Entries from February 2007 ↓

Well, that was certainly night and day from the men, wasn't it?

Before I get into the details, can I just take a moment to say how annoying Ryan has gotten, and how painfully forced the whole "let's pretend to make Ryan and Simon fight" nonsense is?  I mean, geez, they even went back to Chris Sligh's comments yesterday — on video! — just to force some interaction.  Just painful.  It's interesting that Simon said he likes it when contestants fight back with him, like Chris did, because it shows spirit.  Actually, at least in Chris's case, what it shows is that he's got a bunch of canned responses all cocked and ready to go, and he looks for ways to use them because he thinks he's funny that way.  A truly funny personality can think on his feet.  Look at his video again and tell me that the Il Divo and Teletubbies comment was off the cuff.  No way.  I think that before he ever got up to sing, he said "Watch this, I'm going to slam Simon on the Teletubbies thing."  And then he went about forcing it into the conversation for no reason. I'm liking him less and less.

Anyway, on with the ladies.  It would be an understatement to say that American Idol this year is going to be all about the ladies.  I'll even go so far as saying that it's going to be all about the black ladies?  Can I say that?  I can't really say African American if I don't know each individual race, can I?  How does one go about making that observation without sounding racist?

Oh, and ladies, here's a tip.  When Paula says you're beautiful?  It means she hated your song and is struggling for something nice to say about it.  When Simon says "On the positive side, you're attractive" it means he thinks you'll get votes based on that alone.

Let's make this easy by just sorting by who is going to make it to the finals, since there are some obvious favorites.

Stephanie starts it out on a note that reminds me of an American Idol original, Latoya London.   Everybody seems to love it just because it was better than all the men put together, even though it had issues.

Sabrina takes it back up a notch not just by singing well but by showing that she did her homework by watching past seasons and choosing not to sing a ballad during these early stages.  Good move.

Melinda is the former backup singer who is now enjoying her time at the front of the stage.  And she sings really, really well.  She's got a great personality as well, and really knows how to work her backstory ("You'd think that the 6 feet between the background microphones and the lead microphone wouldn't be that big a distance…")  I still don't think she looks like an American Idol, though.  I hate to say that, but it's true.

Gina's got a good shot at making the final 6 girls, but I really wish she'd fix her hair.  The black with red highlights thing doesn't work for me.

Lakisha.  Oh, Lakisha.  She brings down the house singing that Dreamgirls song made famous by Jennifer Hudson, and you almost have to wonder if the producers told her to sing it just so they could make the comparisons.  Here's my problem with dear Lakisha.  She looks horrible.  I feel awful saying that, but it's honest. Her teeth need work.  She needs to drop like 50 pounds.  I'm not saying a "big" girl can't go far in the competition, look at how far Mandisa got before she started blessing us all in the name of Jesus and telling us she doesn't like gay people.  Lakisha looks unhealthy, like she does not take care of herself.  If the producers want to groom her like the next Jennifer Hudson, they'd better get started on the image people quickly.

Jordin is likely to claim the last spot in the top 6 as the "bouncing 17yr old with a big voice".  She's nice, she's energetic and polite, and she has the potential to sing well.  But, like all of the young contestants, she'll eventually fall behind the professionals and end up in the "Better luck in a few years" camp.

Ok, that's the 6 I expect to sail through to the finals.  And now the rest.

Amy is one of the dull and forgettable ones.  I don't see her lasting.

Leslie.  When I first saw Leslie in the final 12 "dancing" vignette at the end of Hollywood week, I thought, "she's goofy."  Simon says it better, by calling her "ungainly".

Antonella demonstrates that she's out of her league, and could easily be the first to go.  I'm somewhat surprised that she's even still there, given that popularity of her topless pictures.  They could easily have booted her and given her spot to a runner-up. 

Nicole?  Who?  She's another one that I can't see making it to the final 12.

Haley.  I think that it was during Haley's performance that I turned to Kerry and said, "Let's see if one of the judges mentions Broadway."  Sure enough, right out of Randy's mouth, "It felt Broadway to me."  Thank you.  I sort of liked it, but after looking at the top 6 up there I can't see it being good enough.

Alaina gets a "rely on your looks" from Simon.  She might survive the first week, but not much longer.  Voice isn't nearly strong enough.

Who will win it?  Right now, if we assume that singing ability still counts the most, I think it's between Melinda and Lakisha.  Which I think is interesting because I've also commented that I don't think either one of them looks the part.  I like Melinda's story better — Fantasia already played the single mamma card.  I don't want to be subjected to that again.  And images can change over the weeks.  Look at Clay Aiken, after all.

Over the last week or so we got a chance to visit with two different sets of recently married friends. One just had a baby, and one just found out they're expecting a baby. In both conversations the following idea came up, so I thought I'd blog about it. That idea is this:

For every baby story someone tells you, you are going to learn that you'll experience that exact story, and yet it will be completely unique to you.

Here's the problem. Once you either get pregnant or have a baby, people are going to come out of the woodwork to tell you what to expect. Most people are not courteous enough to properly tell "here's what happened to us" stories, they will tell you "here's what's going to happen to you" stories. These stories are well intentioned. They want to bond with you over the shared experience you're about to have. They want to help by imparting their wisdom based on their own experience.

However, it's logical for you to get defensive over it, because for someone to tell you what you're going to experience (as well as how you're going to feel and react) before it ever happens, well, that makes it seem like they're taking the experience away from you. It lessens the anticipation. Your natural instinct is to say "Not me!" and then, even if it does play out exactly as the person told you it would, your subconscious can't even see it because darnit you want the experience to be yours, not this other person's. The problem with this is that you're isolating yourself from what should be a great support community. You just had a baby, for pete's sake, and you want to distance yourself from other people with babies? Not a good idea. You should want to bring them closer so that when you need to say Help! they're there for you.

