Inside the Head of a TV Junkie

Okay, so I just got done watching the Olympics on NBC this evening where they had women’s platform diving semi-finals.  Why do they have such crappy interviewers in Beijing?  Andrea Cramer interviews the 15 year old Haley Ishimatsu who just missed making the finals and asks her what’s going through her mind given she “just managed to miss the finals”.  Um, duh, she’s devistated.  Her Olympic dream is over.  Haley breaks down during the interview and Andrea just stands there, like an idiot, staring at her.  Haley apologizes and Andrea says “It’s your first time, we understand this” with, in my opinion, an uncaring tone to her voice.  Anyway, she asks Haley some other stupid question about “what she will take away from this experience” and Haley barely can get a complete sentence out she’s so emotional.  I was watching the interview thinking “For crying out loud, hug her already!  She’s sad for not making it and now embarrassed that she’s crying on national television.  Do you even feel?”  Why can’t Cat Deeley be doing the interviews for the Olympics?  At least she is good at showing that she cares when someone is hurting or is at least really good at faking it.

Wow, I must really be suffering from lack of sleep if I felt it was important to write about this before going to bed tonight.

Okay, the sheer number of Olympic hours on TV have won!  I’m so far behind there’s no way I can catch up.  I am fast fowardeding through many items.  I stop and watch a bit of canoeing/kyaking, wrestling, shooting, etc. and then I move on.  It’s kind of sad but I guess I can’t really complain.  These sports used to never be seen on the TV and now they are here for everyone to see.  Anyway, I’m thoroughly enjoying my Olympic viewing.  Maybe I can catch up this weekend, but who knows.  Okay, now I have to go back to watching my recordings - Team Badminton!!

The earthquake that hit southern California this week was caught on camera at the Big Brother house.  See the raw clip below.  CBS featured it in Thursday night’s eviction show.

WARNING - THIS IS A LONG POST

I love Big Brother.  I’ve seen every season.  I’ve been holding off on watching episodes without Mike because I’ve kind of gotten him addicted to the show as well.  Besides, it’s more fun to watch it with someone than alone because you can talk about what crazy stuff is going on during the episode.

Anyway, there were three episodes on my TiVo that needed to be viewed on Wednesday night.  Two were from earlier in the week and the eviction episode from that night.  Let me just say, the contestants for this year look like they are going to make some good episodes in the future.  There seems to be enough low level animosity between a few players that will make eventual blow-ups inevitable.  That’s good TV.  A quick rundown of the first week of BB10 is below.

This season started with the contestants having to select the first HOH before entering the house and getting to know one another.  This, I thought, was an interesting twist.  They had no idea if they were going to accidentally choose the craziest person in the house or not.  In fact, the craziest person in the house was almost chosen (Renny) simply because other contestants felt she looked like the “motherly” type.  Yikes!  I don’t think we’ve seen her real hair yet this season.  She wears these funky wigs with scarf headbands… kooky.  She’s also very loud and has an in your face personality.  That being said, I told Mike that if I was on the show, I would probably end up being her friend.  HA!

Later in the first episode, the houseguests had their first competition.  They were required to break into two teams and then proceed to climb into upside down VW Beetles.  The whole team was to work together to move down the track to one end, pick up a gas can, move back to the other side and have one player jump out with the gas can.  The catch to this game was that the last person in the car for the winning team would win a classic car.  Also, the winning team would win food for the week while the losing team would be on slop.  Most of the players decided not being on slop was a bigger incentive than the car so jumping out of the cars was not as big of a problem as it could have been.  Memphis ended up winning the car, which could become a sore spot for other contestants down the road.  Also, in this episode, there was a small argument between Jesse and Renny.  As I mentioned before, she’s a bit loud and Jesse was trying to sleep in the other room while Renny was carrying on about the door being “locked” when it wasn’t, etc.  This is the first night in the house and Jesse, for some odd reason, thinks that he’s entitled to a quite night sleep.  Ummm, hello, didn’t you sign up for Big Brother?  Didn’t you realize you’d be in a house with 12 other roommates?  Why would he think it would be quiet?  Did he think he had checked himself into a nice hotel or something?  Yeah, Renny was a bit noisy, but nothing more than most of us have experienced at some point in our lives.  It was night #1 and he was already crying about how loud it was and how she was being disrespectful.  In addition to his gross muscles, his attitude is very unattractive.  He may be 22 but please grow up and stop whining like a baby.  Renny apologized for being too loud and yet he kept carrying on about it.  Anyway, as you can tell, he really annoys me.

In the first episode, we also got the nominations for eviction.  The two people put up were Renny and Jesse.  Jerry (the HOH) said they were nominated because he wanted the house to decide who should leave and who was responsible for all the drama that occurred because of their little fight the night before.  In reality, Jerry was being manipulated by Brian.  Brian, as we find out in the next few episodes, is too smart for his own good.

