Miscellaneous rambling, and bragging about my kids.

Here's one from a little while ago I forgot to tell. The kids have been watching The Wizard of Oz for the first time, and are fascinated with the witch. It might also be the first time that they've learned that "wicked" means the same as "bad."

So one day we're at the store or something, and my 3 yr old is planning for her evening movie. "Can we watch Wizard of Oz?" she asks.

"Yes," I tell her.

"With Dorothy and the Tin Man?"

"That's the one."

"And the wicked bad witch?"

I love it. She's not just bad, she's wicked bad. That's my New England child for you!

When K first started school I told a story about how she came home and in the course of telling me about her day, started using the word "honkin." It took me a little while figure out that she was using it to mean "very big", as in "cut the big honkin paper."

Now E is in school, and today she tells me this. "Daddy, they have a beautiful bookframe at school and next time you pick me up I get to take it home so you can see it!"

Book frame?

Anybody spot what she's talking about?

A photo album. It is a book of photographs. Photographs go in frames. Therefore, a bookframe. I love it because it's not like somebody else used that expression in front of her, and she didn't say it like "That's kind of like a book with frames in it, Daddy." She just invented a word, bookframe, that meant what she needed it to mean, and started using it like a regular part of her vocabulary.

Unfortunately I think I have to agree. As I mentioned in the notes, Kelso's "Seriously,am I having a stroke or is someone making an omelet?" line might have been the best joke.

Although, honestly, the Todd's "Shhhh…dong sleeping" t-shirt was funny, especially the "Good morning!" joke.

Lame start to the new season.
All the hype they built up from the last episode of last season was lost. It seems like they just traded in a great show for a few bad jokes. BOOO!

Taking a page straight out of a Seinfeld episode, Halle Berry offered a rather telling apology for a "Jewish slur" she said on the Tonight Show. They were doing one of those bits where they take pictures of her and use a computer to distort them, and when she came to one with a big nose she said "And this one is my Jewish cousin."

Yikes. 10 years ago we wouldn't have called that Jewish slur, we would have just called it a bad joke.

20 years ago, Don Rickles would have said the exact same thing and followed it up with "Just kidding, I love the Jews, my agent is Jewish" and he would have killed.

These days the audience is silent, the Tonight Show producers edit out the segment, and the star offers an apology the next day.

The funny thing about her apology, though, is that she claims she was simply repeating what had been said backstage by "the three Jewish girls that work for me." So Ms. Berry, in repeating the joke, forgot one of the cardinal rules of the ethnic joke – you can only tell jokes about the race/ethnicity/sexual orientation/religion that you personally belong to. Because if you're not, then you must have meant it in an offensive manner, you see. (Note sarcasm).

In other words, she could have told a black joke and the audience would have laughed. Or she could have had her people send out a press release stating that she's converting to Judaism. Both would have been ok.

Well, I hear that the writers do check out the blogs periodically. I have no idea if they read this one (wouldn't that be cool?), but you never know. There's the usual page and contact stuff up on NBC, but I highly doubt you'd ever get through to anybody on that.

I know that Rob Maschio, who plays The Todd, answers his email. You might want to send him some feedback at www.robertmaschio.com

how can we get in touch with the writers? I just want to say that it might be fun making the muscial episodes but I can tell you they are not very fun to watch!

WTF is wrong with cliches?
I thought it was a cool episode, but yeah, i did think it was lacking the connection with the last episode, but maybe they wanted the episode to be centered more around the person rather than her beliefs.. i dunno but i see what you mean

Oh, the drama!

I've never liked Kim, I've mentioned that. I think she's mean to her team. And now they're abandoning her. I missed last week, but apparently she said something to Amy last week about not deserving to be here or some such. Either way, it upset Amy enough that when the rules became "You can train with whoever you want" she ran to Jillian. Apparently it didn't help her much, as her weight stayed the same.

The real drama, however, came when Neil, from the blue team, decided to cheat the system by bulking up before the weigh-in. He comes in at a +17, which causes Bob to drop a large number of F bombs in his direction. The plan, you see, is to deliberately put his team of 3 up for elimination so that the remaining blue players who are loyal to Neil will send somebody else home. Neil admits this, and laughs about it, which immediately makes him the enemy for the rest of his stay on the show.

It's at this point that I completely don't understand the game, as the other teams vote out Jez from the black team despite everyone acknowledging the Neil basically cheated the system. Well, here's hoping that Bob kicks some serious ass next week as he obviously wasn't in the "Let's rig the system" plan that blue came up with.

Finally a week where there's something to write about! Sorry I missed last week, but come on, the Red Sox are going to the World Series. I am morally obligated to watch baseball over ballroom. It's a Boston law.

This week was intriguing indeed! It started when I walked into the room and my wife said "Marie Osmond just passed out." Thank heaven for Tivo! It was a pretty standard faint, you can't really blame her. I bet the audience felt bad for laughing, thinking she was doing some sort of a stunt. Looking back at the fall during the results show you really got a feeling for just how fast she went down. Heather Mills commented that they thought it was a bit, and it was best fake faint she'd ever seen.

We're at a point now in the season where all the easy picks to go home have gone home. Well, almost. This week it should be Mark. And then Jane, Jennie, Marie and Cameron, leaving Mel, Cheetah girl and Helio to vie for the title.

This weeks's special guest star is Jennifer Lopez. If you're still wondering if she's pregnant, ask yourself why she wore a glorified beach cover-up for both of her numbers? Of course she is. Finally the show has a big enough star who just comes out and says "I'll sing." I didn't hear any plugs for a new album, and she did two classics rather than one classic and one new song that nobody's heard. I just wish that they'd stop with the backup dancers. It's a dancing show. You can sing all you want, but let the ballroom professionals dance while you do it.

Normally I fast forward through the pieces in between the results, but this week there was a good one – how each professional does their choreography. We learned that Edyta listens to her music 50 times, that Julianne goes to bed thinking about what she'll teach the next day, and that Max choreographs on the fly. Tony had the best quote when he said, "I'm just the frame, my partner is the picture." Sometimes in their effort to win you'll see pros who basically have their celebrity stand still while they dance circles around them. But the show's not about that, we all know that the pros can dance. The idea is to see what the celebrities can do.

In a funny moment, Julianne hears her name called during the results portion but has no idea if she's been told that she's safe or in the bottom two. So she sits there, looking vaguely confused, until Tom says "That means that in the bottom two are …" and finally she realizes that she's safe and celebrates.

No surprise, Mark goes home this week. Jane Seymour is also in the bottom two, which might be an indicator of what happens next week. She's good, but does she had the following? I say its her or Jennie Garth.