February 13, 2012

In which I recap TV as if I were at the Entertainment Weekly staff meeting

Oh, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (Mondays, 9 p.m. Bravo TV, also in infinite repeats forever especially on sick days.)

I may be venturing to your Villa Blanca and I may be indeed loving your cruel assessment that both Malibu (where Camille lives) and Westlake Village (where Kim lives) are so, so far away from the city and the shoes and the fake eyelashes.

That's one of those inside-L.A. snob jokes. Like the time I tweeted about the insane paparazzi I'd just passed on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks outside Marmalade and some uppity nobody from nowhere informed me that "no celebrities worth photographing go to the Valley."

On that particular day at Marmalade it was Jennifer Aniston. Not to be outdone, just a few weeks ago Angelina Jolie and some of her tribe showed up for the Studio City Farmer's Market, so here's a big tongue sticking out claiming boo-yah rights at the goobernut who believes the Valley is full of nothing but auto detailing shops and gangland violence. Not that we don't love our auto body shops and smooth pelositos, but on the boulevard we are all about celebs.

So, Kim admits she's an alcoholic, Dana is normal but in this light looks crazy, Ken seems oddly hot and all I miss is Jiggy. Taylor pulls my strings -- I mean, I am a girl who sides with girls -- but something about her makes me wary. Brandi cracks me UP. I would totally watch Vanderfabulous spinoff with Brandi in tow. If only her name were Tanqueray, it would be so fitting.

Thus concludes another season of the Beverly Hills Housewives.

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I Just Want My Pants Back (MTV, 11 p.m. Thursdays)
The Parents TV Council wants MTV to drop this new show, obviously because it is funny and realistic-ish (still, the apartments are too big) and the Council thinks it's too racy for kids. My suggestion? CALL MY DAD. He never let me watch TV alone. We picked shows as a family and watched TV together. That is appropriate, people. When you are 12, you shouldn't be running nilly willy through the world of backdoor jokes.

Anyway, this show is funny and sweet, surprisingly. I love how it captures that time in your twenties before you become a jaded Dating Oracle with nothing but stories and wisdom left ... the characters still have their souls and their hopes and their funny love-hungry misadventures. It's solid. I like it. Make the Parental Control people just control their own kids, OK?

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SMASH (Mondays, NBC)
Meh. I watched the pilot but the whole time I rooted for Megan Hilty and not Katherine McPhee. It's my cue that I should un-Tivo this one.

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American Idol (FOX, Wednesdays and Thursdays)
I was SO BUMMED that we wasted one entire of Group Night and MY LIFE to see no singing at all last week. You are on notice, American Idol. To be a singing competition, people must SING.

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Law & Order
Not realizing the width and breadth and prolific availability of 20 years of now-canceled Law & Order episodes, I started tivo'ing them last week. I was just in a mood. You understand. Now I go to bed each night thinking that theme, CHA-CHUM. But I like it. Who was your fave? Chris Noth? Lenny Briscoe? I liked Fred Thompson. I need justice to PREVAIL, people.

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Revenge(Wednesdays, ABC, 10 p.m.)
Best new show of the year. I am soapified and sucked in! I love every aspect of this show, it is exactly what a nighttime soap should be down to the fabulous clothing.

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Prime Suspect(never, NBC)
NBC canceled the one series I fell in love with this year besides Revenge. Sure the pilot was clunky, but as time went by Maria Bello was the finest thing on TV and a revelation as a soft/hard woman on the force. Screw you, NBC. I am so mad at you.

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CSI(Thursdays, CBS, 10 p.m.)
Elisabeth Shue!
I was sad to see the departure of Marg Helgenberger, one of the strongest female leads in the long line of CSI: Dead White Woman Of The Week shows. But I loves me some Elisabeth Shue. Here is why I admire here -- she inspires me. She does some teeny movies in the 1980s, lands a big dramatic role in Leaving Las Vegas that tears your heart in two, and later re-surfaces in a Piranha movie. I really get that kind of career. I understand it. It makes sense to me. Keep in mind my Shakespearean oeuvres have lately been about hair removal or online dating, so choose your source wisely. But I am so looking forward to Shue classing up the joint.

