Fave New Shows

Cast of Modern Family

1. Modern Family - great comedy, funny, smart and at the end of each episode, a little sentimental and touching about the importance of family. So many fave characters on this show.

Phil Dunphy

I love Phil. Favorite Phil quote (and there are soooo many good ones): "I am brave. Rollercoasters? Love 'em! Scary movies? I've seen Ghostbusters, like, seven times. I regularly drive through neighborhoods that have only recently been gentrified. So yeah, I'm pretty much not afraid of anything. Except clowns...I'm not really sure where that fear comes from. My mother says it's because when I was a kid I found a dead clown in the woods...who knows?"

FIZZBO THE CLOWN

I love Gloria. Just watch the dog butler episode and pee in your pants. I love Cameron. Just watch the Fizzbo episode. I dare you not to laugh. And, somewhat surprisingly, I love the character of Jay, played by Ed O'Neill, from Married with Children fame. He is hilarious.

2. Parks and Recreation - okay, it's not a new show. In this 2nd season though, the show has really found its footing. So funny! Bless you Amy Pohler for being so good. Unfortunately, I find I have more than a few things in common with your character Leslie Knope...


3. Justified - just started watching this one on the FX channel. It is a very manly show and I like it. It's about a US Marshall who gets involved in a questionable shooting and is transferred from Miami back to Western Kentucky, where he grew up. Timothy Oliphant plays the lead character, Raylan Givens. To quote a black female marshall he is teamed up with who believes he is getting a better deal than he deserves as the new guy, "you are a tall goodlooking white male with a shitload of swagger." Amen, sister! He certainly has the swagger. His ex-wife refers to him as the angriest man she has ever known. And although he will not hesitate a moment to shoot someone, he will try to talk them out of it first. Quiet little show and very watchable.



4. Survivor - Heroes Vs Villains - Okay, also not a new show. I was just about done with Survivor. Every new season was the same. I didn't watch all of the last season and did not watch any of the previous season. But bringing back classic players like Colby, Jerri, Rupert, Parvati, James, Boston Rob, mixed with the unknown (to all of them) element of Russell has made for some fine spicy entertainment, I must say!

I miss ya Boston Rob!

5. Parenthood - I really did not think I would like this. I love the movie. I love Peter Krause and Lauren Graham and Craig T Nelson. Despite all that, I really did not think I would like it. I forced myself to get through one episode and bam! It is good, smart, funny, has a really likable cast, including those mentioned above along with Dax Shepherd, who is turning out to be much more lovable than I would have guessed. Everyone is really good in it. I am not married nor do I have kids, so I guess there is not much here that is directly relatable, but still I enjoy it very much.

HAPPY TV VIEWING!!!!!

These people must be bored

I tuned in the other day to a show on the G4 channel called Web Soup. It is along the same lines as The Soup which shows on the E! channel. I watch The Soup all the time and it is hilarious. They show clips of TV shows and make fun of celebrities. So I decided to watch Web Soup, which I assumed would be clips of internet videos and making fun of people in them. I was right.

It was fairly amusing. What I learned on one show was a little disturbing though. The host used a term I had not heard before - nutshotters. When I first heard him use it, it did not seem to be a term he made up. He used it casually, as if using the word bedwetter or sock puppet, like it was a word that his audience did of course already know the meaning of.

I figured out that nutshotters is a word for young men who make videos of themselves getting hit in the testicles. Unlike the famous and supposedly endlessly entertaining videos shown on America's Funniest Videos of men accidentally getting hit in the nuts, these guys are doing this on purpose.

These guys seem to be vying for most creative "nut shot" or most painful or both. One video showed a guy with a string tied around his testicles (through a pair of thin shorts for the sake of modesty). He appeared to have a full 20 ounces bottle of water attached to the other end of the string. Then he proceeded to throw the bottle across the room away from him, causing a violent jerk of the string when the bottle reached the end of its rope, so to speak. He did this over and over again, groaning and doubling over in pain each time. In the background, friends laughing and cheering him on. Then the guy says in a weak but undaunted voice "Okay 5 more times", as if trying to outdo his last attempt and break his own record.

In another video, a rather large young man lay on the ground on his back with his legs spread apart. A friend with no shoes is on a playground swing a few feet from his legs. The friend is swinging high and then jumps out of the swing, does a flip in the air and comes down socked feet first onto the young man on the ground, taking careful aim to land one foot directly in the young man's crotch. He hits his mark. The young man on the ground jerks in pain, rolls over, grabs his crotch and moans and cries.

Clearly the guy had set this whole thing up. He was not forced to do this. He clearly asked his friends to tape it. In fact, he asked 2 friends to tape it. The video was taped from 2 angles. One person standing on the ground and one person filming from on top of the swing set. My only question is why??????

Is this a test of machoness? Is this a dare about how much pain you can endure? Is this an attempt to sterilize yourself without the cost of a vasectomy? I know young men often do stupid things to prove themselves "men", but why would you want to risk this kind of permanent physical damage? And damage to organs that men, regardless of age, cherish and enjoy? I cannot answer this. I was just amazed that there are so many of these videos and videomakers out there. I am feeling very old and out of it.

You wanna prove how tough you are? Test your other body parts. Ride your bike very fast over a homemade ramp! Get in a fight with Mike Tyson! Smash cinderblocks in half with your forehead! Enter a cockroach-eating contest! Date Chris Brown! Just for goodness sake, leave the precious, sensitive gonads/apricots/back wheels/family jewels alone!

5 things about Kick-Ass

1. This movie is rated R for a reason. Lotsa blood and guts, lotsa violence, lotsa profanity, not to mention the disturbing scenes of an 11 year old girl spitting out all of the above at once. I saw two parents at the theater. One dad with his two sons, I presume, who looked to be about 12 or 13. I also saw a mom with two girls. Both of these girls looked around 11 or 12 years old. I think it was the same woman who brought all those kids to see The Book of Eli, another R rated film unacceptable for children. (see my previous post titled The Book Of Eli). She looked the same as the Eli parent to me. And, as the woman in Eli had, she texted all the way through the movie and kept showing her kids the texts, flashing the light toward me, as I was sitting only two rows behind them. Anywho... this movie is NOT for kids, despite it starring several kids. DO NOT take your children to see this. It was way bloodier and more profane than Eli and the gore was much redder. What were those parents thinking?????

2. The girl who plays Hit Girl, Chloe Grace Moretz, is very good in the role. She is charismatic and energetic. She does drop the C word in one scene though. No good reason for it either. Just pure shock value.

HIT GIRL

3. You gotta give it up to Nic Cage. Sure he makes about a hundred films a year and most of them are bombs, National Treasure franchise notwithstanding. But he is one entertaining MF (sorry still under the influence of this movie). He is one of few actors who make you forget how silly a plot it is that a whole team of thoroughly trained Navy SEALS can invade an island in San Francisco Bay and, after less than 30 minutes, the only ones left standing are an old Scottish man and a bookish chemical engineer! Cage is just that good.

4. I am not of the comic book culture or of the generation that this film is aimed toward. There is a feel to this movie that I surely don't understand. This movie, more than any movie since Watchmen, made me feel very old and culturally irrelevant.

5. Despite numbers 1 and 4, I walked away thinking this was a pretty good movie all in all. It was certainly able to hold my attention and entertain me the entire length. I was never bored. Sometimes I was briefly a little uncomfortable. The end plays out so you know there will be a sequel and I will probably go see that too. Kick-Ass is loud, colorful, funny, violent, both realistic and incredible, and interesting.

Easy Summer side dish/salad

1 yellow pepper, diced
1/2 red onion, diced
1 can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 pint of grape tomatoes, cut in half lengthwise
2 avocados, diced
1/2 or 1 jalapeno pepper, diced, you can include some seeds if you like it hotter
cilantro, chopped, amount depends on taste

OPTIONAL - 1-2 diced chicken breasts

dressing:
1/4 cup lime juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1-2 cloves garlic, minced

Combine all the diced vegetables, beans, cilantro together in a medium bowl. For best results, do not add the avocado until right before serving.

Combine all ingredients of the dressing together and whisk until well combined. Pour over the salad and add avocado cubes right before serving. Toss gently to mix.

This salad, even with the dressing mixed in, will stay good for about 2 days in the fridge. But it tastes so good, it won't last that long! I have made it both with and without chicken. I changed 3 things about the original recipe. The second time I made it, I did not put the 1 tsp lime zest in. I felt the lime flavor with both zest and juice was too overpowering. And I added cilantro to the recipe. These ingredients just seem to cry out for cilantro. The original recipe also did not call for chicken, but I thought it might taste good in a nice cold salad.

I got this original "Guacamole Salad" recipe from the Food Network site. Thanks to the Barefoot Contessa for such a delicious and easy recipe.

China Cabinet arrives!

My new (old) china cabinet arrived on Wednesday, delivered by two young men who for the most part were extremely careful. But young men being who they are, they did not deliver it unscathed. One of them tried to roll it on the dolly and lower the top to about a foot off the ground in an attempt to slide it under the fire extinguisher box attached to the wall by my door. He tried to roll it under this box while avoiding the large square stucco column on the other side of the cabinet.

His pal advised him to go around the outside of the column, through the wide open space of the courtyard, instead of trying to get it between the wall and the column. He did not listen. He almost made it. He was sure he had cleared the fire extinguisher box and lifted the top of the cabinet up again. Bang! He hadn't cleared it. He left a small scrape on the top. He apologized and his pal looked at him as if to say, what did I tell ya? I can't complain too much as I bought the cabinet with scrapes already existing. What's one more, right? The bang guy took his sweet time installing the glass shelves for me and made sure everything was good. He turned on the light above to show they worked.

The cabinet was pretty dirty and smelled ever so slightly of old cigarette smoke, a smell I remember well. I cleaned up the mirror and the glass and gave the whole thing a once over. It looks pretty good. And it was pretty darn cheap too.


Yay! A place to put things with no use where they won't collect so much dust and where they can sit pretty and where the cat can't jump up and walk around on them.

I Should Not Be Allowed to Spend Money Without a Guardian

Today I bought an old tacky kind of beat up china cabinet. Why did I buy a china cabinet when I don't have any china anymore? Because I want to put all my knick knacks in there so they don't need to be dusted as often. Why did I buy this particular china cabinet? Because it was yellow, mostly. I will have it delivered on Wednesday and will no doubt hate it once it gets here. Sigh.

Today I went to get a pedicure and have my eyebrows tamed. I got the same girl I got last time, whose work was not all that impressive. I did not for a different person. Last time this girl gave me a pedicure, she cut down the sides of nails and a few hours later, I had two toes that were a little swollen and blistery on one side. I swore to myself that if I didn't lose a toe, I would never let them cut down the sides again. My toes all recovered from the last time. When she started to cut down the sides this time, did I say anything? No. If I lose a toe this time, I was just asking for it. And I gave her a good tip to boot.

Someone really needs to sign off on my spending!