There's another crazy official Lost site, filled with lots of Easter eggs. (third item)

Charlize Theron will be on five episodes of Arrested Development.

The new show, Prison Break, starts tonight. I've heard nothing bug good reviews up until now, but there's finally a review that is less enthusiastic, but not particularly negative, in case you'd like to see the opposing opinion...

Over the weekend, I watched Bollywood/Hollywood. It was a fun movie, although it got somewhat terrible reviews; but it falls under my "lowered standards for romatic comedies" clause of movie standards. It was a bit odd and wacky, but if you go in with somewhat lower expectations, I think it's very enjoyable. The songs weren't translated into English, which I think made them more fun than the songs in Bride and Prejudice.

Best song title: "My heart is a pigeon coop. Come in!"
TV actors from other series: A surprise and very short appearance by Jessica Pare, the main girl from Jack & Bobby.

My parents have now been bitten by the Wire bug, so they watched two discs of the first season over the weekend. My evil plan is working!

Amy Jo Johnson (of Felicity) will be on Wildfire as a jockey. Scary.

Yes, roomie (aka mbmbl) has fallen victim to HBO's the Wire. She just finished watching the first season. Totoro is so far resisting the the pull, having only watched a few episodes, but I think that's just because he's playing too much World of Warcraft! More Wire, less Warcraft!

The airport restaurant guide

Okay, this is off topic, but here's my airport restaurant guide, to get you through the perils of eating in the many airports around the nation. Mmmm, food. These are some good place to check out that you might not encounter in your neck of the woods. I personally am excited every time I go through an airport with one of these places, rather than the usual Pizza Hut and Burger King.

Garduno's Restaurant - outside security of the Albuquerque airport - a great place for tasty smoothies and blended drinks, as well as the classic and wonderful sopaipilla (yummy with honey!), which is a New Mexico staple.

Popeye's - Atlanta (inside security), Houston (inside security), New Orleans (outside security)- everyone loves fried chicken. I recommend the spicy recipe, with a biscuit and a side of red beans and rice. I eat it every time I can get my hands on it!

Potbelly Sandwich Works - Chicago Midway Airport - scrumptious toasted sandwiches! And don't wander the many concourses of O'Hare looking for it because it's just not there. And there's nothing sadder than not getting your yummy sandwich, especially after lugging your luggage all over.

Sonic Drive-in - New Orleans (outside security) - I can't explain why a drive-in chain that actually does carhop service has a branch at the airport, but boy, are their shakes yummy. I like banana, but I'm slowly being won over by the pineapple shake as well. CC swears by the strawberry limeade, and the chicken toaster. I'm not a fan of the breakfast toaster, but a large shake will tide me through many hours of a flight.

Pappasito's - Houston E terminal - Burritos with a fabulous rice/cheese something or another. Anyway, a great burrito.

Fuddruckers - Boston (Delta terminal/A) [outside security] - Tasty hamburgers, as well as a mean brownie. Yum! I believe one of tomcat's friends has gone to the airport with no flight impending, just to eat here.

Legal Seafood - Boston (Terminal C) - Great chowder, as well as fantastic crab roll sandwich. The rest of the seafood is probably good, but I never get past the chowder and the crab sandwich.

Qdoba - Seattle (between the B and C concourses) - The tomcat loves the queso burrito. I tried this place for the first time, and I'm still finding my favorite meal, but the steak in my last burrito was quite scrumptious.

Ivar's - Seattle (between the B and C concourses) - A Seattle classic restaurant; the chowder is very good, but don't forget a dash of tabasco!

Paradise Bakery and Cafe - Phoenix (outside the Southwest check-in area, outside security) - Cookies! I particuarly like the mini chipper cookies.

TWOP does recaplets for the 2004-2005 season of the shows that they cover. Hilarious, as to be expected.

And...Mandy Moore has her own clothing line

Over the weekend, I watched Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood style, but still pretty Americanized version of Pride and Prejudice. Sadly, it wasn't that cute, but it was a pretty funny "Hey!" moment, when I saw Rory Gilmore come onscreen as Darcy's little sister.

Spiky balls of pain: one and a half.
Predictability: Five crystal balls. But that's because it's based on a book, that has been made into like 500 movies including the upcoming one with Keira Knightley.
Hotness of the main character: Negative one ball of fire. Kind of a poor man's Bill Pullman, but less endearing. Maybe that's because he's supposed to be prideful. Or was he prejudice? Hmmm.
Other TV actors who show up: Naveen Andrews (Sayid on Lost), Alexis Bledel (Rory on Gilmore Girls)

Ha. An OC fashion collection available through Amazon. Now I can look like Summer too!

