Tag: Teevee

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Breakfast — the Meal of the Gods


Breakfast at Charlie’s, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I love food of nearly all varieties, but like a lot of folks, there’s a special place in my heart for breakfast. There’s something awfully nice about a day that starts off with a nice, big, filling breakfast. I’m not partial to any particular item for breakfast: I’ll have my beloved waffles or pancakes with pure maple syrup and a side of some kind of meat, or I’ll have an omelet and homefries, or I’ll go big and get one of those combo breakfast meals that every good breakfast joint has.

The photo above is one of those meals, from one of my absolute favorite breakfast joints: Charlie’s Diner in East Aurora, NY. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a diner, with typical diner grub. Inside there’s seating at a cramped counter and a few tables in the first room, but the place has become so popular over the years that it’s obviously expanded greatly, with additional dining room areas. And best of all is the seating area on the porch out front, where one can sit in shaded fresh air and eat. It’s just a fantastic place. My meal above consisted of two eggs, three sausage links, home fries, toast on homemade bread, and a stack of three pancakes that I couldn’t squeeze into the frame. (The pancakes at the upper left are The Daughter’s.)

I love breakfast because it tends to be the most value-packed of meals. You can get a huge meal, with coffee and OJ, at most places like this for around $10. That’s great, especially when you eat late enough in the morning and you eat enough food to make lunch expendable.

We ate there on a Saturday morning two weeks ago before attending the East Aurora Farmers Market. Farmers markets are some of my favorite things; just wandering around, looking at all the fresh produce and vegetables and plants and flowers and other items is fantastic, and I love being able to hand my money for a head of lettuce to the person who grew it.

Back on the subject of breakfasts, we discovered quite by accident last week a great show on PBS called Breakfast Special. This show spends an hour profiling different kinds of breakfast joints throughout the country, from one of Western New York’s own pancake houses (the Maple Tree Inn, which is only open during maple syrup harvesting season) across the country to a couple of places in Portland, OR. Watching this show made us terribly hungry. If you can find the show on your PBS station, check it out.

Wow, I want to eat some breakfast now…and as I’m writing this, I’ve just finished dinner!

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FOX! CURSE YOU, FOX!!!


CURSE YOU!!!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

So I settle in for my weekly dose of the beautiful Holli Hell’s Kitchen, only to discover that the Major League Baseball All Star Game is on instead. Betrayer most foul!!!

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I think it’s crap, Chef!

Time for this week’s griping and kvetching about Hell’s Kitchen!

:: Holli’s hair is so cute. Holli is so cute.

:: Ah, the blind taste test! The results are about what they always are, with the chefs only naming a handful of the ingredients they are fed whilst blindfolded and wearing headphones. Frankly, I’d love to see Chef Ramsay do this one sometime.

:: I still hate Benjamin. I can’t get over how quiet and reserved he was when he was with the men, but now that he’s with the women, he’s the arrogant ass steamrolling over everybody. I hate that kind of chauvinistic crap. It reminds me of when I worked in restaurants, and if I was on duty with another manager who happened to be female, and the other manager went off to talk to a customer with a problem, every once in a while you’d get that customer who would refuse to believe the female they were talking to was a “real” manager.

:: Dinner service: Benjamin is shitting the bed from the outset, and Chef Ramsay is calling him out. Good. Hate this guy. Have I mentioned that? I’m sure it will come up again.

:: Fran’s falling apart. Will this be her last hurrah?

:: Wow, everybody’s stinking except for Holli, who is so cute and competent.

:: Elimination: Fran out, Autumn back to the Red team. Who cares?

:: Second episode! Preview shows fireworks! Huzzah!!!

:: Holy crap, those are some awesome looking lobsters. I’m already hungry. But naming them for departed chefs? How rude!

:: I always wonder about the dishes in tasting challenges like this. They sit around getting cold for a few minutes while the tasting chefs are introduced and whatnot.

:: Holli always seems to do well at these challenges, doesn’t she? My small crush on her aside (can we see her in overalls again, please?), she really shows serious skill. Her dishes at these challenges are always well-received, and she’s only had a couple of hiccups in the services. She could be this season’s Christina (the eventual winner of Season Four).

:: And Holli’s dish is so good that Chef Ramsay awards her an extra point to break the tie! Holli’s awesome. And since her team wins, she’ll get to wear normal clothes.

:: OK, those dorms are disgusting. There’s something like three weeks’ worth of cigarette butts in that big ashtray! I wonder if there’s a rule that no one is to do any incidental cleaning at all, so that the cleaning can be held out as a punishment.

:: Ohhhhhhh wow…Holli…(I promise I’ll stop this eventually.)

:: Hoo boy, throwing a time factor on the dinner service? I’m sure this will go swimmingly!

:: Oh wait, no, it won’t. And Nilka, who has been pretty good until now, has just fallen apart completely. This was like watching the Titanic steam full-speed right into the iceberg. While its hold was full of explosives.

:: Wow, this is the tantrum that keeps on giving. It was a pretty wild moment. But you know what? It would have been astonishing teevee if FOX had not plastered this event all over its promos for this episode. I really wish networks would let the shocking moments be shocking moments.

:: Classy exit after all the screaming for Nilka. And they still have to put people up for elimination! Wow.

:: Ramsay specifically praises Jason’s performance…so the team was seriously discussing nominating him? Duh. Actual nominees: Autumn and Ed. Ed’s first nomination, Autumn’s third? I think? I’m guessing he doesn’t eliminate anybody this time, given Nilka’s exit.

:: And I call it! Time for the black uniforms. Final six! Go Holli!!!

