Category Archives: television

This is what it must feel like to go crazy

I hit Martha’s site to link to the segment where Keith Olbermann makes triple chocolate pumpkin pie with Martha, but I immediately got derailed by this:

“Snoop Dogg and I Make Mom’s Mash-Potatoes”

I have to say that my life is very interesting and also kind of weird. I’m so fortunate in that I get to meet fascinating people. One day I’m presenting Maya Angelou with a Living Legend award and then I fly off to Miami and attend a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. And then yesterday, the multi-platinum rap artist, Snoop Dogg, appeared on my television show and taught me some of his very own language called Snoop-guistics. He and his posse add ‘izzles’ onto the ends of words. It’s kind of a code, or a way of communicating so that others won’t know what they’re talking about. Example: fo shizzle is how they say, for sure.

Snoop Dogg also shared –

Crack-a-lackin – means get something poppin
Chuuuch – means take God everywhere you go and everything will be all right
All hood – means good
Ball til ya fall – get as much money as you can before you die

Snoop Dogg is about to start the second season of his reality TV show, Father Hood on November 30th and he also wanted to share his Five Tips for Fatherhood.
1 – Know when to lie to your kids
2 – Know when to be mean and know when to be a friend
3 – Always stay in control
4 – Serve them juice but hold the gin
5 – When the kids give you attitude, pop ‘em like it’s hot

Bottom line – Keep your children respectful of their elders.

You have to watch the videos. Fantastic.

The whole segment went on for quite a while, there are a number of other videos embedded on Martha’s blog, including the actual cooking segment.

Dexter

In the first few episodes of Dexter, I found Dexter’s sister Debra a little annoying. She grew on me, though. Plus, she gets some of the best dialogue, not in quality necessarily – although she gets great dialogue Dexter’s lines are probably the best. Her dialogue is so great because it’s so consistently pitch-perfect for her character.

Her reaction to finding out another character is pregnant in a recent episode (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) had me in tears of laughter. With delight, she squealed, “A baby? A motherfucking rolly-poly, chubby-cheeked, shit machine? Are you kidding me?” It’s all in the delivery, you really need to see it to appreciate it. Unfortunately, it runs through my head every time I see a baby now….

Hocus Pocus! (Halloween film fest, redux)

The animation that transformed the top-hat wearing Count Dracula into a bat in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula reminded me of my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon, Transylvania 6-5000. I hadn’t seen it in years, maybe since I was a kid, so I was excited to find it online in it’s entirety.

Bugs Bunny – Transylvania 6-5000

About House of Dracula – Glenn Strange returns as The Monster but footage of Lon Chaney (Ghost of Frankenstein) and Boris Karloff (Bride of Frankenstein) are used to pad the movie. Chaney also has a starring role as Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man who’s despair is at the heart of many of these movies. The poor immortal bastard just wants to quit chasing cars and howling at the moon, but every scientist he finds who’s willing to try to cure him turns out to be mad. Plus, they always turn out to have a fetish for reviving Frankenstein’s Monster that screws everything up by the final reel and leaves Lawrence Talbot once again in need of some new clothes and a case of flea collars. Poor WolfMan, he’s got the worst HMO ever.

saturday night live

John McCain got through the opening of SNL without falling on his face, but it wasn’t especially funny, even with Tina Fey doing the heavy lifting. “Alec Baldwin visits the View” was hysterical, though:

And if you watch Countdown, Ben Affleck’s Keith Olbermann was fantastic:

We went to bed right after the Olbermann sketch and I haven’t skimmed through the rest of the episode yet because Husband has been engrossed inn the Sunday morning talkers all morning.

Halloween Movie Night!

I had this delusion I was just going to spend most of the day vegetating and alternating between reading Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts and watching movies. Didn’t quite work out, although I did manage to combine a run and The Devil Bat (1941) – one of the few times I was glad the gym has installed individual tv’s on some of the treadmills. I had someone else turn it on, because most people watch CNN at my gym and I didn’t want to take the chance on a random sighting on day 2 of my CNN detox.

Devil Bat is so hilariously bad it was almost dangerous to watch while running. I love the opening sequence, where Mad Scientist Bela works to perfect his species of Giant Devil Bats using electrical manipulation of their glandular processes. He does this when he’s not busy inventing a new aftershave. His conversation with the stock footage bat before he carries the completely unconvincing rubber model into the laboratory is priceless. I mean that literally, it couldn’t have cost anything to produce that scene. And if it did, someone should have been fired. I swear the actual plot of this movie is: Mad Scientist hates his employer, develops a shaving lotion that causes Giant Devil Bats to attack whoever wears it, commits mayhem.

I’d planned to make tonight a triple-feature: The Haunting (1963), Evil Dead and the 1st Halloween, but those best laid plans and all. It’s okay, I’ve already decided that Halloween is going to last through election-day this year so that I have time to get through everything left on the Tivo, finish the Frankenstein marathon, and read the Joe Hill short stories and David J. Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween. Both of those books have been sitting on the coffeetable mocking me ever since the start of the 10 day migraine that kept me from reading.

I was so tired tonight that I decided to postpone the movies and watch Halloween episodes from Buffy. I haven’t seen any of them in ages, they’re funny, and they don’t require much attention span. I picked season 2 (where everyone becomes their Halloween costume) after realizing I was too tired to even watch more than one tonight. I never mentioned it here, but I kicked off the 13 Days of Halloween fest with the Halloween episode from the final season of Angel, “Life of the Party.”