What America's Watching

I have two great jobs while most of America is unemployed. God bless us!

   When I am having an especially rough week, nothing soothes my soul better than watching an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos. I'm not embarrassed to say that. I feel proud. Patriotic, even. I mean, this is our country's greatest export of home-video and web-cam created bag-o-chuckles. I'm a long time watcher, I'm talking about extra cheesy-Bob Saget era as a kid, AFV watcher here. Today's version, hosted by DWTS host Tom Bergeron, is only mildly cheesy. To be honest, I've been kind of cheating on AFV for about a year now. That is with the introduction of Tru t.v. and their smorgasbord of video clip shows with titles such as; It Only Hurts When I Laugh and World's Dumbest. I can't help myself. These shows are awesome. First of all, they quench my insatiable blood-thirst to see dudes get hit in the balls repeatedly. They have no problem meeting my strict quota of three guy gets hit in the balls shots per day. They do so with ease. Basically that's all dudes do with flipcams nowadays, record themselves getting kicked, punched, hit or landing on their crotch region. I don't hate it at all. God bless America.

Seriously folks, God bless us.

Charlie Sheen and Pauly D Are Killing Situational Comedies

If she makes me watch Ru-Paul's Drag Race again I'm filing for divorce.

   Some people will try to tell you that reality television is the vestibule to hell. The reason we as a society are so stupid, or lustful, or apathetic or whatever the new cultural moniker of shame is for the week, it will ultimately and ritualistically be blamed on reality television. And that theory may very well fly except that there are shows like ABC's What Would You Do or Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, that are one the air and are classified as reality programming and are not God-awful.  I would stack any of these shows up against a traditional scripted show any day of the week. They have strong content,  intense storyline and characters we can relate to and/or cheer for. And right after that we can watch rapper/Law and Order beverage Ice-T live his dramatically undramatic life with his big butt wife Coco and their team of "helpers" that seem to be of the "helmet-wearing" variety. But let's not tell anybody about it afterwards.

Yes Virginia, Coco DOES exist.

Vanity in Peril's Commercial Cagematch 6-15-11

Two go in, one comes out.

Vanity in Peril kicks off the summer with a new Wednesday feature we like to call My Commercial Mascot is Better Than Yours (we're still working on that title) pitting well-known commercial icons and some that are relatively new to the game against each other in an effort to secure advertising world domination. This week Vanity in Peril compares two products that we suspect are made with the same fattening ingredients. The products come from two food chains that have been utilized more often than most families cook in. Other than on weekends ,when I have more time to my leisure, I usually am unable to give myself enough time in the morning to stop and make breakfast. If I do, it's usually just a blueberry waffle or a yogurt with granola. Not anything grand like eggs Benedict or a slab of bacon. No... no... I leave my strawberry crepes to my Saturday mornings. On a Wednesday, I'm lucky if I make it out of the house with a handful of Cheerios.

Which pretty much guarantees me getting this platter at the Tomboy's.

The Tale of Despereaux (Musings from a wannabe hipster)

We've been looking for the perfect lunch set to carry our chocolate Rice Dream and
udon noodles around in

   If there's anything I love/hate more than Papa John's thin-crust bbq chicken pizza (and the occasional bum fight) it's the attitude of the hipsters. What is a hipster, you ask?

From Wikipedia:

"Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear t-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care."


— Time, July 2009

 Living in a metropolitan area, there is very little chance that you won't run into a whole gaggle of them as you complete errands in your daily grind. They walk the earth, as hippies did, on the outskirts of mainstream society. These outliers are responsible for but never credited as the incubators for all things cutting edge. Only, that's not entirely true anymore. Hipsters have always dictated what's cool but their holier than though attitudes weren't seen as desirable. Hey, if Topher and Moon-zweetle want to pay  beau coup bucks to look like lumberjacks, so be it. If you hang out with me in my personal life, no doubt you've heard me go on and on about how much I would like to give a collective throat-chop to all the hipster backpackers and skinny pants wearing mother sons that clog up my favorite places to go get brunch every Sunday. I even threatened to burn down an entire city block in protest to the continuous play of this commercial during the holiday season. I don't even know if I went through with that or not. I honestly blacked out for a couple of hours there. Those more in the know, know that this is just a front. I secretly have a passionate attraction to the comings and goings of all things hipster. You see, when I was a teen in the late nineties/early two g's, "hipster" was not a term I was familiar with. Not in my semi-charmed kind of life. Everything was so... literal. Music was very well-packaged, Clinton was our president and artists like Puff Daddy and Will Smith were dancing across the screen with shiny suits and tap shoes on.



That's Jaden Smith's dad for my tweens out there.



So You Think You Can ... Anything.

Could you be a candidate for the next great reality show?

