My Dream Emmy List

Here's who I think should be nominated &/or win Emmy's this year. I'm not totally sure some of these are even eligible but really who cares? Here's my Dream Emmy List.

I don't watch The Good Wife or Breaking Bad or Mad Men or Game of Thrones (which is apparently really good & I need to start watching it but there you go) so if you don't see certain shows or actors listed, it's because I've never seen them. Not that I don't think they are worthy, although, that could totally be the case. Preemptive ramble abort.

Best Drama:

• Fringe - this show is AMAZING, mind blowing ideas & totally grounded performances.
• Justified - can do no wrong, as strong in its second season as its first.
• Terriers - short-lived but intense & funny & riveting drama.
• Friday Night Lights - it's last season, never been nominated for Best Drama that I know of, throw it a bone!
• Southland - the move to TNT made a good show even better. Amazing cast, willing to shock you.

Best Comedy:

• Community - I'd say it's underrated but it seems to be a critical darling. All the cool kids watch it. Why don't you?
• Cougar Town - People put off by the admittedly lame title are missing out on a hilariously funny show
• Archer - sure it's animated but it's still one of the best & funniest comedies on TV right now
• Louie - funny but squirm-inducing. Makes you think about what you're laughing about.
• Modern Family - consistently makes me laugh. What more could you want?
• Park & Recreation - adding Adam Scott & Rob Lowe seems to have rounded out the cast perfectly instead of adding unnecessary bulk. It's literally a laugh out loud show. Leslie Knope!

 Best Actor, Drama:

• Kyle Chandler, Friday Night Lights - if I thought it's help him win, I'd leave the rest of the ballot blank or put his name five times. He IS Coach Taylor & he is SO deserving of the Emmy. Again, last season!
• Timothy Olyphant, Justified - sigh, love him. Love his conflicted character.
• Ben McKenzie, Southland - OC? What OC? He's totally left his teeny-bopper past behind him & grown into this fully realized adult role.
• John Noble, Fringe - Probably will be shut out due to snobbery over the SCI-FI elements of the show but he made you believe he was two different versions of the same man. Each was impressive & flawed, one was funny, the other terrifying.

Best Actress, Drama:

• Connie Britton, Friday Night Lights - see Kyle Chandler's entry above, insert Mrs. Coach.
• Regina King, Southland - her detective is the best character on a very strong show. She is a force to be reckoned with but not in an intimidating way.
• Anna Torv, Fringe - see John Noble's entry above, change pronoun to she!
• Mary McCormack, In Plain Sight -I don't know that I'd quantify IPS as a straight-up drama, because it makes me laugh a lot, but I'd love to see some different cable shows get some Emmy love & she's great as the good at her job but lousy with people witness protection US Marshal.

Best Actor, Comedy:

• Joel McHale, Community - I love this show & I love every actor on it. I'd nominate them all if I had the power. "I've got the power!"
• Louie CK, Louie - Sure he's basically playing himself but he can't be this funny in real life, can he? Actually, he probably could but props for being so unflinchingly honest.
• Matt LeBlanc, Episodes -I seriously doubt the Matt LeBlanc played by Matt LeBlanc is a carbon copy of the real guy, but holy crap, he is a funny bastard. I wish more people had seen this show when it originally aired on Showtime so we'd get more eps of Episodes but I'll savor the few gems we did get.
• Garret Dilahunt, Raising Hope - he's so funny? Who knew? I knew he was a great actor from seeing him on Terminator: Sarah Connors Chronicles & Life & Deadwood & a bunch of other shows but I never knew he could be so damn funny.

 Best Actress, Comedy:

• Courteney Cox, Cougar Town - when the show first premiered, people (mainly TV critics & disgruntled forum posters) gave CC flak for being the weakest link in an otherwise strong cast. I think that's crap, I think she's the crazy glue that holds the Cul de Sac Crew together. If not for her, who would bring Ellie & Laurie together? Or Grayson & Bobby? Or any of the other characters in any permutation?
• Martha Plimpton, Raising Hope - I was sure about this character in the pilot but she has grown as the show progressed & while some of that is surely due to the writers, a lot of it is due to MP's sexy, funny, grandmother, Virginia.
• Amy Poehler, Parks & Recreation - she took what could have been a one-note character & imbued her with so much hope & optimism & just enough crazy to be believable.

This post is getting away from me, length-wise & also the amount of time I've put into it. If anyone responds to this, I'll post my Supporting Actor/Actress in Comedy & Drama picks later.

Whatever happened to Chandra Levy?