Uh oh, Robin Hobb's new book is coming out on Sept. 6. It's a new trilogy. I'm a bit afraid to read it, because it might have the same crack-like addictive qualities as her other series. And yet, it's so hard to tear myself away. Hmmm, maybe I'll reserve it at the library.

And this is a link for scheng, the cheesy romance novels about jewels are the Donovans series by Elizabeth Lowell. A fun read, although my friend cc says that they get kind of repetitive after a while.

Thanks to cc for the heads up on both of these items!

I had to skip a second season episode of the Amazing Race because Windows Media Player was being persnickety. But the tomcat (the boyfriend) was right, VideoLAN can play everything. In case you're looking for a good movie player and don't want to download a bunch of codecs. Now I can watch season 2 in its entirety, if a bit out of order.

Red Eye on RT

With all the recent obsession about Rachel McAdams, nyanko should be keeping a close eye on this page. Who knows, maybe it'll actually be worth watching, even if the trailer was traumatic.

I just started watching some of the episodes of Season 2 of the Amazing Race, and hiliariously, I have managed to get episodes with Polish (I think) subtitles. Luckily, the teams have been in South America so far, so I've been able to understand without English translations of what the contestants are saying, but this could get challenging... I think I now know the Polish word for "Ready" (though the pronunciation could be a problem) and I might learn some other common TAR words, like uh, "baby."

Prison Break

Prison Break is a new drama out on Fox this fall with an intriguing concept. A man breaks into prison, in order to break his brother out. The pilot contains a cool setup sequence and introduces the major players in this, and we know the show will have a finite timeline (like 24 or something) since the man being broken out of prison is on death row.

I've never seen any work by Wentworth Miller before, but he plays Michael, who is convinced that his brother (played by Dominic Purcell, whom we know from "John Doe" and Blade: Trinity) is innocent of his crime and thus needs to be broken out. Basically, though, the show is all about Michael, and it rocks. I haven't had an hour of television fly by so fast in a long time.

There's a raving review over at thefutoncritic, that goes into more detail, but I'm definitely looking forward to the start of this season.
There is some hilarious symbolism at the end of the episode, which kind of fails in my opinion, but in general the show moves at a quick pace and you can sense that Michael has calculated his every move, and it keeps you guessing.
On top of all this, there are hints of a conspiracy working to kill off John Doe, and this brings an added component of outside influence working against Michael who's on the inside.

So, uh. Watch it. and stuff.

A&E will be airing past seasons of 24 in a mini-marathon format. Starting September 12th, the first season will be shown in four hour chunks every Monday night. Sweet!

Oy, Wildfire, the ABC Family horse/juvenile delinquent show, has been renewed for a second season. I want you to know that I finally did revoke its season pass.

JLH sees dead people

Ghost Whisperer is the first new TV project for JLH in a while, and if you've seen the commercials for it you know exactly what's up.
It's like The Sixth Sense, only not as scary, and no bizarre plot twists. Actually a reasonably entertaining show, JLH has insane bangs and there's practically zero comic relief. They make some odd attempt to freak you out with ghosts appearing and dream sequences, and JLH herself has some awkward acting moments, but it's okay.
Well, there is one kind of hilarious scene where JLH acts as interpreter between the dead and the living, repeating everything the dead guy says. I guess this is supposed to be dramatic though, cause people are crying. hmm.

Also of note, the only two other major actors in the show are JLH's husband Jim, played by Michael from Miss Match, and her co-worker/friend Andrea, played by Charlie (Ross's love interest in the last season) from Friends. I think I get more kicks out of identifying actors in these new shows than watching the show itself.

Huh. A live episode of the West Wing might be in the works.

Weird. CBS will be distributing DVDs with previews of their fall TV shows in Williams-Sonoma. Novelty colored kitchenware + crime procedurals. Hmmm. (from tvtattle)

Thanks to the tomcat (the boyfriend), we can all learn what a Jetrosexual is.