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Bring him Ice

SamuraiFrog comments favorably on Sean Bean’s casting as Lord Eddard Stark in the forthcoming HBO series A Game of Thrones, adapting the first book in George RR Martin’s pretty good, but I suspect doomed to eternal incompletion, Song of Ice and Fire series. Bean looks really good in this photo:

Looking at this pic, I have a new thought: [SPOILER, highlight to read]Maybe after this, Bean can play Uther Pendragon in a filmed adaptation of Mary Stewart’s Arthurian books, so he can keep up his newfound habit of playing guys who die in the first books of the series whose filmed adaptation he’s starring in.

In other Game of Thrones casting news, the part of Hodor has been cast. Talk about having it easy! (Hodor is a mentally-challenged character who only ever says his own name. That’s it. His dialogue will consist of him doing nothing but saying “Hodor”. In fact, I have a hope that in the unlikely event GRRM ever actually does finish the series, the book ends with “Hodor,” said Hodor.)

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I’ve had ENOUGH!

Ahhh, the tortures of Hell’s Kitchen continue!

:: Sandwich day at Hell’s Kitchen. Oy. I love sandwiches. Watching this show was painful, it made me so hungry! But interesting that Ramsay takes them to a place so they can eat French Dip sandwiches, and then criticizes Fran’s sandwich because of a bit of soggy bread, saying that “You never want to see soggy bread in a sandwich.” Except, apparently, the sandwiches that are dipped in broth at the place you took them to, Chef?

:: The 50th wedding anniversary hosted by Hell’s Kitchen was kind of cool, although I’d never heard of “Steak Diane” before. No idea what that is. Chicken Kiev, though? Ewwww! Never been a big fan of the stuff.

:: Salvatore is gone. I had a feeling.

:: Siobhan is gone. Again, I had a feeling.

:: Remaining contestants: Holli got yelled at for the first time, I think. She’s still safe, though. I expect Fran to go soon. Autumn had a low-key week in which she did not annoy me. The others on the Blue team — Jason, Jay, and Ed — all had rough weeks, though, probably because they got really drunk the night before service and were hung over. Oops!

:: Until this week, the main impression we’d been given of Benjamin was of a quiet and talented cook who just performed consistently and didn’t speak up much. Well, all that was out of the water this week, as he revealed himself to be a Grade A ass. Yes, Siobhan deserved to go, but his arrogant and condescending vendetta towards her was disgusting to behold — especially when he insisted that in his professional opinion, the sandwich she’d made was terrible even after Chef Ramsay himself pronounced it fine. I won’t be rooting for Benjamin now. At all. I want him to lose, badly. He’s an ugly little man, and I have to wonder if his new-found arrogance and outspokenness, now that he’s gone from the all-male Blue Team to the all-female Red Team, is based just a bit in good old-fashioned male chauvinism.

Next week brings the ever-popular “Taste the ingredient and tell me what it is” challenge, which is always a devious one as Ramsay mixes prosaic ingredients like ham and onion with “gourmet”, obscure stuff like watercress and…other stuff, which causes contestants to overthink and identify, say, bologna as “coconut”.

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It’s RAWWWW!!!

Ahhhh, Hell’s Kitchen, how I love you. I’m enjoying the doubling-up of episodes this year, even if that means that the show will be finished much sooner than usual. Last week’s episodes were full of entertainment:

:: One of the theme nights was a “Family Night” at Hell’s Kitchen, which led Gordon Ramsay to point out to his charges that the dining room would be full of kids and therefore it would be nice if they didn’t make him swear.

So what happened? The Red Team proceeded to muck things up so badly that Ramsay threw all of them out and had his trust sous chefs finish the service. And if you know Gordon Ramsay, you know he didn’t break the news to the Reds by saying, “You have all underperformed, and now I would like you all to return to the dorms forthwith”. Oh no.

As he would say a minute later, “So much for me not swearing tonight….”

:: It’s not uncommon for Hell’s Kitchen to make me hungry for a certain food. That said, I want some crab hushpuppies. NOW.

:: Scott, the endless know-it-all with the unimaginably inflated opinion of his own worth, got tossed out on his ear. He kept saying “None of you work in fine dining restaurants!”, as though it meant something. It never occurred to him that since his food was constantly being sent back, since Ramsay was constantly having to yell at him for serving up raw food no matter what station he ran, that maybe he’s not as good as he thinks. The guy was utterly, utterly delusional. But he talked a good game for a while, even to the point of getting Fran to not nominate him for elimination. (Ramsay saw through this and brought him up anyway, although he eventually sent Maria packing.)

Of the remaining contestants:

:: Siobhan seems ripe to go. I liked her a lot at first, and I still think she’s really cute, but she’s over her head in each service, and her results are similar to Scott’s. The only difference is, Siobhan doesn’t think she’s God’s gift.

:: Salvatore is not long for the show either, I suspect. He’s got talent, but he lacks experience and his confidence has all the rigor of a skyscraper made of balsa wood. He can’t go much farther than he has already.

:: Fran has gone surprisingly far. I was actually a bit shocked when Ramsay looked her in the eye a few weeks ago and said, “I can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I have noticed over the years that he really does gravitate toward youth (such as a few years back when he chose a young woman over an older guy named Petrozza in the finale, when the two were really about equal in performance). I can’t see Fran winning, but I can see her at least making it to the Black Jackets.

:: I can really see Nilka winning, although I know — from the “This season on Hell’s Kitchen!” thing that was part of the first episode — that she appears to have a hell of a tantrum explosion coming up at some point. Of course, that, in itself, need not doom her. Nilka’s got some game, though.

:: Benjamin also has some game, although I was disappointed to hear him start to show some ego and arrogance in the last episode. The humble and confident chefs tend to be the ones who excel on this show. Remember Dave from last year? That guy just shut up and cooked, week in and week out. That’s what Benjamin had been doing, too, but now he’s been appointed “Possible Savior of the Red Team”. That’s not going to help his chances. Two seasons ago, another strong Blue performer was sent to a disastrous Red Team to help pull them back together; he was gone two weeks later.