I'm reading a collection of essays & short stories by Chuck Palahniuk & in one he's describing watching the media coverage of 9/11 with friends when one asks if they ever found Chandra Levy, that intern that went missing. I can't even remember the senator or congressman's name that she worked for. He's probably a high paid consultant now helping lobby groups or political action groups or something like that. Gary Condit. I think that was his name. I could Google it in five seconds & I probably will when I'm done writing this. I'll read the Wikipedia entry on Chandra Levy & learn some basic facts that are probably mostly true & still not know what REALLY happened to her. That's the world we live in today. Everyone wants to know everything about everyone but no one really knows the truth, only the image of truth that we project to others. Sarah Palin comments about Paul Revere riding to warn the British & the media & the bloggers (myself included) make fun of her but she's really a scarily accurate reflection of America today. We know things, "we hold these truths self-evident" - I think that's a mangled quote from the Declaration of Independence - but what do we know really? Paul Revere didn't even make it the whole way to Lexington or Concord, he got caught by the British. There were at least two other riders that night but the majority don't know their names. That's not even really the point of this post. The point is instead of passively accepting the vagaries & the bias that is constant spewed at us, we need to look deeper. We need to investigate things on our own. "I can't do that, I have 2.5 kids & a mortgage & a DVR full of America's Got Talent to watch." Well, to co-opt a phrase, you get what you pay for, America. & it's a damn shame.

Whoa, I promise I didn't fall off the face of the earth...

I just got married & that apparently takes up a ton of your time. I even had my best friend as my wedding planner & her sister as day of coordinator & I was still busy with wedding stuff. I know people plan weddings & hold down jobs at the same time but I'm super grateful I lost mine (hey, where'd my job go? Oh, to some other person. Never mind.) when I did. It seems odds are I'd have lost it eventually when my brain was fully consumed by wedding stuff. Ok, that's not fair & probably only partly true.

Anyhoozle, the wedding is done & the marriage has begun. We went to London on our honeymoon & it was FABULOUS! We also managed to get to Paris for an overnight & that was magical. My husband is amazing & supportive & thinks my brain is sexy. Well, that my mind is sexy not my actual grey matter, that would be disturbing & gross on numerous levels. He suggested I take this opportunity to go back to school & get my master's degree - even if it's not for a job just go back to school & learn more. It's something I've been bandying about for like ever, I just need to firm up what I want to go to school for. Going back to school is a major decision & knowing me, I need to be really interested in whatever I plan on studying. My first inclination is to get my master's in history - it's a subject in which I've always been interested & I even got my minor in history back when I got my BA in English. That's the other major interest for me, literature, or maybe film studies even but that drips of pretension. There are so many options but like I said I need to be into it 100% or I foresee a struggle & why sign up for a struggle. That said, anything worth doing is going to be ... not 'difficult' per se but not 'easy' either. If it was easy, everyone would do it.

Stupid James Franco getting 18 zillion degrees from prestigious universities & making it look effortless.

Bits & bobs

I almost wrote "bits & boobs" but I caught myself in time. Sorry folks, it's not that type of blog.

I challenged myself to write on this blog twice a week & thus far I'm not doing so hot. My main problem seems to be that all my great ideas come to me when I'm nowhere near a computer - like laying (lying? hmm) in bed trying to fall asleep or driving somewhere or some other place that lacks keyboards. To be honest, they're not even great ideas, it's more like just ideas but it's always nice to add a pejorative, right? ... Ok, I just looked up pejorative to see if I used it correctly & no, I didn't. It turns out what I wanted to say was an antonym of pejorative, like something nice, which is the opposite of pejorative. And now I've written that word so many times it completely lacks all meaning. Moving on.

I think we should pass a law that makes lobbying illegal. Stop laughing! I'm serious. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way this country goes about the business of making laws & crafting budgets & whatever the heck else the legislative & executive branches of the government are supposed to do, like, say, legislate & execute. While I'm crafting laws to save our country, I'd also do away with interest groups in general. They're just another word for lobbyists. People who have money hire people to whisper their wants & desires in the ears of elected officials & people who don't have money - namely the other 90% of the population suffer for it.

Do we really need commercials telling us that cheese is a good thing or beef is for dinner or eggs are good this week? Was there really ever a danger of people not eating cheese? Or beef? In America? I so doubt it. But for some reason a group of like-minded individuals/producers of said products paid some ad group a bunch of money to come up with catchy slogans so that when someone goes shopping they buy corn or rice or alfafa or some other damn fool thing. Paid for by Association of Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, because only Wisconsin cheese is good for you, that other cheese from that other state is crap. You hear me, Vermont? Crap! So now we have an ad for Vermont Dairy Farmers touting their super awesome cheese & it just never stops. This is why I bought a TiVo all those years ago. So long commercials! Oh no! TV runs on commercials, let's just stick them at the end of the tv show in the bottom or right hand side of the screen. Ha, that'll teach 'em! Bastards.

Hmm, this got sort of rant-y. I didn't even get to talk about how much we need to find a new source of energy or find a way to take oil off the commodities market/exchange/whatsit so that every time some Middle Eastern country has a crisis or a revolution, (so, weekly) the price of oil doesn't skyrocket. US doesn't even get the majority of its oil from the Middle East. It comes from South America. Which means we have to keep old Crackers in Caracas (TM John Oliver from The Bugle), Hugo Chavez, happy so he won't threaten withholding oil from the US, like he does, weekly.

Heck, Shut the Government Down!

Would the government shutting down have been such a bad thing? Everyone is breathing such sighs of relief that we narrowly averted a shutdown but I think it might not have been the end of the world.

Sure, civilian employees would have gotten furloughed & yes, Congress would still get paid (which isn't right, In my humble opinion), but we could have figured out how "essential" some of our government offices really are. According to that bastion of accurate, reliable information known as Wikipedia, "[g]overnment employees who provide essential services, often referred to as "essential employees," are required to continue working." So federally run hospitals would still have their nurses & doctors, air traffic controllers would still be managing the airways, fire & police would still be doing whatever it is they do when not fighting fires & crime, respectively. (Sidebar: do you think police are paid too much or too little? I find lefties (politically, not writing-wise) think they don't get paid enough while righties (same) think they are vastly overpaid. I'm torn on the issue, but I don't think we need them controlling our traffic for $50/hour. )

I'm of the opinion that our government is a bloated, lumbering bureaucracy that has gotten too big to  successfully do much of anything well. & I say this as someone who currently receives unemployment compensation after losing my job last year (I love that expression, "losing my job", like I misplaced it & now can't find it - dang it, where did my job go? I left it right next to my keys). So I'm sure the government shutting down would not have a been a good thing for me personally or the millions of others collect/receive unemployment assistance. But looking at it objectively, I think a government shutdown would have been a fine way to determine how much of our enormous monolithic government is actually essential and what is so much pork.

I just wish Congress got furloughed as well because that is a group of useless blowhards only out to protect their seat & therefore their electorate. But that's a posting for another day. Feel free to comment & share your opinions.

These are a few of my favorite foods

My favorite foods are fairly pedestrian & boring. The joke is to blame my Irish heritage, but I'm not even a big fan of boiled dinners. I'm trying to expand my repertoire as my fiance has vastly different tastes than I do. But it's a struggle. I also suffered from a swollen gallbladder & gallstones for about 15 years so I did have a tendency to avoid foods that made my symptoms act up. Even now, sans gallbladder, I find that fast food irritates my stomach as do foods with lots of spices. My stomach is on the sensitive side.

It's been said that breakfast is the most important meal or the day & it's by far my favorite. I like ham, egg & cheese sandwiches, pancakes, or scrambled eggs & toast for breakfast when dining out. When eating at home, I tend towards cereal or if I'm feeling adventurous, eggs with a little ham & cheese to zazz them up (I rarely feel that adventurous. Mainly I don't want to clean dishes first thing in the morning). When I worked regularly (note the past tense), breakfast was an oatmeal bar or English muffin with jam. Of course, with these goes coffee & OJ at home or apple juice when out - I hate the watery OJ most restaurants serve.

Lunch & dinner are basically the same to me. I love salads but I'm invariably hungry sooner rather than later when I have a simple salad for a meal; it's a different story when I add tuna or grilled chicken, that keeps me fuller longer. I'm a big fan of making pizza on flat bread which is great because I can control the amount of toppings & keep them on the healthy side. I'd almost always rather have a grilled ham & cheese or a cheeseburger or salad & pizza over a steak, potato/rice & veg meal. I'm just not that into traditional dinner fare. I'm totally content having a couple of low fat hot dogs with some baked beans or rice rather than cooking some chicken or pork or what have you & coming up with appropriate side dishes.

I've become known for my "simple" meal plans & have been on the receiving end of countless recipes, tips & cookbooks & I do appreciate the thought behind them. But until we organize our kitchen, they are in cupboards or drawers & rarely see the light of day.

What are you favorite foods? What do you eat more often than not? What do you think you should eat more of?

You Haven't Seen What?

What movies have you never seen that you KNOW you should have by now? Or movies you are embarrassed to admit passed you by? My list is pretty epic but I'm putting it out there! I'm not going to go by category or by decade, this list is by no means all-encompassing, I'm sure there are other movies out there I haven't seen that I forgot to put on this list.

1. Easy Rider
2. Apocalypse Now
3. Taxi Driver (I started this one but couldn't get into it)
4. Amelie
5. Full Metal Jacket
6. Casino
7. Any & all Sergio Leone movies w/Clint Eastwood
8. Dirty Harry & its sequels
9. Unforgiven
10. Mulholland Falls (pretty much any David Lynch film)
11. The Hustler
12. Rebel Without a Cause
13. On the Waterfront
14. Aliens (forced to watch the first one in film class & cried I was so scared. I'm a little girl when it comes to horror movies)
15. The Shawshank Redemption
16. West Side Story
17. Schindler's List
18. Sunset Blvd.
19. Wall-E
20. The Rocky Horror Picture Show

I'm going to stop here because I'm starting to have trouble thinking of movies. What's your list?