I kinda know someone who will be on national TV this weekend.  Stephanie’s sister’s husband’s sister is Miss North Carolina USA.1  She is in Las Vegas right now preparing for the Miss USA pageant, which will air on NBC this Friday, April 11th, at 9:00 PM.

I was at home with the flu for a few days last week (not an experience I would recommend to anyone), and I did something I’ve never done before.  I watched a few episodes of Walker: Texas Ranger.  I had always assumed, based on the title I suppose, that the show was about your typical tougher-than-nails-cowboy-who-lives-by-his-own-rules-but-has-a-heart-of-gold type.  Turns out, it’s mainly about jumping out of helicopters onto people, and then proceeding to kick them.  A lot.  Like, I think there have been kick-boxing matches with less kicking.  Now I get all those Chuck Norris facts which set the internets abuzz a few years ago.

I also caught a few episodes of Ninja Warrior.  It’s kinda like Gladiators, only without the gladiators themselves (an improvement), and with the difficulty turned up about ten difficulty units.  And that’s on a scale of five.  You should totally check it out.

Now if only we could get Chuck Norris to compete on Ninja Warrior...

Remember when Dane Cook was funny?  That’s what Stephanie and I were thinking when we watched his new special on Comedy Central the other day.  Maybe it’s harder to write funny material when you’re not stealing it.

American Gladiators is back on TV.  (Or would proper grammar be “American Gladiators are back on TV?”)  In any case, Stephanie and I caught the show last night.  It’s kind of like you remember it, except with less stuff happening and more people talking.  In other words, just what you’d expect in today’s post-Survivor reality TV format.  I guess they want you to care about the contestants so they spend time talking about them?  I don’t—I just want to see people get jousted so hard their fingers come off.  And some of the gladiators are clearly trying to make names for themselves (ahem, Wolf, yeah it’s really cute how you howl whenever the camera points at you, but you look like an idiot).

Maybe I’m remembering American Gladiators through the rose-colored lens of memory.  In fact, I know I am.  I was, after all, twelve years old at the height of the show’s popularity.  Still, the new show isn’t entirely without its good points.  For one, the lady gladiators aren’t quite as scary (i.e. manly) as they used to be.  Another improvement is the updated Eliminator, which is now incredibly grueling.  Somehow moving the uphill conveyor belt to the end of the competition makes it a hundred times more difficult.  When the contestants finish, they are barely able to move.  I don’t think it will be long before someone finishing the Eliminator just throws up right on Hulk Hogan’s legs.  That would be hilarious.

I’ll probably keep watching, at least for a little while, although I’m not sure if I would be doing so if there were other shows on TV.

A few days ago I was talking to Stephanie and somehow the subject of ear-piercing came up.  Stephanie said she was seven when she first got her ears pierced, which seemed young to me.  I thought most parents didn’t let their girls get their ears pierced till they were thirteen or so.  She said no—for most parents who make their girls wait till they are a certain age, that age is nine or ten.

Afterwards I was thinking about it, wondering why I had an age of thirteen in mind.  I never had sisters, so it’s not like it was a rule I learned from my parents.  All of my friends were boys, and although some had sisters, I never really saw the parenting process per se.  The closest would have been some of my cousins, but even then I don’t recall ear-piercing being discussed.

Then I remembered that episode of Full House where Stephanie wants to get her ears pierced but her dad says she needs to wait until she is in Jr. High (i.e. about 13 years old), because that’s when D.J. got her ears pierced.  All of a sudden it occurred to me: everything I think I know about how to raise a girl I learned from watching Full House.

That’s a little scary.

If you’re like me you knew there was a writers’ strike but didn’t really understand what it was about.  It finally made sense to me after reading about it on Jenna Fischer’s blog and watching the YouTube video she links to, which shows Greg Daniels, Ryan, Kelly, Mose, and Toby on the picket line (they are all writers on the show).

The gist of it is that contracts were written in a time before the Internet and before TV shows were sold on DVD.  So when someone watches a show on NBC.com, for example, the network considers that promotional material and gets to keep nearly all the ad revenue (whereas the writers/actors get paid whenever a show is rerun on TV).  Similarly, the networks keep nearly all the proceeds of DVD sales.  Ten years from now, digital downloads and DVDs could very likely be the main ways people watch television shows, and it’s not exactly fair that the networks get to keep all that cash for themselves.

And if that’s wrong, then I guess I still don’t understand it after all.

Spoiler warning: If you haven’t seen any of Lost’s third season yet, this post will contain spoilers.  If you are caught up but prefer to not know anything about season 4, even if it comes from the writers and is vague, you might consider this post to contain spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

I think I am now a new level of nerd.  I am blogging about something that happened at Comic-Con.

Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse held a panel discussion at Comic-Con, and you can download the audio of the event, if you are interested.  There is probably video of it out there on your tubes, if you prefer.  In any case, I’ll outline some of the things I found intriguing.

• The show doesn’t start till February, but runs for sixteen straight episodes without reruns.  This isn’t new information, though.

• The filming for season 4 starts in a few weeks, giving them a lot more time to work on each episode.  This also means most of the season will be written, and a good deal of it filmed, before the first episode airs.

• Harold Perrineau (Michael) will be returning to the show in season 4, as an actual cast member (i.e. you won’t just see him in flashbacks).  Michael was never one of my favorite characters, but I am hoping this means Walt will be back in some form.  This leaves one to wonder if Michael actually got off the island and is now returning (with help?), or if Ben lied and Michael will, like Desmond, somehow crash back into the island.

• There will be more flashforwards in the final three seasons.  Starting around 22:30 in the audio, they say:

  At the end of season 1 we sat down and said ... this flashback device is not going to work forever.  The minute that we stop showing the audience revelatory moments from these people’s lives, and the minute that it starts feeling like we’re making it up as we go along, ... we knew that we were going to have to switch gears, and the way that we would be switching gears would be with flashforwards.

• The season 3 DVDs come out in December.

• At some point we’ll find out why Ben was heading across the island when he got trapped in Rousseau’s net (which was indeed an accident, not a plot to invade the survivors’ camp).

• They hope to get to Libby’s story in season 4 at some point (they’ll tell it in flashbacks).

• They haven’t told us about Rousseau’s story yet, because they’ll have to reveal other things that they haven’t gotten to.  We should learn about her in season 4 or 5.

After the discussion, they showed a new Dharma Initiative orientation film, for a new station, “The Orchid.”  This can now be seen on the official website.  You can find some discussion of the video, including screen caps of the frame jumps, by navigating your web browser to the destination of this hyperlink.

You’ve seen it way too many times.  Two people who are clearly wrong for each other are supposed to get married.  An elaborate wedding ceremony has been planned, family has come in from out of town, and everyone is excited to wish the new couple well.  Everyone, that is, except one of the two people getting married.  Ten minutes later still no bride.  Or maybe the bride shows up, and as the couple exchanges vows, one of them gets the shocking realization that maybe this isn’t right.  And in response to “do you take this man/woman to be your lawfully wedded husband/wife?” there is a long pause.  The minister will repeat himself, as if somehow he was misunderstood.  Then the bride/groom responds “...no... no, I can’t do this, it’s just not right.”  Suddenly everyone in the church gasps in awe because they didn’t see this coming and honestly they were just there for the free booze.  At this point, either the bride runs out of the church in tears, or the groom scrambles off.  Or sometimes one of them will confess their true feelings for someone else present in the church.

I’m sure you’ve seen a scene very similar to what I’ve just described in countless movies and TV shows.  You may have even read such a tale in a book or two.  It is super cliché, but it must be the first thing they teach you in screen writing school.  Just before they teach you that one bullet is enough to make a Ford Explorer explode.  But does this ever actually happen in real life to real human beings?  I’d say it’s pretty rare.  I’ve never known anyone who’s encountered such a situation.  I’ve never even heard a third-hand tale of someone being left at the altar.  Given how much people like to gossip about the misfortunes of others, you’d think word would spread fast and linger for years.  But the only incident I know of is the runaway bride from two years ago that got far too much media attention.  So I ask all of the writers who read my blog: please don’t write a scene involving someone getting left at the altar.  We are all pretty tired of it.

by now you should’ve somehow realized what you’ve got to do

Nearly a year ago I blogged about the schedule for Lost season 3.  Now the producers have announced that there will be exactly three more seasons of Lost before it ends, each of which will air only in the spring, for 16 consecutive weeks.  I think this is a great step in the right direction for the show.  After the craptacular mini-season aired last fall, Lost lost a lot of viewers.

Reading between the lines, it seems that the show’s writers always knew where they wanted to take the show to end it, but the networks would (naturally) like to keep the show on the air until it stops bringing in money.  And that might be the best thing for the networks, but it’s certainly not good for the fans or for the show’s story.  To extend the show, the writers would have two basic courses of action: 1) write filler material to go in the middle of the story, to delay the ending; or 2) write the ending, then make up stuff after that ending that you never planned to write.  For a show with lots of mysteries, option 1 is really the only choice, and it seems the network was pushing the writers to stretch out the plot and forget about some things that were introduced in season 1.

The last ten episodes or so of this season have (in my opinion) gotten way better, and I’m looking forward to the next three seasons.

No, and I don’t care.