:: Ed? I have no impression of the guy. At all. I don’t recall him even being yelled at yet. No read on him whatsoever.

:: Jay also seems a bit arrogant, but a bit quieter about it. He could be the type to reach the finale by outlasting everyone else.

:: Jason also seems to have a bit of skill, but I think he’s going to fall apart at some point. He just always seems to have a chip on his shoulder, and that’s never going to work out well.

:: Autumn? I don’t like her at all. Still. She appears to have some skill in the kitchen, but she’s a weasel. I didn’t like the way she would screw things up on the Red Team and then find a way to avoid the blame that was hers, and I didn’t like how, this past week, she tried to set the Red Team up for failure now that she was on the Blue Team. (One night, each team switched off kitchen and dining room service duties, so one team was waiting tables while the other cooked. Autumn was being really suggestive to customers that she could take their food back and have it re-cooked, she really really really could it was no problem at all. Ugh.

:: And then there’s my favorite contestant, the beautiful Holli. And she seems to have some skill as well; she has not yet been in Chef Ramsay’s line of fire, and she manages to pretty much stay out of the fray on a Red Team that gets more dysfunctional every week.

And she’s just…immensely cute.

She even manages to look cute when all the chefs are required to wear butchering costumes for a challenge that doesn’t even involve butchering!

Of course, that episode ultimately irritated me a bit. The Blue Team won a challenge involving using pork as an ingredient, so they all got to go to a spa where they got massages and sat in hot tubs and had mud baths, with lots of nicely lingering shots of the Blue Team members in their spa gear. There was a lot less footage of the Red Team’s punishment, which involved dressing up appropriately for the job of washing a bunch of muddy pigs.

Which means that the episode featured a number of lingering shots of Autumn in a bikini, and only a couple of fleeting glimpses of wonderful Holli in overalls. Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, Hell’s Kitchen!

Sigh!

(Yeah, I’m weird. Your point?)

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Food is now flying out of both kitchens

We got caught up on Hell’s Kitchen last night, by watching the episodes that aired this past Tuesday night. Apparently they’ll have two episodes again this Tuesday, so I suspect that FOX is trying to get through as much HK as they can before Gordon Ramsay’s new show, Master Chef, debuts sometime in July.

Anyway, some random observations on where everyone stands and how the season is proceeding:

:: I liked seeing the Blue team (the men) use their “punishment” for losing a challenge as a way of building their teamwork. They had to go to a particularly nasty spot along the Los Angeles River and pick up trash, which wasn’t just small crap but stuff like shopping carts. (The LA River, in LA, flows through a bunch of man-made flood-control channels made of concrete. Remember the “Thunder Road” race in Grease? That’s one of the LA River channels.)

:: Strong contestants are emerging: Nilka on the Red team, and Benjamin on the Blue. Others are falling into the “making it interesting” category: Holli and Fran for the Red, Salvatore and Jason for the Blue.

:: Contestants I don’t have a handle on yet: Siobhan and Maria for the Red team; Ed and Jay for the Blue. These folks haven’t distinguished themselves one way or the other yet. Siobhan seems a bit fragile, but maybe she finds her strength and bounces back a bit. It’s happened before on HK — in fact, it might have happened already this year, with Salvatore. (And I still like her because of her red dreadlocks. I’m shallow.)

:: The contestants I’m unimpressed with: Scott for the Blue team, Autumn for the Red. Of course, now that’s reversed, because both were nominated for elimination this week only to be simply switched to the other team. Scott is an obnoxious know-it-all whose high opinion of his own knowledge and ability is not yet backed up by any evidence, and Autumn has the same faults plus a bit of added backstabbery in action. She’s the kind of person who is very quick to find someone else to blame for her screw-ups, like when she played dumb about the oversalted water last week and when she simply refused to speak up when Siobhan was getting pilloried by Chef Ramsay for not cooking all of her eggs herself, as she’d been instructed to do. (As soon as they went to the kitchen, Autumn said “Hey Siobhan, I’ll cook some of your eggs for you.”) Plus the way Autumn looked down her nose at the burgers-and-fries cooking challenge (“I cook at a much higher level than lunch stuff”) was utterly obnoxious. Her “blame others” schtick may work for a while, but sooner or later Gordon Ramsay always sees through this.

:: Speaking of that, I find it gets annoying on these reality teevee shows when contestants don’t show any evidence of having watched the show they’re on before! It always bugs me on The Amazing Race when contestants flip out over what plane they’ll take at the beginning of the episode, when the show is clearly set up to make sure that all contestants more or less get to the same place at the same time. Ditto Hell’s Kitchen, when a week ago, the teams nominated contestants for elimination for reasons other than picking who had just had the worst dinner service. Every year someone tries the “I’ll nominate the annoying person!” or “I’ll nominate the person I really don’t like!” or “I’ll nominate the person I believe to be my toughest competition!” strategy, and every time, Gordon Ramsay ignores the nominations and gives the truly deserving person the boot.

:: In one of the episodes this week, two contestants — Salvatore and Holli — were sent out into the dining room to work that end of things. They were both put into identical suits, which reminds me that I just hate it when women are required to wear what is essentially a man’s uniform. Neckties on women bug me. Always have.

:: Before last week’s episodes, I had never heard of the vegetable “salsify” before. If I had seen that word on a page, I would assume it was a verb meaning, “to make salsa out of”. As in, “Take these tomatoes, onions, garlic, and peppers and salsify them.”

More observations as the season progresses!

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100 Characters

Roger points out that Entertainment Weekly did another of their “list” things, this time the “100 Greatest Characters of the last 20 years”. I don’t much like EW, but their lists are usually good for a blog post or two, so I’ll just reproduce their list with comment on the entries. (Now, I’m not reading the actual EW article, so I’m not sure of their criteria.)