                                Well he's a steel time disciple
                                He's a legend of his kind/
                                He's running like a cyclone
                                Across the wild mid western sky/
                                Oh oh oh he's a working class man


---  Jimmy Barnes, Working Class Man


   Barnes failed to release the extended version of this track, where he discusses the plight of said working class man as he tries to negotiate his contract with Tru-TV. For better or worse (probably worse) reality television is a part of our lives. There seems to be a reality show for every occupation, quirk, social disorder and celebrity junkie. It's hard to escape its presence and influence on our world. New shows crop up each week that cause us to hyper-extend our sense of belief that any of these people are even worthy of having a show. It's almost as if the traditional audition process has been flipped 180,  and what characteristics would usually classify a person as unfit to socialize with other human beings are somehow met with applauds in the reality world. We should all be able to understand, I mean, who hasn't ran from the cops with no shirt on (Cops), dated twelve dudes at once, rejecting them one by one via Rosa berberifolia disposals (The Bachelorette) or dressed in drag and walked the runway while Margaret Cho screams insults at you dressed up like the pink Power Ranger. I sure have! That was right around the time I had the septuplets.

Those camera crews would NOT leave me alone when I tried to adopt a few of them
in the Petco parking lot, either.

Vanity in Peril's Commercial Cagematch 6-8-11

   Vanity in Peril kicks off the summer with a new Wednesday feature we like to call My Commercial Mascot is Better Than Yours (we're still working on that title) pitting well-known commercial icons and some that are relatively new to the game against each other in an effort to secure advertising world domination. This week we take a look at the war being waged in kitchens across the world. A war between generations. The war between parents and dependants being played out on television is not breaking new ground, usually with the know it all kids that don't exist in the real world outsmarting their bumbling parents. So we were pleasantly surprised when we came across a recent ad that features a mother and father hoodwinking their children into good behavior. It was refreshing to see parents who weren't portrayed as idiots. The spots are from Kraft for their new Jello Temptation product which is marketed towards adults who don't like fruit (I guess) and they are pretty funny. See below:

  

Movies to Ovulate To



50% of the women in this picture would rather be watching Ghostbusters



   Movies targeted towards women are vastly different than movies targeted towards men. The mere fact that movies targeted towards men are also said to be for the general audience speaks volumes to the differences that can be found in what, only for lack of a better term, can be classified as "chick flicks". For those who needed a reminder, even though women make up the majority of humans on the globe, we are still a minority and are therefore expected to assimilate our own beliefs and values to those of the majority--dudes. So in order for me as a woman to get along with most people I need to know my Revenge of the Nerds trivia as well as be able to recite the give her the shot scene from Terms of Endearment like my own wedding vows.  I can't really say that I mind though when you think of all the chick-flick empty calories they push on our plates these days. Most movies made by or for women fall into these generic cliché lines:

Vanity in Peril Trims the Movie Fat

  

   Basic cable has been playing the movie Titanic on television for the past month or so. Titanic was an epic movie of all proportions. The movie launched the careers of Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet and made James Cameron (pre Avatar, post Terminator) relevant again, despite the fact that it was single-handedly responsible for the breakup of Linda Hamilton's marriage to the director. Yeah, we went there. At the first time that I saw this movie, as a pre-teen in the theatre with my mother, I thought it was the greatest film ever created. Teen-angst hyperbole aside, the movie still holds up pretty well in the over ten years since its release. Well, not exactly... that's too blanket of a statement. The special FX and the overall tone of the movie are spot on. Watching the movie as an adult, however, reveals several gaping plot conundrums that take me the viewer out of the whole movie-magic experience.

Such as the scene where Jack ascertains the whereabouts of Rose's blue diamond by infiltrating her dreams.
Like... what was up with that? 

   Plot holes aren't the only thing that plague this flick, however. The movie runs approximately two hours too long for the VIP team's taste, taking the time to show us the development of a romance between two characters that are doomed to play the cruelest game of Go Fish ever. At one moment, I screamed at the screen; "Just sink already!" No film, be it a summer blockbuster or an indie sleeper, needs to run over two hours. I don't care what the subject matter is. I shouldn't be able to go to work and come back and the damn ship is still not in the water. In fact, I took it upon myself ( with a little help of my at-home movie editing software) to trim several scenes from this film to make it more "user-friendly" for me, removing any and every scene that does not pertain to the sinking of the great Titanic. Those were the best scenes anyway. Everything else is unimportant.

Unless of course you count each time Billy Zane's eyelashes appeared on camera to chew up the scenery as "important".

Vanity in Peril's Commercial Cagematch 6-1-11

Two go in... one comes out!

   Vanity in Peril kicks off the summer with a new Wednesday feature we like to call My Commercial Mascot is better than yours (we're still working on that title) pitting well-known commercial icons and some that are relatively new to the game against each other in an effort to secure advertising world domination. It's kind of like Highlander, except for the winner only has immortality for however long the commercials product remains profitable (well that and the sword-fighting). This week we dive right in and see who comes out on top in a battle between the Farmer's Insurance Professor Burke and Allstate's Mr. Mayhem. Here are the stats: