Celebrities Tweeting About Food

Rob Kardashian: Man I could have a feast right now! Stuff crust pizza half pepperoni half pineapple/bacon is callin me! And cinnamon sticks of course!


Mindy Kaling: egg and cheese on a roll please


Taylor Swift: At the Paul O'Grady show, they give the guests baskets of tiny muffins. I may or may not have just gone on a tiny muffin binge.


Perez Hilton: Never heard of a pecan pie made with Kahlua! Sounds yummy!


Lady Gaga: Sending all my little monsters little pizzas for waiting all night for me at best buy. I hope you're hungry...eat up I love u!


you're welcome.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Unexpected References

I've recently decided that often times, my love for certain programs or TV shows is proportional to their usage of obscure or unexpected references.  It might be my love for old TV shows and movies, or my appreciation of american popular culture.  Or the general fact that we are a nostalgic society.  It's like on 30 Rock when Jack is trying to find his biological father, and after narrowing it down to three possible candidates, Liz flies all three to the studio, pulling a Mamma Mia!  Recently, two very funny references, one very obscure, one not as much, have captured my attention:

1) Last Thursday's episode of Community, Troy and Ahmed have a biology lab where they have to train their lab rat to respond to a song.  They name it Fievel, and yes, the song they used to train him was "somewhere, out there..."  While it was not only beautifully performed (you must know by now how much I love when characters break into song), it brought to the forefront one of my favorite movies as a child, "An American Tail: Fievel Goes West."  Now I'm not sure what prompted the writers to center a storyline around a not really that popular early 90s animated film, one that I had kind of forgotten about but nevertheless appreciated the reminder.  I think it's kind of genius in a way.  It probably made one of every ten people laugh.  I guess that's why they call NBC thursday night TV a night of niche audiences! (Don't quote me on that--I may have just made that up.)

2) A recent interview with Kristen Stewart on Late Night.  Jimmy Fallon was interviewing her about her co-star Taylor Lautner, who plays Jacob Black the werewolf in New Moon (which I'm seeing tomorrow...eeek!).  They were discussing Taylor's transformation from a skinny little child in Twilight to a very very muscular and attractive body builder in the sequel.  I believe he gained at least 30 pounds of muscle for New Moon. Wow.  Anyways, Kristen apparently hadn't really seen him in between the movies, and therefore witnessed only the final product, in which Jimmy Fallon squeals "Sandy," in a perfect imitation of John Travolta in Grease.  Good job Jimmy, you literally captured the moment in your unexpected reference.  And made me laugh out loud. A literal LOL if you will.

To conclude, I fully acknowledge the possibility that I'm the only one who finds these moments funny.  But by explaining to you why they are funny, I hope you think they're funny too.

Ga Ga Ooh La LA

This Gossip Girl episode was very exciting for me because my favorite musical artist at the moment was on!! Yes the one and only Lady Gaga!!! And she was amazing.  If you didn't see her performance of Bad Romance, get over to the CW website and watch.  It's actually not nearly as cool as her music video (which you absolutely must youtube as well, its mandatory), but I just love that song so it's okay.  This all got me thinking about the use of music in teenage soap dramas.

One of the things I love about Beverly Hills, 90210, and as I finish my 15th episode of One Tree Hill, is how they incorporate music into their storylines.  It's not overdone--there is a little after the theme song (well, in case of One Tree Hill, it is the theme song), and some playing in the background music of certain scenes.  I think both shows integrate musical acts pretty well into their story lines with characters frequently visiting the Peach Pit After Dark and Karen's Cafe--where live music is just part of the venue.  These shows use music in such a way that when you watch an episode of 90210, you really feel like you're watching something out of the 1990s.  While the clothes and the hairstyles help for sure, it's truly the music that captures that moment in popular culture.  So when you see the characters of 90210 get psyched for Babyface or Donna Lewis performing at the after dark ("I love you, always forever...), you just think ahhh, the good ole' days.

Today, I don't think teen soaps do that so much, with Gossip Girl being the exception, for this week anyway.  In general, Gossip Girl, the new 90210, and the new Melrose Place do incorporate a fair amount of music, but it's not very mainstream for the most part.  I mean, 90210's music wasn't necessarily always bubblegum pop--they frequently used R.E.M. which definitely found success in the mainstream but appealed to other types as well.  R&B artists also visited the After Dark, so in reality, their use of music worked to appeal to many different types of people.  Today, the appeal of the music used is pretty narrow.  And, they encourage you to go download it after the show which doesn't seem so much a celebration of popular culture as product placement.  In the end, if I one day decide to re-watch Gossip Girl down the road, I'm not so sure it will feel like a snip-it of what late 2000s culture was like.

Fancast.com might be as cool or cooler than hulu

For those of you who are obsessed with hulu.com like me, you must check out fancast.com.  It's comcast's version of online viewing, and they have a LOT of great stuff.  For instance, they post episodes of my favorite CW shows, like 90210 and Melrose Place and Gossip Girl (which hulu doesn't so much), but more importantly, as I just discovered yesterday, they post episodes of one of my FAVORITE shows of all time: Growing Pains!!!!!  I cannot begin to tell you how much I love this show.  They don't play reruns on TV at all like they used to.  I swear, I've been in foreign countries and this show has come on TV, and naturally, I have stopped all the fun and ignored everyone around me to just soak in the Seaver goodness.  On Fancast, they have 13 whole episodes online, which is just great news.  In case you never experienced the greatness as a child, growing pains is about the Seavers, a long island family whose mom has recently gone back to work and the dad, a psychiatrist, moved his practice to the home so he can take care of their three kids.  And the kids are just the funniest...Kirk Cameron still melts my heart.  So if you feel the need to invest your time in some eighties greatness, I highly suggest you scoot on over to fancast.  In the meantime, I will add both Long Island and the Seavers onto my list of families I'm going to move in with (right under LA and the Walsh Family).

In other exciting news:
(1) Jake appears on Beverly Hills 90210 today.  Let the Melrose spin-off begin!
(2) Chillin with Dylan Marathon on Soapnet November 27th...enough said.

Google Whacking isn't the only Google Game

A friend of mine (who I shall not name for security purposes) posted this fun little thing she came across while doing a google search. Now I can't say for sure how the Google search engine works, but I imagine when you type in something it predicts your search terms or question based on the most common things people type.  In this particular case, I can't imagine why the most searched term is such a specific question...but as for the question, "what are capers?" is something I have definitely wondered and probably have googled at some time or another.  After my friend came across this one, I decided to experiment with some other question beginnings:

Google is one interesting indicator of human behavior, that's for sure.

Things Glee and Guts Have in Common

-Adding Glee to my lineup of TV shows was one of the best decisions I have made this fall.  Nickelodeon's "Guts" hasn't been on the air for almost 15 years.  We will say that about Glee one day.

-Both shows have quite a competitive spirit.  While on Guts, three kids are competing for a piece of the Aggrocrag, on Glee, the examples of competition are endless.  Between the boys and girls of glee club, between Mr. Schuester and Jane Lynch's character, between the cool kids and the losers.  the Glee Club itself competes with other schools, that's kinda the point of its existence.  I don't know who is going to win yet, but if I had to guess, it will be the Glee Club.  It's as obvious as the fact that the girl will never win on Guts.

-Mike O'Malley, our favorite host of Guts, has been making recurring appearances as Kurt's father on Glee.     Who knew this guy was still around, but I am very happy to see you.  You are not as old as I thought you'd be after all this time. 

-The last thing these shows have in common, is how badly I want/wanted to be on them.  My childhood dream was to climb that aggrocrag and shoot nerf arrows while on a bungee harness.  And currently, I must find a way to be on Glee.  Ever since I saw Grease 2, I have been hoping to re-experience the magic of high school kids breaking into song in a weekly televised format.  And since I wasn't alive when Grease 2 was made, Glee might be my only chance because I was meant to attend a singing high school.  For now, I'll have to settle for being on Glee in my imagination. Which isn't a bad way to go.  I had a dream I won Global Guts for America and it feels very real to this day!

When Does Donna become a real person?

For all you 90210 lovers out there, you are well aware that Tori Spelling's character, Donna Martin, has ZERO personality for the whole first season.  She pretty much just stands behind Kelly and Brenda listening to them talk, and when she does add to the conversation, you just want to be like really?  really. This scene would have been totally fine if you never spoke.

Then, somewhere in the second season she crosses over and becomes a character.  And eventually, she becomes one of my favorite characters on the show.  So for the past week or so, I've been trying to pinpoint exactly when she becomes a real person.  It could be the episode where she, Kelly, and Steve try and play the stock market, and Steve and Kelly call her stupid for wasting their money but she actually makes a lot of money. And tells them never to call her stupid again.  But I think the real episode is the one where Scott accidently kills himself and David and Donna's relationship begins.  What do you think?

And to conclude this post on Tori Spelling, I would have to say that she has downgraded to pretend status yet again.  Now I love Tori Spelling, and I think her reality show is the greatest, but I follow her on twitter and the abrevs she uses...are like that of a really old person that is trying to be cool by abbreviating but doesn't really get it.  Now I know it might be the nature of the twitter medium, but to me, less is more, not let's see how much we can fit in 120 characters until I can barely understand what you are trying to say.  Example:

bed early ROX...Get 2wtch tv!Modern Family hilar!Ariel Winter is so grwn up!She played"Little Tori"on"SO noTORIous"4 VH1.Miss doin tht shw.


