louis-Dreyfus came on after one of my favorite Seinfeld clips was shown, from “The Contest”. For those of you who haven’t seen “The Contest”, well, shame on you. But it was about who could go the longest without masterbating and it was the episode that put the show on the map. Anyway, Julia had one of the funniest lines of the broadcast: “You know, I can’t tell you how proud I am to be part of a television program that celebrates the gratuitous indulgence of self-gratification. But enough about the Emmys…”
It was almost worth sitting through all of the other crap to see Ricky Gervais do his thing. He was hilarious! Watch it now before YouTube removes it:
They should really consider him for the hosting job next year.
Josh Groban singing a long medley of TV show themes was a big risk, but I think he pulled it off. It’s worth watching just for his South Park theme. I have a new respect for him.
There was a Laugh In scene with some original cast members that fell completely flat. The show just hasn’t aged well, and the stars have lost their timing (or perhaps they were waiting for laughs and applause that never came?). I’m sure that in its day it was groundbreaking and hilarious and all that, but now, for someone who wasn’t watching it from the perspective of nostalgia but just at face value, it totally dragged without a chuckle.
Presenter Katherine Joosten (the late Dolores Landingham of The West Wing) got up there and said “Because we’re running late they cut my bit” and then went into the nominations for the category she was announcing. Now, there were a few other stars who just got up there and did the award thing without any stilted banter, probably for the same reason. So why would she want to draw attention to herself and the fact that her bit was completely expendable?
But while she was the first, Ms. Joosten wasn’t the only one. It got really repetitive hearing presenter after presenter mention that they had something funny they were supposed to say, but it had been cut because the show was running long. It could have been a funny running gag, but instead most of the presenters just seemed bitter (except Kristin Chenoweth and Neil Patrick Harris, who actually said they were bitter – that was funny). The whole thing could have been solved by cutting Don Rickles and Kathy Griffin. I suppose Don Rickles deserves some kind of respect and lifetime achievement award, but he did not deserve two actual Emmys and a ton of stage time. His comedy, while I’m sure it paved the way for many of the people on the stage last night, is now pretty much irrelevant. He couldn’t even stay quiet while the winners he announced (Amazing Race, fantastic show!) were making their speech – he had to upstage them.
And his co-presenter Kathy Griffin? She should have gotten two special awards. One for the most plastic surgery with the least benefit, and another for laughing the most at her own unfunny bit. Cut her out and all of the other presenters could have done their semi-funny bits. Kathy, you’re not funny! You’re like one of those poor kids on the early round of American Idol who just can’t sing, who is just awful, but is surrounded by people saying “Oh baby, don’t you listen to what those judges say, you just keep singing, you’re great!” But all of us out in the real world are going WTF? Why are you encouraging this poor person to humiliate herself on national TV like that? Well, Kathy, it’s my duty as a fellow human being to say to you: You’re not funny! Sit the fuck down! The people around you are not going to tell you this because they are (inexplicably) making money off of you. But it’s true.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were great together, as always, getting their digs in at McCain without mentioning his name or his party. And they weren’t the only ones. But it made latent conservative Tom Selleck seem very classy later in the show when he came on and did his thing with no political mentions at all. I give him credit just for walking into the room.
Best Actress nominee Julia Louis-Dreyfus was pretty funny while Tina Fey was giving her best-actress-in-a-comedy acceptance speech. Tina was relating how when she doesn’t know how to play a scene, her husband tells her to act like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, so thanks Julia, that’s working out pretty well for me. They cut to Julia in the audience giving Tina a very sarcastic thumbs up and eye roll.
Tina also gave the best piece of parenting advice I’ve seen come out of Hollywood since everyone went on TV to remind us that babies should NOT be dangled over balconies by their man-child fathers: “I want to thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities. Well done, that is what all parents should do.”
The awarding of the best reality host award was actually very funny. Jimmy Kimmel brought all of the nominees (Howie, Tom, Heidi, Jeff, and Ryan) onstage and they had to stand there while Jimmy made fun of them. Then he made them wait until after the commercial break to announce the winner. Which turned out to be Jeff Probst of Survivor.
All in all, one of the more boring awards shows I’ve seen. The sad fact is, nobody but the people being mentioned care about the people being mentioned during the speeches. And the people who don’t make their livings in front of the camera should all be given their awards at a luncheon the day before. I’m talking about the producers, directors, writers, everybody. Then give each actor and actress five minutes to give a speech. Special arrangements can be made for people like Tom Hanks, actors who win as producers and make good speeches.
And for God’s sake, there is absolutely no excuse for bad writing for the hosts. And if the writing isn’t the problem, you have nobody to blame but yourself: you picked the hosts!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom
Tags: Don Rickles, Emmys, Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel, Jeff Probst, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, Josh Grobin, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Katherine Joosten, Kathy Griffin, Kristin Chenoweth, Neil Patrick Harris, Ricky Gervais, Ryan Seacrest, Seinfeld, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Tom Bergeron, Tom Hanks, Tom Selleck
