Only one can win!
television
Good ads count.
Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, I KNOW, OK? Nike is a big bad company and commercials are poisoning our children and Adbusters and Naomi Klein and everything etc. bah blah blah. Additionally, I have no clue what the Nike Fuelband is and I’m sure it’s stupid and I really don’t care. But I am amazed by the folks at Wieden+Kennedy and how they just consistently crank out ads that are both really visually interesting and not cheesy and JUST emotionally manipulative enough to get you excited without feeling TOTALLY gross.
I mean, did you see this one yet? IT HAS DAVID BRENT IN IT.
I don’t know anything about marketing or video production or any of this stuff, but one day I will work for W+K. Even if it means I have to live in Portland.
The Emmys, 2011
So, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Emmys. I always get excited for them because I love quite a bit of television, and quite a bit of the television that I love gets nominated. But there are always one or two nominees in each category that (even though MAYBE I’ve never actually watched the show SO SUE ME) are clearly not worthy. And, more often than not, one of those two nominees ends up winning. Like, I wouldn’t be surprised if Johnny Galecki won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy this year. JUST KIDDING even the Emmys wouldn’t go that far, I mean it’s JOHNNY GALECKI lolz gimme a break! If that happened I would expect the Emmys to receive an Emmy nomination for Best Comedy next year! Get it?? Wocka wocka wocka!
So usually I start out excited, slowly lose my enthusiasm after some mind-numbingly bad award choices, and by the end of the night I’m a disillusioned husk of a man. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, because I don’t really care all that much, but you get my point.
As usual, my wife Johanna and I will be competing in a winner-picking competition. She’s trying not to over-think things tonight and keeps muttering things like, “I refuse to base my self-worth on this. I am an adult with a job.” She is also going to fulfill her role as bartender for the evening. We very recently found out that we will be moving from North Carolina back to Boston soon so that she can start the aforementioned job. In honor of both Game of Thrones and the impending New England blizzards that we’re dreading, she has concocted a drink made up of vanilla-flavored vodka and seltzer that she’s calling “Winter is Coming.” Yummerz? We’ll see.
OK, let’s get this thing started. Time to hype ourselves up for another bloated award show! Repeat after me: “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!”
8:01 – Fun (??) opening musical number! Oh, Jane Lynch. In just a couple short years I’ve gone from liking you a lot to still liking you but being annoyed at your overexposure because of Glee to kind of maybe not even liking you anymore? But this bit is pretty winning. Maybe you’ll redeem yourself in my eyes tonight! And I know my opinion is all that really matters to you, Jane.
The MTV VMAs, 2011
BLACK AND YELLOW GUCCI GUCCI LOUIS LOUIS FENDI FENDI PRADA!!!1! YO! MTV gives out VMAs!!
Seriously, this is one of my favorite award shows, if only because it is consistently bonkers. I mean, most of the time it’s only bonkers in an over-produced, manufactured MTV type of way, but it’s still sort of fun if you don’t think too much about it, I think? And every once in a while something that’s actually bizarre happens. I was actually starting to get excited about this earlier today until I remembered that Chelsea Handler was the host [Edit: Wrong.]. UGH THAT DOUBLE UGH.
Anywayz, my wife Johanna and I will be competing in another of our CLASSIC winner-picking competitions. Luckily, there are only like eight categories tonight (at least on our ballot), so this should be easy enough. Johanna is also, as usual, in charge of our themed beverage for the evening. I’ve been singing (rapping?) Kreayshawn all day long, so she’s calling tonight’s drink the “Gucci Gucci.” We don’t have any Adderall to grind up and put in a beverage, so she’s making a variant of a Cuba Libre because, in her words, “it’s something a trashy girl would drink.” After her first sip she added, “I’ll only be having one of these.”
Let’s get going. Categories and winners in bold. And if Kanye does anything crazy, it’ll be in bold and also, like, 20 pt font.
9:35 – Hey, guess what!? Time Warner Cable is the worst! The tech they use is ridiculously out-of-date and barely functions, and it decided this evening to not record the first 35 minutes of this show! Now I’m going to use that 35 minutes of my life that they saved me tweeting at them about how horrible they are.
I suppose this means I missed the opening performance (Lady Gaga, I think?), so that’s too bad, but this also means that I have to hear Chelsea Handler talk less, so, win some lose some, I guess? [Edit: Wrong.] Oh, well. Deep breaths, Jared; it’s just the VMAs. This will all be online later anyways.
Johanna is hopping on to MTV.com to see the results of any categories that we missed. Let’s check in.
Best Video with a Message: We both went with Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and it wins. 1-1.
Best Pop Video: Johanna went with Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and I went with Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)”, because we had both forgotten that it was 2002. Since it is 2002, though, Britney Spears wins with “Till the World Ends”.
Best Rock Video: I went with Foster the People here because I have never heard of them before. Johanna remembered that it was 2002 this time, so she went with Foo Fighters, who win. 2-1 her.
All right, let’s rejoin our regularly scheduled programming.
9:35 – Jack Black, Will Ferrell, and Seth Rogen are here reprising their roles as the Beastie Boys from this thing:
Are you guys watching Survivor?
Boston Rob is really running things, huh?
The Big Love Finale
I totes should have written this post last night right after watching the show because it seemed like I had lots of thoughts then that I can’t remember now, but oh well, I’m lazy and thems the breaks!
I should start by saying that I know that you hate Big Love. Everyone hates Big Love! But I was always sort of fond of it. It was basically a soap opera with high production values, right? And that’s fun, I think? It seems that most of the problems people had with it were story-based, and that is completely valid. Because like 83% of the stories this show chose to introduce and explore were really stupid. I get it. But I always saw it as more of a character-driven show than a story-driven show, and while I wasn’t really in love with any of the individual performances, these were some pretty compelling and well-drawn characters, IMHO. It was always in the Entourage vein of HBO shows, in that it’s really stupid, but I can settle in and distractedly enjoy it every week while I try to get through my Google Reader. And, unlike Entourage, at least it had a little bit of forward momentum, even if it was stupid forward momentum. Entourage has, like, backward momentum. I suspect I’ll miss Big Love a bit.