The veto competition was a good one this week.  The players were required to make their way under a “bridge” through a pool of honey-like substance and dig through a bed full of pillows for bears that were the color of their sleepwear.  The pillows, of course, were full of feathers so the contestants were soon covered in feathers from head to toe.  I was rooting for anyone but Jesse to get the power of veto this week. I was hoping to see him go out of the house.  He’s really very annoying.  Anyway, my wishes were not granted and he ended up winning the power of veto.  Brian immediately launched a new plan and convinced Jerry to put up Memphis when Jesse took himself off the block.  It’s worth mentioning that originally, there was an alliance between Brian, Dan and Ollie.  Well, two of the girls, Libra and April, press Ollie to give up the fact that he’s working with Brian.  To save his own butt, Ollie sells out Brian and Dan and helps the two girls convince the whole rest of the house to have a meeting with Jerry up in the HOH room.  The whole house gives Jerry and ultimatum, either put up Brian in place of Jesse or we’ll boot you out next week.  What is Jerry to do?  He agrees.  The veto meeting happens and Brian is put up in place of Jesse, to the shock of Dan.  I’m kind of glad Brian is put up on the block.  I don’t necessarily dislike him but I figure it’s probably the best for the house.  The voting goes down and Brian is evicted with only one vote to keep him in the house (Dan).  I think he was a bit surprised by that but it appeared that he knew he was leaving the house.

The first HOH competition of the season was one of the “majority rules” games that they play quite a bit in BB.  They usually do one of these early on to see how much each of the contestants knows their fellow housemates.  I was really hoping that Steven would win.  We’re not seeing much of him on TV at the moment.  Is it because he’s very mellow and flying under the radar?  Possibly.  It doesn’t appear that he has much drama (at least drama CBS is willing to televise) in the house.  We need a powerful gay contestant this year!  Unfortunately, my “favorite” player won HOH this week.  I have no idea what Jesse is going to do this week.  He’s a real crap shoot.  I’m sure he’ll put up Renny since he hates her so much.  We’ll find out more on Sunday night!

Question for those of you who are watching the show, do you think they know Steven is gay yet?

The Euro 2008 football championships begin on June 7 and I can hardly wait. ESPN and ESPN2 will be airing every game this time around, thanks in part to the success they had with the World Cup two years ago. Unfortunately, most of these matches will be during the day and I won’t be able to watch them live. The final match will be played on Sunday, June 29th in Vienna. I may have to make my way down to the George & Dragon pub to view a few matches. It’s always great to watch football matches surrounded by other fans. Also, it’s interesting to see how many people from the participating countries are here in Phoenix.

The most exciting matches will be the Quarter Finals, Semi Finals and Final. The dates for these matches are as follows: June 19 - 22 - QFinals; June 25-26 - Semis; June 29 - Final.

Every two years I’m rewarded with a great football championship.  Thank goodness for the Euro Championship.  The four years between World Cups would be quite difficult to deal with if it wasn’t around.  A small fact, for those of you who like learning new things, this is the third most watched sporting event in the world after the World Cup and the Summer Olympics.  Kinda crazy.

I set my TiVo to record “The Brady Bunch” on TV Land this past week. I figured it would be amusing to watch a few episodes when I have nothing else recorded. I am kind of frightened that I remember all of the episodes I have seen so far. I know exactly what is going to happen within the first 3 minutes. One thing I enjoy about the show the most is how dated it is in regards to family dynamics and gender roles. In one episode, Mike pointed out that Mrs. Brady put on her high heel shoes before getting up off the couch to take the phone from Mr. Brady. Is walking in your bare feet that bad? How taboo! In the same episode, a second phone was installed in the Den that only Mr. Brady was allowed to use. He needed it for business purposes (setting up tee times with the boys). If you haven’t seen an episode in a while, I suggest you find it on TV Land and record it. What’s your favorite episode of “The Brady Bunch”?

Oh! Anyone else notice that the theme song is sung by some generic guy/group in the first few seasons and then is sung by the “Brady Kids” in later seasons? Examples follow:

John McCain was on SNL this past weekend. He did a small monologue and kind of made me laugh. The Arizona jokes are funny. I have included the clip for you viewing pleasure below.

And he follows up this monologue with another appearance on Weekend Update. Amusing.

It’s amazing how easy it is to fall out of the routine of watching a show on TV.  I used to watch Survivor each week when the writer’s strike was in effect.  The reason was that I had no other scripted shows on Thursday night that were conflicting with my TiVo recording Survivor.  Now that the strike is over, Survivor is never recorded on my TiVo.  I was relegated to watching each episode on CBS.com.  I kept forgetting to watch the epsides on the web and fell behind a few episodes.  I found myself reading about what happened in each episode and figured that there was no point to watch it.  Well, today I spent about 2 hours going through the remaining episodes on CBS.com in preparation for the finale tonight.  I was not aware the finale was so soon so I figured that I should catch up.  Let me say that it’s been pretty interesting.  I’m looking forward to a new season of Survivor when there are no veterans.  The summer season is almost ready to begin and I can hardly wait!

So let me just preface this post by saying that we were SHOCKED when we first saw this ad on Irish TV. This came on after 9pm on the free basic TV station. I’m sure young children would not be watching at that time but still, yikes! In my opinion, this is how PSAs should be made. If they aren’t shocking and memorable, what’s the point?!

SNL had a great opening skit this weekend.  Remember all the crazy, out of control Hillary bashing that went on this past week by the Media?  You know… all that hullabaloo about how much money the two of them have made since 2000???  Watch it and laugh.  Bravo SNL.