1. Homer Simpson. While I can’t quibble with the placement, I call foul in that Homer Simpson first showed up more than 20 years ago, and therefore should not be eligible.

2. Harry Potter. On the basis of Homer’s ineligibility, Harry should be Number One. Not just a cultural phenomenon, but Harry’s also a great character, and one of the pleasures of the books is watching him grow.

3. Buffy Summers. I really need to watch Buffy one of these years, in its entirety. I always liked what I saw when I caught sporadic episodes here and there.

4. Tony Soprano. Meh. I know lots of folks liked this, but it wasn’t my cup of tea.

5. The Joker (The Dark Knight). Not sure about the eligibility here, either. This was a new take on a very old character, not a new character. Great performance, but this also seems a bit high to me.

6. Rachel Green (Friends). This high? I dearly loved Friends and it was huge in its day, but for whatever reason it hasn’t had much staying power. But then, maybe we’re a little too soon yet for 1990s nostalgia. It’s taken this long for overalls to start coming back into style, after all.

7. Edward Scissorhands. This high on the list? Really? (This movie was my first date with The At-the-time Future Wife. Love the movie, but I’m not sure I’d put Edward this high up.)

8. Hannibal Lecter. Again, shouldn’t be eligible. Silence of the Lambs, which came out in 1991, was an adaptation of a book that was several years old. Yes, Anthony Hopkins cemented Lecter in our cultural mind, but that’s not the same thing.

9. Carrie Bradshaw (Sex and the City). I never watched this show. She wore overalls a lot, though, from what I’ve seen.

10. Spongebob Squarepants. Sure, why not?

11. Cosmo Kramer. Absolutely!

12. Fox Mulder & Dana Scully (The X-Files). Two characters as one? Huh? A great duo isn’t a great character. Both are great characters.

13. Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean). Come on, EW! It’s Captain Jack Sparrow.

14. Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (The Big Lebowski). I need to see this.

15. Shrek. Sure, why not?

16. Bridget Jones. Maybe. I know nothing about her.

17. Lara Croft. OK, maybe.

18. Sue Sylvester (Glee). I don’t know why, but I cannot get into Glee. I’ve watched it a bunch of times, and every single time, I bounce off it. So no from me.

19. Morpheus (The Matrix). Ummmm…I’m on the fence, here. Laurence Fishburne’s performance was terrific, but the character’s really your basic Mentor character in a Campbellian hero journey tale.

20. Ally McBeal. I hated that show. Hated it, and mostly because I tend to hate the people in David Kelley’s shows. So no.

21. Rosanne Conner (Roseanne). Hated the character. Hated the show. And she debuted in 1988, so not eligible, anyway.

22. Eric Cartman (South Park). OK, I guess. I can’t believe the show’s still on, but “Respect mah authoritah!” and “Screw you guys, I’m going home” are always good lines to have at one’s disposal.

23. Austin Powers. Sure.

24. Felicity Porter. Huh? Seriously? The show wasn’t that great…but then, EW is pretty firmly in the camp of worshipping everything JJ Abrams touches. I’m surprised they haven’t put a LOST character on the list yet.

25. Woody (Toy Story). Absolutely! But I wonder how many Pixar characters I’ll find on this list. Pixar does character better than anybody. I’m hard-pressed to think of a badly done character in any of their films.

26. Kavalier & Clay (from Michael Chabon’s novel). Again, a duo is not a character. A great book, though.

27. Frasier Crane. Not eligible! He first appeared on Cheers in the 1980s!

28. Madea. I have no idea who she is. Pardon me whilst I Wiki-search…hmmmm…wow. I’ve never heard of any of this. It’s always amazing how certain cultural items can slide by you so completely and utterly. This feels like something I should at least know about, and yet, nothing at all.

29. Vincent Vega & Jules Winnfield (Pulp Fiction). All right, EW, grab your chalk and write “Duos are not characters” 50 times on the blackboard. Both are great characters.

30. Stephen Colbert (in the persona he portrays on his show). Huh. Wouldn’t have thought of him as a character, but yup!

31. Forrest Gump. He’s a great character, but the 1994 movie is based on a 1988 book. Not eligible.

32. Beavis and Butt-Head. OK, here’s a legitimate exception to the “Duos are not characters” rule, simply because they are never shown in any light other than interacting with one another and they are cut from the same cloth.

33. Sarah Connor (Terminator 2). No, because it’s a sequel to a 1984 movie! Not eligible!

34. Cher (Clueless). No idea; never saw it.

35. Dexter Morgan (Dexter). No idea; never saw it.

36. Gollum (Lord of the Rings). So obviously not eligible that it boggles the mind. Yes, he’s an amazing film-making creation in the movies, but the movies do not create the character.

37. Kyser Söze (The Usual Suspects). He’s a Macguffin and a plot-trick all in one. I wouldn’t even consider him a character. (And besides, the movie is crap.)

38. Elmo (Sesame Street). Not eligible. He’s been around forever. Sure, he’s become huge more recently, but that’s not the same thing.

39. GOB Bluth (Arrested Development). I never really watched this show, so I don’t know.

40. Ron Burgundy (Anchorman). OK, I guess. I loved the movie.

41. Harold and Kumar. Never saw the movie, so I can’t comment on whether they’re enough of a single entity to qualify under the “Beavis-and-Butthead Exception”.

42. Sydney Bristow (Alias). I was never really impressed with the show, so no.

43. Cal Stephanides (the novel Middlesex). No idea; never read it.

44. Jack Bauer – 24. Absolutely. In fact, he should probably be higher; Bauer was really a great pop cultural summation of the entire decade of the 2000s.

45. Stewie Griffin (Family Guy). OK, yes. The parts of that show that actually make me laugh always seem to involve either Stewie or Brian, the talking dog.