Lots of random scoop from TV Guide Online: Jess will be back on Gilmore Girls for at least an episode (gah!), Brendan Fehr of Roswell will be joining CSI: Miami (I love tracking the continuing "careers" of ex-WB starlets/heartthrobs, Jared Padalecki films Supernatural in Vancouver (keep your eyes peeled if you're there!) and on Charmed, Darryl the detective has been let go (sad) and Leo the ex-whitelighter/husband/man who is really bad a fake crying is only going to be on a limited number of episodes.

high-res video on the go

nyanko mentioned earlier that I am a recent recipient of a Sony PSP as a birthday gift (thanks to all my awesome friends). I'm told that this thing plays games, but my real interest is in using it as a portable video/web-browsing device.
For those of you who haven't seen one yet, the PSP sports a very sharp 16:9 LCD screen, making it optimal for viewing all this crazy widescreen stuff that's so popular these days. I've managed to successfully convert a small 5-minute .avi TV-show file into the PSP format, and it looks great.
Even more promising, a recent firmware patch to the PSP has enabled H.264/AVC video. The tool I'm watching the most closely is pspvideo9 and I'm hoping that by the time I can dig up enough cash to buy a large memory stick (I wish Sony would learn what 'standard' means) I'll be watching The Wire on my PSP everywhere I go.

On a related note, all my ranting about the PSP got nyanko thinking about it, but it seems like a pure portable-tv solution might be found in the upcoming Creative Zen Vision. Built-in TivoToGo and a much larger storage capacity for the win. Lame 4:3 aspect ratio screen for the loss.

Courtesy of kottke.org, Fantasy Fashion League!

There have been some good reviews for Slings & Arrows, a Best in Show-esque TV show about the behind the scenes chaos of a Shakespearean company. It's a Canadian show, now airing on the Sundance channel, but lo and behold, it has Rachel McAdams!

I can't wait until the new season of Arrested Development starts. No Touching!

Poor Key West! They're hosting the next Real World.

Kelly from TAR7 has posted her journal from the race as well as some stories about things that didn't make it into the show. (Click on The Race section) There are some interesting behind the scenes anecdotes.

Battlestar Galactica's Executive Producer is doing podcasts that are commentary on the episode, meant to be listened to with the episode... Do you think it's going to feel like people who take their own recordings of Pink Floyd when they go to see the Wizard of Oz in the theater? Am I the only one who knew people who did that? But I guess you don't have to wait for a DVD to get commentary, or have to hope that the studio will cough up the money to put the extras on the DVD.

Note to self: I should do an Armageddon watch-along podcast... Mwahahaha!

This is for the tomcat (the boyfriend), who inexplicably likes Tara Reid, even though she's well... Tara Reid...

Tara Reid's stint as host of Wild On on E! will start on August 10

Billy Bob Thornton has said that the worst thing he did for money was Armageddon. Sweet. (Okay, that's a tiny anecdote in a story about how Oscar winners end up in terrible movies.)

iPods get too mainstream...

So I'm a total sucker for dance music, and there appears to be a disturbing trend of remixing cheesy songs from the 80s and 90s. Some of the more popular remixes don't seem completely odd - for example, "I Touch Myself" has continued to be popular, but really, who was asking for dance versions of "What a Feeling", "Easy Lover", "More than This", "Listen to Your Heart", and the classic Steve Winwood song Valerie, now rewritten to be "Call on Me"? What next? Toad the Wet Sprocket, Live (with the long i) and Collective Soul remixes?

CBS announces their premiere dates for fall shows.

Charlie Murphy says Chapelle's Show is over.

For some unfathomable reason, I seem to really like Amanda Righetti. She seems likable, so I keep getting excited when she's in a new show. I watched the North Shore (so sue me) just to catch her, and it wasn't worth it. I was excited about Reunion, but the futon critic isn't impressed with the first episode. I think I'm starting to learn my lesson, which means I'll probably keep away, but we'll see if I can make myself obey reason...

Hey, Jennifer Aniston's new movie might be kind of good. Or at least the trailer looks good. But we have Kevin Costner on the upswing of looking pretty good and Mark Ruffalo fulfilling Totoro's theory of taking on the mantle of romantic comedy king (although I'm not entirely sure if it's a romantic comedy or more of a comedy/romance).

Movies.com has little movie review episodes with the two grumpy Muppets Waldorf and Statler. It's not stellar, but there are some funny bits and in their first episodes they have some pretty funny things to say about War of the Worlds. They also have some silly ratings, like "on an old man driving scale of 0 to 35, I'd drive 10 mph to see this..." Also, they define dej-HAH-vous, as when you've seen all the funny parts of a movie in the preview...

A long Joss Whedon interview. (courtesy of Ain't It Cool News) He helped with writing on Toy Story!