Miscellaneous rambling, and bragging about my kids.

Update October 25, 2007: THE NEW (AND LAST) SEASON IS HERE!

Since I'm getting pummeled with searches for it – Scrubs starts up again Thursday, the 25th of October, 2007. They're billing it as the last season, and the writers all seem to confirm that in interviews, but you know, you just never know. Stranger things have happened. Will they eventually make it over to ABC? Who knows.

(Forget what I said about Sept 26, I have no idea where I got that. I could have sworn that in the NBC Preview they spoke of this being the week to start up all the new shows, but the official NBC site now has it listed at Oct 25.)

Check out the quote file!.

I had not heard about, as my dad put it, the dip from MIT who walked into Logan airport with a fake bomb. So apparently she's both an electrical engineering student as well as an "artist" who wanted to "stand out on career day."

Thoughts: Ok, she's an idiot. That's obvious. Anybody who walks into an airport with a fake bomb is asking to get shot. She's probably disappointed that she didn't get injured, she would have gotten more press that way.

Thought #2, does anybody besides me think that the quotes from the police actually sound disappointed that they didn't get to shoot her. The officers are like, "Yeah, well, good thing she totally cooperated with what we said to do, you know, otherwise, we would have had to shoot her….yeah…." I get the feeling there's an airport full of guards this morning who were hoping to get their own tasering video posted on YouTube. I find that even scarier. There will always be stupid college kids (particularly those that wish to push the boundaries of "art"), but trigger happy police are worrisome. Those taser videos are coming out of the woodwork now.

Update: As people that know this person check in, they're basically saying that the sweatshirt in question (with the circuit board and wires attached to it) is indeed an art project that she wears all the time. And that, "since MIT students don't do mornings, and don't particularly care what they wear", she made a mistake. Does it bother anyone else that kids who are supposedly the smartest people on the planet make such stupid decisions? A few years back an alarming number of MIT kids were drinking themselves to death. Now we've got one who is so clueless that she almost got gunned down for failing to realize that her sweatshirt, deliberately made to look like a bomb, would not go over well at the airport.

Today my wife grabbed a string, some nails, and a bunch of clothespins and headed into our sun room that is three quarters windows. She proceeded to nail up a piece of string to the molding of one of the windows, thread some clothespins onto it, and then string it across to the next window and tack it up there as well. Then she clipped the kids' latest drawings and homework to it. Voila, instant showcase!

I hadn't watched Survivor in a while, but at the moment there's nothing else on at 8 on Thursdays so I thought I'd check it out. They had me at the Buddhist temple. Very cool! But honestly, if they're going to do the Buddhist thing in China, I'd like them to mention how China is royally screwing over Tibet and just pretty much violating the crap out of their human rights.

Anyway the first person to piss us off is, of course, the Christian radio host who decides that she's not going to "put her face on the floor for anybody but Jesus." Even though the host clearly said that a visit to the temple was about welcome, not worship, this lady walked out on them (what an insult) and said "I think I did the right thing." Personally I think you demonstrated why people think that Christians are intolerant. I'm sure all of the contestants have religion – heck, one of them is listed as a gay Mormon – but none of them had a problem with the Buddhists, only the Jesus freak.

It's going to be fun watching Ashley, from the WWE. There's a funny moment where the host tells all the contestants that they don't get to have their luggage, only the clothes on their backs, and we get a shot of the 20lb boots that Ashley is wearing. Then the girl next to her says, "But I'm not wearing a bra." "That's going to make you very popular," says the host. On the annoying side of the fence is Courtney, the waitress from New York who wanders around saying things like, "People from New York don't talk like dis, dese people are like people I wouldn't normally be seen wit, ya know what I'm sayin?" She won't last, I hope.

Ashley then proceeds to get violently ill on the first day and can't really pull her weight, which puts her on the chopping block. But luckily they keep her around (it's times like that I wonder if the producers have something to say about it, why get rid of the hot chick with the big rack on the first day?) and instead we lose the chicken farmer from Virginia. That's for the best, since nobody could understand a word he was saying.

I have no idea if we'll watch every week, like I said I haven't watched Survivor really since the very first season. But it started out well.

Why, oh why, do the new prime time game shows insist on doing this? I call it the Deal Or No Deal Curse, since I saw it with that show first and now I don't watch that show anymore.