46. Jerry Maguire. Sure.

47. Corky St. Clair (Waiting for Guffman). Not a clue.

48. Red (The Shawshank Redemption). Not eligible…Stephen King’s original story was published in 1982.

49. Vivian Ward (Pretty Woman). Meh. The hooker with a heart of gold?

50. Pearl the Landlord. I have zero idea who this is.

51. Omar Little (The Wire). I’ve never watched The Wire. It doesn’t look like my cup of tea.

52. Annie Wilkes (Misery). Novel published in 1987. Ineligible.

53. Edward Cullen. No. No no no a thousand times no. Great popularity does not equal great character. Edward Cullen is a creepy and abusive stalker.

54. Juno (Juno). Sure.

55. Tracy Jordan (30 Rock). Sure, OK.

56. Barney Stinson (How I Met Your Mother). Sure, OK. I’d probably love the show if I could get beyond my irrational loathing of Bob Saget.

57. Clayton Bigsby. No idea who he is.

58. Thelma & Louise. DUOS ARE NOT CHARACTERS!

59. Master Chief (Halo). Not a clue.

60. Mary Jones (Precious). Never saw it.

61. Vic Mackey (The Shield). Never saw it.

62. Jimmy Corrigan (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth). I’ve had this on my shelf for years. I suppose I should actually read it some day….

63. John Locke (Lost). I’m surprised that they didn’t put him higher than this. Never gave the tiniest crap about the character (one reason I never much liked LOST is that I didn’t like the characters), but it was great seeing Terry O’Quinn get a chance to show what a great actor he’s been for years.

64. Maximus (Gladiator). Huh. OK, I guess.

65. Lorelai & Rory Gilmore (Gilmore Girls). I’ve only seen a few episodes and enjoyed them. But DUOS ARE NOT CHARACTERS.

66. Allie & Noah (The Notebook). DUOS ARE NOT CHARACTERS.

67. Borat. Yes!

68. Effie White (Dreamgirls). Never saw it Probably should.

69. Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada).

70. Mary Katherine Gallagher (SNL). Erm…meh.

71. Det. Alonzo Harris (Training Day). Never saw it.

72. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (Battlestar Galactica). OK, we’re testing my standards of eligibility here. I’m going to allow it, even though BSG is based on a show from 1978. Why? Because the re-imagining was so extensive that the newer Starbuck can really only be said to be based on the original character in name only.

73. Catherine Tramell (Basic Instinct). No. One iconic film moment — we know the one — does not a great character make. She’s pretty much a cipher in the movie, a character on which to hang plot stuff. She’s a female Keyser Soze, and he’s not a character, either.

74. Don Draper (Mad Men). Never saw it, but sure.

75. David Brent (The Office – original from the UK). You bet!

76. Tyler Durden (Fight Club). I didn’t like the movie, but that was more of a “cup of tea” thing than any obvious flaws I could point out — I found it very well-made and interesting, but ultimately unpleasant.

77. Mimi Marquez (Rent). Never saw it.

78. Patty Hewes (Damages). Never saw it, either.

79. Elphaba (Wicked). Never saw the musical or read the book. We’re hoping to see the show when it comes to Buffalo again next May, though.

80. Gorillaz, the world’s greatest virtual band. No idea what they are.

81. Amanda Woodward (Melrose Place). Meh. Didn’t like the show much.

82. Tracy Flick (Election). Didn’t see it.

83. Jen Yu (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). I’ve seen parts of this movie. I should rectify that.

84. House (House). Yes!

85. Daniel Plainview (There Will Be Blood). Never saw it.

86. Karen Walker & Jack McFarland (Will & Grace). DUOS ARE NOT CHARACTERS!

87. Tony Stark (Iron Man). Not eligible. I’m not even going to bother Googling when Iron Man first showed up in comics, since I read him as a kid.

88. Napoleon Dynamite. I should probably see this.

89. Wilkus van de Merwe (District 9). This too.

90. Marge Gunderson (Fargo). Absolutely! Strange thing — she’s too good a character to be contained in just one movie, and yet, a sequel would just seem kinda dorky, you know?

91. Hancock (Hancock). Never saw it, but I have a hard time seeing this on the list.

92. Christopher Boone (The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time). I know nothing about this.

93. “Game Boys”: Nathan Drake – Uncharted, Kratos – God of War, Niko Bellic – Grand Theft Auto IV. I have no idea what this is talking about.

94. Truman (The Truman Show). Sure. This movie seems underrated to me these days.

95. Wilhelmina Slater (Ugly Betty). Not sure; I only saw one or two episodes of this show and wasn’t all that thrilled by it.

96. Bernie Mac (The Bernie Mac Show). Meh. Wasn’t really my cup of tea.

97. Violet Weston (August: Osage County). Not a clue.

98. Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Not a clue.

99. The Bride (Kill Bill). I haven’t seen the whole thing. I’m not sure how good a character she is. How many dimensions of character are there in this blood-soaked violence fantasy?

100. Tim Riggins (Friday Night Lights). Meh…the few episodes I saw didn’t knock me over.

OK, so there’s the list. Again, I didn’t read any of EW‘s commentary, but it seems pretty clear that they’re judging things on the basis of when characters became Big Cultural Things as opposed to when they originated, but that seems to be splitting hairs to me. Sure, Frasier Crane became a lot bigger when he had his own hit show, but he wasn’t exactly a bit part on Cheers — it’s not like they made a juggernaut hit out of Harry the Hat, for example. This is how they’re able to choose Tony Stark (not the most famous of Marvel superheroes) and not Spiderman or Wolverine (who were hugely famous long before they showed up in movies).

Better, in my view, to select characters only created since 1990. Sure, way more people know who Gollum is by virtue of the LOTR movies, but it’s not as if the books were obscurities known only to a small number of cultists and fanboys. It may be fun to view fantasy and science fiction fandom as something of a small ghetto, but consider: the LOTR books have been in print for more than half a century. I see no logical argument to be made that Gollum is a character of the “last 20 years”. If we’re restricting ourselves to movie characters, then maybe, but EW didn’t do that.