I should also say that my wife Johanna and I had some conversations as the season built to the finale about the way the show should end, and it mostly ended, in word if not in spirit, exactly how I thought it should. I wanted Bill to die (BELATED SPOILER ALERT!!1!). Bill needed to die. And Bill died. Also, I wanted to get confirmation that the story was really always about the wives and their relationships with each other, and I got that confirmation.
OK, all that said, this finale was terrible.
This Derrick Rose and Katy Perry team-up is making me reconsider my “Buy American” stance.
So at some point, perhaps when I was the owner of a Chrysler dealership while they were going bankrupt (Believe it or not, that is not a joke! That is a thing that actually happened!), I got it in my head that I should be one of those “Buy American” people. One way in which this manifested itself was in my half-baked decision to only wear, like, Nike, Vans and Converse shoes and no longer support Adidas or Puma.
My aversion to Adidas was even more pronounced because I have an inherent distrust of German corporations, mostly because I assume they all used to provide material support to the Nazi Party. UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIM BASED ON ABSOLUTELY NO INFORMATION ALERT! When I brought up this attitude about the Germans to my wife’s father and told him I was thinking of buying a Ford instead of, say, a Volkswagen because of it, he pointed out that Henry Ford was a noted anti-Semite who exchanged correspondance with Adolf Hitler. Or something. So there’s that.
Another way in which I’m an idiot is that clearly all of these shoe companies are global corporations at this point, and they’re all manufacturing the sneakers in the same Indonesian sweatshops, and blah blah blah, I know! I know, OK?! I just said RIGHT AT THE START OF THIS PARAGRAPH that I’m an idiot! Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am a large hypocrite.
Anyway, this new Adidas commercial features both my singer crush, Katy Perry, and my basketball crush, Derrick Rose, so I’m thinking of switching allegiances. Sorry, Phil Knight! And yes, I know, you hate Katy Perry, but I don’t care. She’s really hot, you guys. Plus, I know you hate her husband Russell Brand, too, but that doesn’t stop me from also really liking him. So there.
As for the commercial itself, I think it might be slightly too frenetic for my taste, but the new Justice song it uses is pretty awesome, and it really makes me want to go care about something/work hard/never give up! I’m not sure I’m going to go out and buy a new pair of Adidas shoes, though, because pretty much every pair that I’ve ever owned has sort of hurt my feet. But if anyone could convince me to switch brands it would be Derrick Rose, on whom I currently have the biggest sports crush I’ve had since the heights of my Pujolsmania. He’s so hard-working and humble and unselfish and amazing! Did you see this article? How could you not love him?!
Speaking of my current love of Derrick Rose, I really need someone to talk NBA with. None of my friends care, and my wife, God bless her, tries her best, but I get the sense that she’s just daydreaming about Kyle Chandler while I’m blathering on about how maybe the Bulls are better off with the 2 seed in the East as opposed to the 1 seed because then they would probably face the Heat in the second round of the playoffs instead of the Magic, and I really think they match up better against the Heat in a seven game series. What’s that? You’ve already stopped reading? OK then, I’ll show myself out.
The Super Bowl, 2011
OK, wait, just for one second let’s talk about the Puppy Bowl. Did you guys see Two Face? He was clearly the best and my favorite because he just wants to chill.
I’m also probably going to be good friends with Oliver (and maybe his brother River) because we share a love of movies.
But anyway, the Super Bowl. So, this seems like it’s going to be a good game. Most people that I’ve heard have been picking the Packers to win, but they aren’t huge favorites. It should be close. Plus, both the Packers and the Steelers have huge fanbases and storied histories. There is a lot going on here. And somehow, I absolutely could not care less. I can’t remember the last time I was this uninterested in this game.
My desire to watch it is also hurt by the fact that the television rights this year belong to FOX, which means this is going to be really overproduced and will constantly pander to the lowest common denominator. And will feature a robot.
Wow, we REALLY didn’t know what the Internet was.
This video of Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel discussing the internet in 1994 could probably best be described as astonishing. I mean, I know it was all new and changing very quickly, but really, Bryant? You don’t know what the @ symbol is? Did the internet invent the @ symbol?
I find it jarring to hear them talk so ignorantly about the internet. Jarring! Can you believe we all used to be like that? Also, can you believe how insufferable Bryant Gumbel seems? I bet Katie Couric hates him.
[All over the place today, but I first saw it at io9]
Update: And the guy who uploaded this originally has been fired. This man should be celebrated, not punished! Also, I don’t know if he works for NBC or not, but if he does, and they’re the ones who fired him, they’re idiots. It’s much easier to capitalize on something like this than it is to run from it, not that there is even anything to run from here. They should have thanked him. Plus, the only people who really look even slightly bad in this are Couric and Gumbel, and they both work for different networks now.
Another Update: Yup, it was NBC. Sigh.
OK, OK, Dexter is a BIT formulaic.
Granted, I pretty much know what to expect from a season of Dexter at this point, but it’s generally fun enough to keep me watching. When you see all of its repetitive plot devices and character tics recreated in one eighty second spoof, though, it does make the show look a tad ridiculous.
Great job, LandlineTV, whoever you are! This is my favorite Dexter parody since Showtime aired that full, 12 episode fake season 3 back in 2008.
Wait, that was real? The whole thing, even the Jimmy Smits stuff? No way!
[Via Urlesque]
Of Modern Proportions 