What am I talking about? When the trailer for the episode tells you what's going to happen. Tonight, for instance, it told us, before the show ever started, that the contestant's boyfriend was going to propose, and that she was going to go on to win the most money of any contestant on the history of the show.

WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD YOU TELL US THAT? So now every song lyric she sings, instead of being in suspense if she got it right, we're bored because we know she did, up until the end. Instead of giving us a reason to watch, you give us a reason to fast forward. This absolutely killed Deal or No Deal for me, which was reduced to just random number picking. At least with Lyrics you get to hear some music. Outrageous.

On top of that, the buildup did not even suit the ending. Every commercial break (which, by the way, seemed to come more frequently as we approached the end) was filled with the same sort of suspenseful "Wait until you see how this ends!" nonsense. How did it end? With a whimper, not a bang, as she walked away with $350k, not even seeing the million dollar question. Who cares? A contestant won $350k last week. I was hoping this one would at least get to see the million dollar question.

The show could be dead to me now. It seems like they're going to do that every episode. In the preview for next week it was "This waitress whose fiance is serving overseas is trying to save up enough money for a wedding….until Wayne Brady gets a special call from a distant land that motivates her to go all the way…" I mean, COME ON! WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT?

3yr old, during her normal morning potty break, says to me, "Daddy? I love my sister whole big."

Awwwwwww.

It's actually become her catch phrase, she's saying it every day this week. "I whole big love you, Daddy!"

"I whole big love you too, sweetheart. Now go whole big love Mommy."

Then again, my 3yr old (both my girls, actually) can recite Shakespeare, too. I'm still trying to find a place to show off that trick, but none of the adults they come in contact with have any idea what they're talking about :).

After all the hype, Kid Nation has begun.  The premise, in case you missed it, is a tamed version of Lord of the Flies where they put a bunch of kids (I lost track of how many) in an isolated setting (a ghost town) and let them run it for themselves, with no adults.  Now, of course we know that there are adult cameramen and adult producers swarming around the place.  The point is that if the kids are about to do something stupid like screw up the spaghetti, they can't look at the nearest adult and say, "Help?"

So what did you think?  I found it hard to understand the kids, what with all the "like this and like that" and the general inability to properly pronounce most words.  Not to mention that everything is "awesome."  They fight like you'd expect, and the bigger kids (who are 15) pick on the smaller kids.  Funny moment of the show comes when they get a private camera on the older kid after a fight who says, in all seriousness, "I didn't get upset….you haven't seen me upset yet."  Dude, you're 15, nobody cares what you're like when you're upset.

They're trying to put some structure on it, with four teams divided up into things like running the store, handling the kitchen and so on.  Those tasks are divided up based on a challenge, which also dictates how much money the kids make.  That could be a problem since the losing team gets ten cents a day and the winning team gets a dollar.  That's quite a gap, especially if one team loses several challenges.

In general it wasn't painful to watch.  I'll watch it again, but I bet I won't stick through it to the end.

these buggy boards are normal in europe. but i doubt that it will fit with a stroller here. the stroller here doesn't have the attachment which you need to put a buggy board on. try a sit'n stand stroller!

Is it any wonder that Kim's red team is doing so horribly? For the second week in a row they don't just lose the weigh-in, they lose badly. Their best guy loses 6 pounds.

But really, is it a surprise after watching her training sessions? She's a whiner. Her best motivational tactic seems to be yelling at people "Quit, I don't care." Yeah, that'll work. One of her people (Amy) even walks out on her, and Bob has to talk her back into the gym.

I continue to be the most impressed with Bob. I think that Jillian's team works out of fear and respect, I think Kim's team is self-motivated (much like Kim herself, it seems). But I think that Bob's team is winning because they work to make their trainer proud of them, and earn all of those positive words he has for them. Thus far it seems to be working, as he "won" two weeks in a row, something that hadn't been done before. I say it like that because this week they added Jillian's black team, who had the best weight loss, but technically if it was a standard blue/red battle, Bob would have won his second week.

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2512486.html?menu=news.quirkies

This story is so silly is seems like something out of Weekly World News.  A husband and wife are both engaging in online affairs, only to find out that they've been speaking with each other.  How romantic!  Just like that song that my wife likes!  Well, not so much.  They're getting divorced, each citing the other's infidelity.  Apparently they missed the point of the song.