And of course, there are some other quibbles as well, as I note throughout. EW‘s list is wildly skewed toward what’s popular as opposed to what’s good, which leads to stuff like Edward Cullen being on there. And the whole thing of counting couples or duos as single characters really bugged the crap out of me; there’s really only one duo on there, Beavis and Butthead, that can be considered, for me, a single character entity (although Harold and Kumar might well qualify as well).

And then there are the simple omissions from the list: characters who most absolutely certainly ought to have been there. Here are just a few, tossed off the top of my head:

President Josiah Bartlet. An intelligent character, smart as a whip, and depicted as being governed by very strong moral principles that he nevertheless ignores at times. He’s a very human character.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds. I’ll take him over any character in any teevee series ever helmed by JJ Abrams.

Severus Snape. The way JK Rowling handled Snape over the years was nothing short of brilliant — we never knew, until there were mere pages left in the last book, whether he was a villain or not. And even when that question was finally answered, his motivations turned out to have been deeply complex. He’s a terribly underrated character, in my view.

Pixar characters: Mr. Incredible. Wall-E. The old guy in Up. And since they liked duos so much, I’m surprised they didn’t pair Woody with Buzz Lightyear, or include Marlin and Dory.

Captain Barbossa. They have Captain Jack Sparrow up there, but a good adventure movie can only become a great adventure movie by virtue of its villain, and Barbossa’s one of the best.

Jack Dawson. I know, we’ve culturally agreed that we can only sneer at Titanic these days, but I don’t.

Lieutenant John J. Dunbar. Same thing with Dances With Wolves.

Hayao Miyazaki characters: Ashitaka, San, Chihiro. And more.

Gil Grissom. He was so cool back when CSI was new.

If they’re including duos and some very recent characters, where are Castle and Beckett? (Not that I’m including duos, but I’d have Castle and Beckett on there separately.)

I wasn’t a huge Law and Order fan, but when the show’s cancellation was recently announced, just about every blog post or article online I saw about it mentioned Jerry Orbach’s long-running character, Detective Lennie Briscoe. That seems a good addition, to me.

Dr. Perry Cox from Scrubs; Dr. John Carter from ER. Also from The West Wing, Donnatella Moss and CJ Cregg. And from my beloved Once and Again, Rick Sammler and Lily Manning.

OK, that’s it.

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Final Idol

American Idol for this year is over, at long, long last. Aside from a couple of too-rare bright spots, this season was generically disappointing from the start right up until the end, when — for the first time in my experience — Idol crowned the wrong person. And not just a little bit wrong, but staggeringly wrong.

Lee DeWyze was utterly, utterly inadequate, no matter how much the judges inexplicably adored him. He’s got a pleasant enough voice, and he can strum a guitar in relatively convincing fashion (although that’s about all he did with it), but he showed, time and time and time again throughout the show’s run, that he had zero real musicianship. He showed it when he failed completely to sell the song “Beautiful Day” in the finale; he showed it when he did an awful one-half of a duet with eventual runner-up Crystal Bowersox in “Falling Slowly”; he showed it in his jaw-droppingly awful rendition of “Hey Jude”; and worst of all was his wholesale slaughtering of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, which he turned into a Queen-style arena rock anthem. There have only been a couple of times in all the seasons of Idol I’ve watched (all but the first) in which someone I really disliked made the finale (Diana DiGarmo and David Archuleta), but this was the first time that the person I really disliked actually won, and he did it despite near unanimous opinion that his performances on the Finale were seriously subpar.

What was odd was the judges’ reaction to Lee all year. Until the finale, Lee received zero criticism. None. He was slathered with praise every single week until the finale, when at long last he seemed to receive some mild critique. It’s true that the judges can’t eliminate or keep anyone around solely by virtue of their criticism, but they can certainly shape opinion, and Lee had them in his back pocket right to the end, even to the point where he’d give warbling performances in which he would literally sing wrong notes and start shouting the song as soon as he possibly could, and yet, no one would point it out; Randy Jackson, famous for using the word “pitchy” as much as “dawg”, would merely shout out things like “Oooooh, someone is in it to win it!” The judges’ devotion to Lee DeWyze was absolutely mystifying.

What about Crystal Bowersox, then? Well, it’s pretty obvious that I loved her. Absolutely loved her. Not everything she did was perfect; on “Movie Song Night”, she did some song from Caddyshack that nobody much remembers, for example. But she was such a smart, capable, intelligent performer. She thought her songs through in a way that Lee couldn’t even conceive. After Simon Cowell criticized her for the way she had performed a particular song, she was actually able to look at him and say, “Well, the lyrics say this, so I had to sing it in a way that made that meaning clear” or some such thing. That kind of musical intelligence is rare on Idol, which is tailor-made for vocalists like Lee DeWyze and Siobhan Magnus who approach a song as though it is a vocal jungle-gym.

Crystal also had tremendous stage presence, which Lee did not. During the Season Finale (the results show, not the individual performances), both Crystal and Lee showed up on stage occasionally to perform with various famed pop and rock artists. Crystal did a number with Alanis Morissette in which she held her own with the star, making the moment something special. A short while later Lee did a number with Chicago, and he couldn’t even stand out as a 20-something kid amongst a group of aging, has-been rockers. Lee just melted into the stage; Crystal looked like the stage was her home. And it was. That the Idol voters didn’t consider this is…well, it’s not very shocking, actually.

Crystal’s dominance over Lee in the final performances was so undeniable that not even Lee could deny it. At the very end of the show, just before the final fade-out, there they were on stage, Lee and Crystal, with Ryan Seacrest in between. The look on Lee’s face was the look of dismay on the face of any person who has been thoroughly beaten by a superior opponent.

So why, then, did Lee win? I’ve heard some theories:

Lee is more marketable, more current, more contemporary, more [insert intangible here] than Crystal.

I don’t buy this. First of all, I have no idea what’s “current” or “contemporary” and neither does anyone else. It’s all BS, really — Crystal stands in the tradition of Melissa Ethridge and Sheryl Crow, both of whom are still very much present on the music scene. Plus, Idol viewers aren’t record producers. It’s not their job to pick people who sell tons of albums, even though that’s the hope. Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino, Taylor Hicks — all have had fine music careers since winning Idol, but none have lit the world on fire. But more importantly, none were “current” or “contemporary”.

Crystal doesn’t really need to win. She’s virtually guaranteed a great career.

I’m not so sure about this. Everyone loves to talk about the Idols who didn’t win and who went on to some kind of stardom — Clay Aiken, Jennifer Hudson (didn’t even make the finale), and Adam Lambert are prime examples here — but there are others who disappeared. Justin Guarini, Kat Stevens, that beat-boxing kid from a few years back: where are they? Nowhere that anybody knows. Some non-winners have had good careers. Many more have not.

Lee’s backstory is more compelling than Crystal’s.

Well, this is all opinion, I guess. I, for one, am more attuned to the single mother struggling to make it as a singer than the paint salesman trying to be a singer, but that’s just me.

A related theory:

America’s a pretty puritanical country, so a single mom isn’t going to win IDOL against a good-looking guy. Same was Adam Lambert lost.

Don’t know about this one. I hope it isn’t true, but I’m sure that for a few voters, it was.

Teenybopper girls robotexting their votes carried the day for Lee.

There may be something to this; I suspect it’s at least part of the reason Lee won. You can’t overestimate the sway held by the “cute” contestants, whether they can sing or not. It’s why Aaron Kelly and Tim Urban lasted so long, despite their relative lack of plausibility as Idols. I saw this theory advanced somewhere to explain the fact that men have won Idol four of the last five years (Taylor Hicks, David Cook, Kris Allen, and now Lee DeWyze). However, looking at who lost some of those years, the theory looks a little less convincing. There’s no way anybody’s going to look at David Cook and decide that he’s going to have the “teenybopper girl” vote sewn up when he’s up against David Archuleta, and Jordin Sparks beat out…that beatboxer kid who looked like he should command the “teenybopper girls” segment of the Idol electorate. I’m sure this is a factor, but a determining factor? Maybe not.

This illustrates the power of the judges to sway opinion, given how relentlessly positive they were about Lee.

This is, for me, the likely big factor here.

So anyway, Lee’s the winner and Crystal’s not. I predicted Lee to win the whole thing weeks ago, mainly because of the way the judges were pushing him so hard in their critiques. In fact, I predicted that Crystal wouldn’t even make the final, so I was partially wrong on that score. But this also demonstrates something else: that the judges’ critiques in the final don’t determine much at all. The judges treated Lee with reverential fervor all year until the final, when they gave him criticism that was mild at best while highly praising Crystal. It’s a far cry from two years ago, when in the final, the judges declared all three “rounds” for David Archuleta, who ended up losing by what was apparently a pretty sizable margin. By the time of the final, I think most people who are going to vote have their minds made up.

Lee’s victory had an air of inevitability, but it was a weird kind of inevitability: the kind where you know you’re getting forced to do something, so you go along with it.

OK, enough about the Worst Idol in the History of Idol. What about Idol in general? I found this year generically disappointing. The level of voices selected for the Top 24 was surprisingly bad, with only a handful of standouts among them. And one of those standouts, Lilly Scott, whom I loved in the early going, didn’t make the Final 12 in what was probably the most surprising single elimination of the entire season. There are always bad contestants who do confoundingly well — John Stevens? Sanjaya Malakar? Tim Urban? I read one article somewhere, early in the season, that suggested that Idol is having more troubles lately because they’ve “depleted the talent pool”. That notion is, obviously, idiotic — are we to believe that Idol has worked through all 50 million or whatever number of people there are in the permitted age group? That’s just silly. But the judges drop the ball on their selections, at least once every year.

Simon Cowell is also leaving, which has a lot of people predicting the show’s swift demise. Maybe, but if so, I suspect it would be because Idol will be in its tenth season and it’s getting old. Like any self-respecting fan of American Idol, I have some thoughts on directions the show should take:

1. Cut back on the filler and focus on the music.

This season, the filler material got ridiculous, to the point where Idol had to schedule two hour shows so that nine contestants could sing. That was ridiculous. There’s only so much anybody wants to know about the contestants, and all the song previews are now going on way too long. Time was when the show would have each contestant sing twice as early as six or seven left in the group; this year they waited (I think) until they were down to five left, just because the show was so full of filler material.

2. Move “Country Music Week” back to where it used to be, early on in the Final Twelve.

This year, they didn’t do Country Week until very late — again when there were only five or six left — and they focused it on songs by Shania Twain. It should come a lot earlier. Not that I’m a country music fan — I like some of it, dislike most of it — but it can’t be denied that Idol‘s Country Week tends to produce a lot of good performances, especially from the contestants who may not be totally cut out for the Pop stuff they want so badly to feature. Country Week can give dark-horse contestants a new lease on life on the show, and it addsa helpful bit of variety to the show.

3. Change the voting.

This will never happen, but I’d like to see voting changed so that people are voting for someone to be eliminated rather than to see someone stay. Failing that, I’d at least like to see the show limit the number of votes from one person, so that someone can’t robo-text fifty votes for someone who isn’t very good. Never gonna happen, obviously — they love that Ryan Seacrest can say things like “Out of a record 190 million votes cast”, as if that many people are watching the show to begin with. But this would fix a recurrent problem with Idol, when every year lesser contestants thrive whilst worthy ones are sent packing.

