What’s up everyone? Hope all of you are doing great. This week I have thoughts on the first week of voting on American Idol, predictions on the all stars version of The Amazing Race, the week in Daytona including my review of the free preview of Nascar Hotpass, and thoughts on NBA All Star Weekend, Veronica Mars, and a bunch of other stuff.
Movie box office numbers for last weekend. 1. Ghost Rider – $44.5 million. 2. Bridge To Terabithia – $22.1 million. 3. Norbit – $16.8 million. 4. Music and Lyrics – $14 million. 5. Daddy’s Little Girls – $12.1 million. 6. Breach – $10.4 million. 7. Hannibal Rising – $5.5 million. 8. Because I Said So – $5.0 million. 9. The Messengers – $3.8 million. 10. Night At The Museum – $3.7 million.
One thing is clear this week with American Idol. The girls destroyed the guys!! It wasn’t even close.
Wow, the guys really struggled on Tuesday night. There weren’t many bright moments out of the show as everyone just looked and sounded nervous. Simon was very critical of them and said that the audience at home would feel the same way as he did when it was over. Well, he may be right cause the general feeling of feedback that I’m reading is that the people agreed with Simon as did I. The only guys that I thought were good on Tuesday night was Blake Lewis and Phil Stacey. I thought Chris Sligh did ok too. The girls on the other hand were very strong including four girls that have powerhouse voices including LaKisha Jones, Melinda Doolittle, Sabrina Sloan, and Jordin Sparks. Those four had really strong performances. Tonight saw the first cuts made by America as the votes are in and two girls are eliminated and two guys are eliminated. The girls going home were Amy Krebs and Nicole Tranquillo. The guys going home were Paul Kim and Rudy Cardenas. Nothing really that surprising although I really expected Antonella to go home. I liked Nicole’s performance last night so that was a bummer. If you have been looking for someone to fire back at Simon, look no further than Chris Sligh. On Tuesday’s show, Simon criticized his performance saying he felt that he was at a “weird student gig”. Sligh fired back at him saying “Just because I don’t sing Il Divo or Teletubbies doesn’t mean that I’m not a good singer” to which Simon really did kind of look insulted. There were also some fireworks between Simon and Ryan on the same show. On a side note, did you know that in Tuesday’s 2 hour show that there were 38 minutes of commercials? That was what I timed it out as being. WOW. Most current two hour shows have 30 minutes of commercials.
After complaining last week about preemptions due to basketball, this week’s Tuesday CW lineup was a victim of bad timing weather wise here locally. This week featured trying to watch Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls through five million weather interruptions. Not bulletins but instead interrupting completely. I did go ahead and watch them but it got to the point where I was very close to just turning it off and go looking on You Tube later on for the full episodes. I didn’t though cause of the big happenings that were supposed to be happening on Veronica Mars and I didn’t want that to get spoiled. It was a very eventful episode on Tuesday with Sheriff Lamb being killed and now Keith is back as in his old job as Sheriff. Lamb was killed in the ongoing investigation into what happened to Dean O’Dell. There is a lot more happening with that next week. Other happenings in the episode was that they teased Logan and Parker getting together. It also turns out that the coach ended up killing himself and that it wasn’t a murder. Comedy on the episode was the scavenger hunt and Veronica’s moments in jail as she took the heat over believing that Josh didn’t kill his dad.