Hence the paradox. Much like light exists as both wave and particle (physics, see?), baby stories exist in both past and future. They happened, past tense, to me. They will happen, future tense, to you. The great thing is that they will still be similar enough that you should feel fine saying, "Yup, that happened to me too!" while at the same time being able to tell the story as if it was yours to begin with. They're handed down from parent to parent. But I'm not handing down "The story of when Elizabeth threw up three times at 4am", I'm handing down the story of "My kid threw up in the middle of the night." It was handed down to me. You'll hand it down to somebody else.

Nobody has claim to baby stories. Telling you one does not lessen your own ability to tell it for your own situation. Each version of the story is as valuable as the next one. When you tell them, tell them with that in mind. And when you're being forced to listen to them, keep that in mind as well. The storyteller simply wants to have some common ground to share with you. You don't have to push the person away for that. You'll probably find yourself in the role of storyteller soon enough.

American Inventor is coming back!

I'm glad to see the show returning, but I hope they make some changes. I really enjoyed the early rounds where we got to see a wide variety of inventions. But all the stupid sob stories were too much to bear. If you didn't break down crying at the end of each round, you were eliminated. Sad, really, and not in the way the producers intended I'm sure.

More Doug Hall, as well. The man is incredibly annoying, but he also happens to know what he's talking about. He's a professional idea guy. So stop with the vignettes about how he thinks he knows it all, and just let him give advice to the inventors that might actually be useful.

Any fan of classic literature has got to be frustrated by the Disney-fication of eventually all children's classics. When we decorated Katherine's nursery we told people that the theme was "classic Pooh" rather than "Disney Pooh". If you didn't realize that, you do not. All of them – not just Cinderella and Snow White, but Sleeping Beauty and Little Mermaid too, all are old public domain stories that Disney has sanitized and merchandised. Some of them are actually better in the original, if you ask me. Read the original Sleeping Beauty some time and then see how dumbed down the Disney version is.

Anyway, this post is not about princesses, it's about the sordid history of Winnie the Pooh and Disney's recent loss in that war. You see, the rights to Pooh are technically owned by the Slesinger family, who purchased them from A.A. Milne back in 1930. In 1961 the family signed a deal with Disney to market Pooh, and receive royalties. However around 1991 it appears that the deal went south, and Disney just stopped making the royalty payments. It's worth noting that Pooh around this time surpassed Mickey Mouse as Disney's biggest money maker. But, hey, they're Disney, they're above the law, right?
Like Scientology or Microsoft they can just throw paperwork and lawyers at the problem until the other party just goes away.

In 2002 some granddaughters of Milne and Shepard appeared out of nowhere and tried to file a copyright claim to the characters which would essentially have erased Slesinger's complaint against Disney (since they would never have had the right to license Pooh in the first place). Disney was not technically a part of that lawsuit, but basically they funded the whole thing. They said that they would pay the granddaughters' costs, as long as, if they won, the granddaughters also signed their rights over to Disney. That's practically Asimov's grandfather paradox, if you think about it. How evil do they have to be to even think of sometihng like that? We can't think of a reason why we shouldn't have to pay this deal we signed…I know! We'll go back in time and fix it so that they never had the rights to do the deal in the first place! Mwahahahah!

Only problem is, as of Thursday, it didn't work. The judge threw it out. Apparently in 1983 one of the surviving Milne's did indeed know about and approve of, on paper, the Slesinger deal. So she couldn't then swoop in and say "No deal."

Want an idea of just how big the Disney marketing juggernaut is? Apparently the Slesinger's are owed somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 billion dollars in royalties. Billion. Have a nice day.

The official cast list has been announced. Since I'd been keeping a running list of the rumors already, I posted the official details over here.

Before the show I'd read a quote from Simon who said, "The boys are lucky that it's split into two groups, otherwise we'd have all girls this year."  Now I'm well aware that every word out of Simon's mouth is crafted for publicity, but it certainly sounds like he's saying the men are pretty weak. I thought they were better this year, but maybe that's me confusing their characters and personalities from their singing talent .  The show was pretty boring.  More than half of the men are so generic I can barely remember their names.  For some of them I had to watch the "How he got here" vignette to refresh my memory, and still didn't recognize him.

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Eh. I left that one off because it's basically just an advertisement. Big deal. I thought "duct tape five" was funnier.

Turk looks at Todd's shirt.
Turk: What the hell is thetoddtime.com
Todd: Log on and thank me later! Cyber five. Send, dude!

The courtroom circus continues as everyone ever involved in Anna Nicole Smith's life fights not just for custody of the baby, but The trial">where Smith's body should be buried. The boyfriend Howard K. Stern (you always have to say the K, otherwise people think she was hooked up with the radio guy) wants her buried in the Bahamas, next to her son. The mother, who Smith did not talk to for years, wants her back in Texas.

Honestly – is there anyone who thinks that the mother has any claim here? The most that the mother's lawyer can muster for an argument is "since the dawn of time, next of kin have been given the rights and responsibilities to bury their dead." Meanwhile, Stern can provide witnesses and paperwork proving that the son is buried in the Bahamas, that Smith has a plot next to him, and that she said that is what she wanted. Seems open and shut to me. Why isn't the mother fighting to have her grandson's remains moved to Texas as well? She probably couldn't find a news crew interested in that.

On a related note, the security surrounding the people tasked with handling the body has been tighter than it was for the Saddam Hussein hanging. I guess we'll have to keep waiting for YouTube video.

I love this show !!
I don't care if the ratings have gone down, my ratings are 100%
They are all fabulous. What guts.
What talent. !