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Bones(Thursdays, FOX)
Just come back already! Thanks to my Twitter friends who helped me uncover the scoop, Bones comes back on (GASP!!!) April 5, 2012. I'll be like, old, by then.

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Finally....

Hoarders(Mondays, A&E)
I don't watch this show live so it may already be in repeats. I TiVo it and watch one episode each morning before I start a major cleaning effort. I can usually make it through 20 minutes of the show before I have to scour something, re-grout a sink or take a full Silkwood.

Once a long time ago some bloke left me an unsavory comment when he saw a picture of my cute cat FrankiePanky sitting on the table. He said something like, "I would never eat there..."

I wanted to email him back and ask for his address. I know and you know that I have some enthusiastic issues (read: OCD) with my cleaning binges. But the poster clearly didn't know that. I wanted to show up to his house in decontamination gear and a respirator with a clipboard. I can guarantee you that even with my cats sitting their fluffy hinds here and there my home is cleaner than any man's home, barring his own bout with OCD (manifesting in a cleanliness disorder, natch). I am living proof that people can have animals inside the home and still have a clean, sanitary, fresh home. Why? Because a sister be crazy for some Clorox wipes and a Dyson. But I don't judge others. I know I border on the Mr. Clean Crazy Spectrum. (Mr. Clean is so cute, a peloncito!) and we all do the best we can. You know my belief is that your best truly is good enough.

Hoarders has changed me in good ways, and that to me is a sign of good TV. While I freely admit to some clean-crazy OCD stuff, I also am a a level one hoarder. I try much harder to part with my hoarded stuff now, because cleaning and arranging all my stuff is exhausting. I recognize that I have Stage One clutter blindness: I may become blind to the mail piling up on the desk or the magazines neatly stacked in the corner. Or even to the shoes piled neatly in the doorway shoe rack.

So when I notice a pile I actually notice it. That's a good step. But most of all I realize how important it is to get even the most minor home repairs fixed immediately. All the TV hoarders seem to share the same fate ... the plumbing or the electricity has failed and they can't get anyone in to fix it. Or they put it off for so long it's impossible. But every hoarded home is the same: plumbing problems, bad wires, no sink.

Today I had the plumber out, he fixed the garbage disposal and a wonky shower stall lever. I mopped and cleaned beforehand, of course, but he left boot prints on the floor so I mopped after, too. Everything works tonight. That's how you know you aren't going to fall into hoarding. You make a point to do upkeep. You get someone out to perform a look-see after the wonky garbage disposal. That is what the show helped me see.

Get it done. And do it now.

TV!

Posted by laurie at 10:03 PM | Comments (97)

February 4, 2012

Big Face

Comments are off site-wide until some of the issues with the new software upgrade can be addressed. In the meantime, Soba!

Posted by laurie at 2:18 PM

February 3, 2012

Ridiculous New Software

There are some problems with the software upgrade. I already know there are some issues so while I do appreciate the notes and emails and texts and tweets, of course, I already know that there are some little fixes that need to be made.

Unless you have MT experience and want to help a sister out with some code, though, definitely send me a line!

If we're all patient it will get sorted out eventually. Thanks!

Posted by laurie at 8:23 PM

January 27, 2012

Los Angeles at night

Posted by laurie at 1:15 PM

January 23, 2012

Raindrops keep falling on my head

I love rainy days in Los Angeles. The building next door has tin rain gutters and the sound is surprisingly comforting, like soft southern rain on a barn roof. The bathroom in the hallway has a skylight and the pattering rain there sounds nice, too, though fainter. I amuse myself on rainy days by going to the grocery store and watching people straggle in wearing their pajamas and Ugg boots. There hasn't been much of that lately, though. Since last June we've only had four inches of rain. Today was a nice change, maybe it will rain some more tonight.

Other things I like: working (and existing) databases, Noro with no knots, writing dialogue, talking to Corey, Meyer lemons, the new season of American Idol, Nailtique.

I would ask you what's on your list today but of course comments are still off during the software upgrade. So save up your list for next week! Or of course you can hit me on the tweetermachine in your pajamas, rain or shine.

Posted by laurie at 3:34 PM

January 20, 2012

And then there was the time I pressed that button.

Comments have been disabled site-wide in preparation for the upcoming software overhaul. It's not a precursor or a dark foreshadowing of a comment-free future, it's just for a few days. So we don't break anything. (Again.)

While prepping my server for the upgrade this morning, guess what happened! I sort of deleted the entire database. Yes, that's right, I pressed a button and *poof* like magic all eight years of writing and cat pictures and navel-gazing and comma splices disappeared. Gone. Finished.

Luckily I have a remarkable server company (pair.com, if you need the best hosting on the planet) and John at the help desk was able to restore my database from a backup and he didn't even laugh at me (much) when I offered to come to his house in Pennsylvania and show him my thanks in person. By cleaning his house of course! Duh.

It sounds all funny and whoopsy and easypeasy now but readers, what I experienced this morning was a full thermonuclear meltdown. When I realized my error -- just after ruining years of work but just before finding solace in the soothing dulcet tones of Help Desk John -- I experienced a mix of physical and psychological insanity that I have only felt once before in my life.

When I was thirteen my mom left my adorable, perfect, blonde baby brother Eric in my care at the Acadiana Mall in Lafayette, Louisiana for one hour. It was hard being a mom to two awful teenagers and one crying (but adorable) baby, so I do not blame her for trusting her youngest and most adorable child to a permed, bracefaced kid with a deep obsession for Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes. While I was using my allowance to buy a pair of acid-washed denim jeans with zippers at the ankles, my little brother vanished in the middle of Express. He was only hiding under a rounder of long, flammable rayon dresses but those few minutes when he was missing and not answering my frantic calls were the worst moments of my life. My adorable brother was missing, and probably being sold on the black market, and I was SO GROUNDED and would never be able to live with myself or wear my cute new jeans.

Then of course we found him and I made him promise to never tell what happened. As soon as our mom picked us up in the food court he told her exactly what happened and I was SO GROUNDED. But it didn't matter, really, because I had my little brother safe and sound and I had my acid washed jeans with the tiny ankle zippers and all was well in the universe and one day Nick Rhodes would come to Bayou Nowhere, Louisiana and marry me.

My point here is that you should never push the delete button without first backing up the database. And even then, go shopping instead of deleting. Listen to some old Duran Duran songs. Call your mother. Do whatever it takes to keep from nuking your life's work. There is more to life than a tidy file structure, OK?

Posted by laurie at 2:28 PM

January 17, 2012

Rise of the machines

The DVR cerebellum is mighty.

Somewhere along the line my Tivo developed a brain of its own and grew wise and now outranks me in IQ. Proof? A few weeks ago it spontaneously decided on its own to stop recording The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. While I still plod along in my human toil, looking forward to my trashy hour of Kyle and Kim and Vanderliciousness, my Tivo grew a brain and decided to stop watching the show. Out of contempt for me, perhaps, the Tivo still has the show on its season pass list. Yet nary an episode has been recorded in two months. I have had to catch up on my trash the old-fashioned way, through copious Bravo reruns.

The indignity!

In other machine brain news...

The server will be undergoing an upgrade in the coming month, so there will be changes here. I am telling you this now because out of a deep respect for your fear and loathing of change (as well as a healthy serving of tech avoidance on my part) I have averted major upgrades for some time, but that time has ended and I know we all need fair warning that change is on the horizon. This is your warning.

There might have been misplaced words in that paragraph.

Finally...
Does anyone have a good recipe for carne asada marinade?

Posted by laurie at 5:12 PM | Comments (38)