NBA All Star Weekend was this past weekend and was an entertaining weekend. Ok, the rookie challenge was boring cause it was such a blowout. I think the rookies forgot to show up to the game with the way they played. Yeah, the All Star Game was also a blowout. All Star Saturday was a lot of fun. We had the old school Bulls/Pistons rivalry in the shooting stars competition and then had the controversy. Hey, what is a Bulls/Pistons match up especially involving players like Pippen and Laimbeer from that era without controversy? The right call was made even though the Bulls got DQ’d in the finals for shooting out of order. The Barkley/Bavetta race was fun like everyone expected. Dunk contest was good. Some original dunks this year. The last couple of years have seen some new dunks debuted instead of the same dunks done every year. Funny that they added a time limit this year which is now known as the Nate Robinson rule. He is impressive for what he can do for a little guy but the problem with him is that sometimes it takes him multiple attempts to get a dunk and it takes some of the excitement off of it. What a great panel of judges, Michael Jordan, Julius Erving, Dominique Wilkins, Kobe Bryant, and Vince Carter. MJ and Dr. J were tough judges for sure. Funny that Barkley said that Jordan was the “Russian judge” because of how he scored lower than the others on a couple of dunks. One thing I want to really put over is the NBA Posterized special that aired on TNT before the Saturday night events. It was a show focusing on the best in game dunks from the history in the NBA with comments thrown in from past and current players. This was a really well produced show and I loved it. The two Shaq dunks were shown where he brought down the backboards. I remember watching the Suns/Magic game live where the whole goal just wilted down. The other game in New Jersey I remember as well cause the Bulls were airing on TNT that night and they broke in showing what had just happened in New Jersey. That is the dunk where he snapped the backboard off completely. Shaq revealed in the special that he was looking to bring that one down after Coleman dunked on him in a previous game and stared him down. He was looking to make a statement. They also showed the Darryl Dawkins glass shattering dunks and Dawkins said that he was threatened by the commissioner after the second one saying that each one would cost him $5,000 from then on if he did it anymore. He stopped shattering them. The KJ dunk on Olajuwon was shown and Shaq blamed that happening on Kenny Smith’s lousy defense that let KJ get to the rim. The Pippen dunk on Ewing from 94 was featured and Marv Albert pointed out that the dunk, and then the shove and step over afterwards really do point out the level of intensity between the Bulls and Knicks from that era. No doubt!! I disliked the Knicks more in that time than I did the Pistons from years before. Line of the segment goes to Reggie Miller who said it looked like a boxing match saying “down goes Frazier, down goes Frazier, down goes Ewing”. A vote was done on the best in game dunk of all time and four were chosen to be picked from, Jordan’s dunk on Ewing in the 91 playoffs, Starks baseline dunk against the Bulls in 93, Chambers climbing dunk on Jackson, and the famous Dr. J swinging cradle dunk on Michael Cooper. Jordan’s dunk won with I believe 44% of the vote. Not sure if that is the right number but it won. I would have voted that too because I’m biased. The Starks dunk would have finished last cause again I’m biased and it made me mad at the time cause I knew I was going to hear about that the next day at school. And, I did. At least, Jordan put up 55 points that week and the Bulls won all the next games in that series.
Thank goodness that there wasn’t any controversy last week at Daytona. Yeah, I’m being completely goofy with that statement. That has to be the most controversial week in Nascar that I can ever remember. It seemed like they had very little moments without controversy over the week. The 500 was good but got very exciting, although way too out of control at the end, in the last 40 laps or so. It’s restrictor plate racing so that is what you get when everyone is in a pack unable to pass like they want. When the wreck happened at the end of the race, I immediately said to my dad that this is going to be controversial with them not throwing the caution flag. It was. This has been a touchy subject since Nascar cut out the racing back to the caution. It did provide us with a bumper to bumper finish at the line as Kevin Harvick edged out Mark Martin to win. I do hope that Martin did race it back to the line and didn’t back off anticipating the caution cause that would be bad if he lost the 500 cause of it. He insists that he did race it full out. This is a tough call with wrecks on the last lap especially in the biggest race of the year and whether to throw the caution. Nascar would have gotten a backlash either way if they had or hadn’t thrown the caution when the crash happened. I can see both arguments on that one. I will say this about the week in Nascar and I’ve made this clear for a couple of years now. Nascar has to be consistent. They haven’t been very consistent in the last couple of years with penalties and that showed again this past week. That has really made a lot of fans mad and they have got to fix that.