What! It just took me ten minutes to translate that.  Ohhhh Donna.  

Videos of Today

Here are three I thought I'd share that I stumbled across over the past few days:

1)  I loooove Lady Gaga but I had never seen her give an interview before.  Here is one she gave with Alexa Chung and I just love her even more now: Lady Gaga

2) more Lady Gaga inspired, but this time Christopher Walken is singing, well rather reciting, his version of Poker Face.  I died like five times watching this.  Thank you Perez Hilton: Poker Face

3)Ellen scaring Taylor Swift on her show, hilarious: Ellen and Swifty

Things Simba Likes

1) Looking at the fridge
2) Meowing at the fridge
3) whipped cream
4) eating my computer
5) sitting on my keyboard
6) sitting on top of me at all times
7) licking trash can liners
8) running from ghosts
9) purring loudly
10) staring at bugs

I'm 35 and still in high school

It's not unusual for 30 year old actors to be playing high school characters.  We see it all the time in our favorite teen dramas.  I think on 90210, Andrea Zuckerman and Jim Walsh were like, 5 or 6 years apart in real life.  Yet recently, two instances have struck me as kind of odd, in terms of actors playing ages that are much younger than them.

First, you should know that I've watched like the first 6 episodes of One Tree Hill, and to my surprise I see yes, the one and only Minkus from Boy Meets World, one of my favorite shows of all time.  Now Minkus was really only on the show for maybe the first two seasons, and kind of disappeared into the "smart wing" when everyone went to high school.  He did make a guest appearance in the episode where they graduate from high school, and they were the class of 1998!  Now we flash to One Tree Hill, and let's remember, the first four seasons everyone is still in high school, and there we see Minkus, still playing a high school child practically ten years later.  WHAT!  you are old.

Second,  on last night's Gossip Girl, Blair meets her new best friend, a prostitute who is also a student at NYU.  The actress who plays her new best friend, also currently plays Jessica/Tessica/Bessica on One Life To Live, a mom who also suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (thus the three names, personalities).  I think I started seriously watching the show when I was a junior and high school, when the DID storyline was underway. In that time, I've managed to graduate from both high school and college, and I'm supposed to believe that on GG she is a college student??  On OLTL she has like a 6 year old daughter! moral of the story, you are old and i don't believe that you go to NYU.

In conclusion, I should be a casting director. the end.

Dear World, HA! Love, me

I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not

One of my favorite new shows on this season is Community.  It plays on Thursday nights at 8pm on NBC before other shows that I like in this order:

1) 30 Rock
1) The Office
2) Parks and Recreation
2) Grey's Anatomy
3) Private Practice


It's about a community college--so you know, right there, the premise is just going to be soooo funny.  The show centers around those you might see at community college--dumb people out of high school, college dropouts going back in their mid twenties, moms, old guys going back for a career change, etc.  All the characters originally connect in a spanish study group.

Joel McHale is the main character...for those who don't know he also hosts the Soup on E!  He's supposed to be the sane one on the show, the zookeeper if you will.  I think that's why TV shows of this type, and by this type I mean when all the characters are legit insane, is that you have one person that is supposed to be the reference of normal. It's like Jim and Pam on the office, Michael Bluth on Arrested Development--the show might get annoying if you don't have those normal people in there as a point of reference. but then it makes you wonder, are they actually normal because they put up with these crazy people?  They never really acknowledge just to what extent everyone is out of their minds...

But one of my favorite characters in the whole show is Chevy Chase playing the old man going back for the career change.  I just finished a book on the history of Saturday Night Live, where Chevy Chase got his start, and proceeded to watch some of the clips from the first season he was in on hulu.  He is probably just as funny on community as he was back then.  He combines physical comedy with a dickish overconfidence.  The most recent episode, the halloween special, is just the epitome of Chevy Chaseness.  I think what I like the most, especially after reading the book on SNL, was about how horrible Chevy was in real life when he would come back to host throughout the course of the show.  The writers and cast members describe him as just saying whatever rude or obnoxious thing, no matter how offensive or malicious.  I think he inserts a part of that into his character, but he's not 20 years old anymore, he looks like a grandfather. so it kind of works in a new way now, because you can't really imagine your grandfather acting like that but you kind of can...

and in order for me to convince you to watch, or just at least appreciate why I like it, I suggest you watch this 30 second clip of the end of the episode: Click Me!