4. Back to three judges.

OK. So Simon Cowell is leaving. I’m not of the general view that he is unreplaceable asset whose departure will spell doom for Idol — Simon is flat-out full of crap a lot of the time, and he only manages to not seem full of crap by virtue of being articulate and having a British accent. But he’s leaving the show. Who to replace him with? Someone with personality and intelligence. I’d like to see him replaced by someone with knowledge of the industry, but really, not another record producer. I’d like to see another actual musician on the show, someone who isn’t concerned with what’s going to sell and be marketable and rather what’s actually good.

I saw the suggestion made somewhere else — can’t remember where — but it’s a good one. Bret Michaels! It’s perfect. After watching him on The Celebrity Apprentice, he’s got smarts and he can be blunt when he needs to be and nice when that’s called for.

And get rid of Kara Dioguardi. I suppose Ellen Degeneres can stay, but she needs to work on her critiquing. Kara, though, is useless.

5. Get rid of the “bad singers”.

When the show starts up in January, they always show lots of stadiums full of Idol hopefuls. Only a tiny percentage of these are allowed through to audition for the judges; five thousand might show up, but only 150 might get through to sing for Randy, Kara and Simon or whomever. And of those, a certain percentage are the terrible singers sent through just so we can see the judges rip into people who suck.

The problem is that this is all boring. The annual weeks-long tour of laughing at sucky singers is old, old, old hat by now. It might help the cause of upgrading the talent level sent through to Hollywood if the show abandoned the sucky singers. Let the judges pick from 150 good singers, instead of only 75 good ones and torturing them with 75 bad ones.

That’s about it. All in all, a really disappointing year on American Idol. We’ll see if it can get its groove back next year or not.

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Random Notes from Home

Daily life stuff….

:: I made pizza for dinner last night. Nothing fancy, just cheese, pepperoni, and sausage, but I made my crust and my sauce from scratch, so that’s something. It turned out really well, I thought. There’s something really satisfying about DIY pizza. Now to experiment with other crust recipes; the one I used is a basic crust from Cooking Light magazine.

:: I watched the last half hour or so of the 24 finale. Hmmmm. Spoiler thoughts (highlight to read):

Jack doesn’t even get to go to bed after his day? Now he’s on the run from both the US and the Russians? And at some point in the past he pissed off China, so where can he go? Canada?

And if the President is feeling that bad about Jack and what he’s been through, why doesn’t she pardon him before resigning her office?

And yes, I’ll totally see a 24 movie.

:: SamuraiFrog on the finale of LOST:

There are two kinds of people–those who loved the last episode of Lost, and those with no poetry in their souls.

I watched the finale (switching back and forth between it and the Celebrity Apprentice finale, which was so much filler that you could watch about eight minutes of the whole thing and catch it all), and I like to think that my soul’s got poetry a-plenty within it, and my reaction to the show was pretty much what my reaction to LOST has always been: Yeah, it’s a pretty show and it’s extremely well-made and Michael Giacchino can write some good music, but…that’s about it. Maybe I’m simply not attuned to the poetry in LOST, wherever it is, but the finale struck me as lots and lots of sentimental stuff, right down to the tearful reunion of man and dog, combined with lots of glowy stuff about death and Heaven. As a non-fan of the show I wasn’t looking for “the answers”, but the online commentary I’ve seen is pretty unanimous that the finale didn’t offer any.

So, basically, what seemed to wind up happening is LOST boiling down to “Our Town meets The Five People You Meet In Heaven meets The X-Files“. Whether they were dead the whole time or whether they were only dead in the parallel timeline doesn’t really matter, apparently, and the creators basically gave themselves the ultimate “out” in terms of explaining stuff: they can simply say, “Explanations, schmexplanations. It’s all religious allegory about death and the afterlife. We don’t need logic for that.” From the vantage point of someone outside the whole LOST phenomenon, it seems to me that what the producers did here was this close to being, if not actually being, an enormous deus ex machina ending. And not just the ending: the entirety of LOST is deus ex machina.

I’m wondering how this show and its ending are going to age, as the emotions of the journey fade and other memories come to the fore. It’ll be interesting.

:: In other teevee season finale news: CSI: Miami‘s finale was unbelievably silly; haven’t seen Grey’s Anatomy or Castle yet (in fact, we’re still eight or nine episodes behind on Castle, so we’ll have new teevee here at Casa Jaquandor for a while); I’m growing more and more weary of The Office and think the show should just end when Michael Scott leaves; The Mentalist needs to wrap up the not-that-interesting Red John storyline soon; and…that’s about it, I guess.

:: It’s really hot this week here in Buffalo. Mid-80s. The kind of weather that makes me irritable and cranky because it’s too unpleasant to go outside and do much of anything. I hate hot weather. This is July weather, and it’s the big reason why July (excepting the Fourth, which I adore) is my least favorite month. July weather in May? I really hope this is an aberration and not a harbinger of a July for the ages in these parts….

:: I’m closing in on finishing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii. I’m past the first “Boss” level in World Seven, so I have a couple of levels and then all of World Eight to go. Yay me! I had “reached” World Eight before, but that was with me doing a lot of playing doubles with The Kid, who has beaten the game multiple times now; basically she completed levels while I died a lot. Now I have a game that I’m playing myself. Fun stuff! (We need some more Wii games, though…maybe Mario Galaxy, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and one of those Lego games, like Indiana Jones.

:: The Daughter is now reading all of the Harry Potter books. She’s on Order of the Phoenix, although she keeps asking me what happens in Deathly Hallows. I refuse to tell her. We’ve watched the existing movies, so she’s still operating on certain assumptions as regarding Professor Snape. Heh! I, of course, refuse to confirm or deny.

That’s about it. More posting later, I hope!

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