This might interest you that aren’t racing fans too just to hear of this new deal that Nascar has as a pay service. I checked out the free preview of the Nascar HotPass deal. The service costs $99 for the season but they gave us a one week free preview for the Daytona 500. Basically, there are five drivers chosen every week. Each driver has their own channel. For the 500, there was a channel each for Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kevin Harvick, Tony Stewart, Michael Waltrip, and Jimmie Johnson. On the channel for the driver, you will ride with that driver for the whole race. In the top right corner for the whole time is the Fox broadcast. There are usually three different screens up at the same time such as the Fox broadcast, an in car camera view, and then a medium close view of the driver on the track. You can hear the radio conversation between the driver and the team. Only thing that I wasn’t really that crazy about was the play by play. They have a separate play by play team for each channel where they will tell what is happening with each driver. Sometimes they tend to talk over radio conversations which gets annoying. You can switch audio though where if you want to stay on the driver channel but hear the Fox broadcast, just change your audio setting. I was surprised that the HotPass broadcast also goes quiet during Fox commercials. The commercials pop up taking up most of the screen but they put up a live shot of the race in a little box in the bottom left corner of the screen. That is something cool where you can still see the race while the commercial is on unlike if you are watching the Fox broadcast. Still though, you have to watch and listen to the commercials even if you see something happening big such as a crash or something in the race. For example, Fox went to commercial just as it looked like an incident was going to happen and this was the Schrader/Blaney crash. They went to commercial and in the corner you could see it all happening but with no sound and from a distance. They also will occasionally play favorite songs of the drivers while they are showing the racing. That is cool unless it starts to cover up radio chatter. It helps break the silence at times. Negatives on Hotpass are whether they will show your favorite driver every week so you may pay for it and not have your driver on there. It’s funny that the commentators actually kind of cheer for whoever’s channel that you are on. I have heard that Junior put in a lot of input on his channel as he is really into it wanting to make it good for his fans. You may ask what happens if a driver goes out of the race, they then go to another team car. When Stewart went out, they went to Hamlin. When Johnson went out, they went to Gordon. When Junior went out, they went to Truex. DirecTV has received several complaints over the commercials being shown on something that you’re paying for to view but they said that is Nascar’s deal where they have to show the commercials. Overall, I enjoyed Hotpass. I don’t know if I’d want to watch it all the time cause it is hard to keep up with the other action at times. There are still some little things to work out but it is a very cool concept.
Viacom made a TON of cuts last week and a lot of it pertained to MTV. Executives were let go that were involved in programming and other big decisions. MTV’s ratings have been down across the board for its shows. I barely even watch MTV anymore and had lately questioned on why that is. I thought maybe I’m just getting older and moving on from it. Truth of the matter is that even their target demographic is down in ratings. I watch The Hills and watched the first two seasons of Laguna Beach. Laguna Beach was a huge hit for MTV but this new season has a new cast and people just aren’t interested in it including me. I was a HUGE Real World fan but quit watching it several years ago when the show turned into “let’s see how many people the houseguests can hook up with and how much trouble they can get into”. Another problem with MTV is that their schedules aren’t very right a lot of the time. I saw this happen twice in the last week. On the schedule they had one show set to air but it was nowhere to be seen. There are rumors that MTV may move out of its home there in Times Square and move down to another location. That is where the once huge hit, TRL, takes place from and there are even rumors out there wondering if TRL is going to be around much longer. That show was huge in the music world but doesn’t even get talked about anymore. How did that show fall from where it was? Other Viacom cuts include the ending of the Nick Jr. magazine although it may return in a different form. Changes are definitely in store for MTV.
The racers are out and running as the all star version of The Amazing Race is underway. It was a good premiere and fun to see a lot of the racers from previous seasons. Drew had a really rough first episode with almost hurting himself and also getting outran by Charla. Even Charla couldn’t believe she outran him. What I am going to do now is try and predict the outcome of this Race. I will say first thing that I would already be messed up on predictions cause I never would have guessed that John Vito and Jill would be the first ones out. So, here are my predictions for the finishing order in the race.
- Dustin and Kandice (yep, I am going to go out on a limb and pick them to win cause they were strong last year until everyone ganged up on them cause they made so many people mad with their antics.)
- Rob and Amber (I really was tempted to put them as the winners but I think they’ll be kept once again from a win)
- Uchenna and Joyce (I’ve got the only previous winner in the field as finishing 3rd in this race although I had a really tough time on where to put them in this)
- Eric and Danielle (Ok, I have them here mostly cause of Eric. He and his former teammate in the other season did really well although Danielle was out fairly early with her previous teammate)
- Teri and Ian (I had to put them kind of high cause they really proved a ton of people wrong on their previous season as they made it to the finale)
- Team Guido (The villains of season one will make it almost halfway but I think that is all.)
- Charla and Mirna (I’ve got them around where they finished in their previous season)
- Oswald and Danny (Yeah, I know they had a good first episode but this is more of a surprising upset pick on why I have them so low)
- David and Mary (Just don’t see them getting far at all but they did prove me wrong last season)
- Kevin and Drew (They’re a lot of fun but unfortunately they are really banged up already physically)
CBS has announced that for the first time ever that they are doing a web only bonus for The Amazing Race. There will be a show that follows what happens to teams after they are eliminated from the race and sent to sequester to live with other eliminated teams before returning for the very end of the race. There is going to be 13 episodes shown on CBS.com and will premiere immediately after the week’s episode is finished on the west coast. This should be fun and I’ll check it out to see how it is.
Comcast On Demand has a section featuring the Scene It board games. They have several previews up of various games that they have released. One of them was the Friends TV series Scene It game. They basically just aired about 11 minutes from the DVD portion of the game. I loved that!! It was a lot of fun to watch and I did pretty good at it. This game makes a great late Christmas present or very early birthday present if someone wants to send it my way. JUST KIDDING. ha ha!! It does look like a lot of fun and we’ll have to get a group of us Friends fans together to play it sometime.
MSNBC renewed Countdown With Keith Olbermann for another 4 years. The deal is reportedly going to pay 4 million dollars a year and make Olbermann one of the highest paid news personalities. The show is MSNBC’s highest rated show and has increased its ratings in the last year.
Fox has went ahead and renewed their shows, Bones, and House for next season. Both of them have benefited from being paired with American Idol.
It looks like Aaron Eckhart is going to get the role of Harvey Dent in the new Batman movie.
A deal has been made for My Name Is Earl to be distributed online such as on iTunes, and other places. iTunes is offering episodes for $1.99 or you can spend more and buy the whole season if you’d like to.
Sirius and XM Radio are talking about merging. It will be interesting to see if the FCC lets this go through.
What is up with the Lost ratings? The ratings for the show are down since it returned from hiatus. I’ve heard everything from that the show isn’t as good as it used to be, new time slot, hiatus hurt it. I don’t watch it so my question to any of you Lost fans is, what do you feel is the reason for the ratings slide?
The new cast of Dancing With The Stars has been named which begins next month. Here is who is on board for this season. Laila Ali (daughter of Muhammad Ali), Joey Fatone (formerly of N’Sync), Billy Ray Cyrus (country singer), Ian Ziering (Oh yeah, Steve Sanders from 90210), Heather Mills (ex-wife of Paul McCartney), Apolo Anton Ohno (Olympic medalist), Clyde Drexler (NBA Hall Of Famer), Shandi Finnessey (Miss USA 2004), Leeza Gibbons (talk show host), Vincent Pastore (actor from The Sopranos), and Paulina Porizkova (model).
TV on DVD releases for Tuesday, February 27th. At The Hotel (At The Hotel), Captain N: The Game Master (Complete Series), Da Vinci’s Inquest (Season 1), Dog The Bounty Hunter (Best of Season 3), The Doris Day Show (Season 4), The Flip Wilson Show (Best Of), Ghostbusters (Volume 1), Girlfriends (Season 1), The Immortal (Complete Series), Magnum P.I. (Season 6), The Rockford Files (Season 3).
You Tube Video Of The Week: 67 vs. 43
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