After having a fairly tragic attempt to listen to a podcast (yes, so it was the commentary for Battlestar), I have figured out that the iPod is not entirely optimized for listening to podcasts. First of all, the screen on the ipod will truncate the name after a not huge number of characters, meaning that you have start playing the file in order to see the full title. It would be nice if podcasts could end up in their own section on the iPod as well - although maybe I'm just too stupid to figure out how to do that. Also, there's no chaptering within one audio file, so when you accidently hit the next button, you have to go back to the right file and fast forward your way to the place where you used to be. And fast forwarding - a super pain in the butt - why don't they have 2x, 8x, 30x fast forwarding like on a DVD? Also, the fast-forwarding button sensitivity is a bit wonky so sometimes I would be holding down the fast-forward/next button and it would decide that I wanted to go to the next song. So I was caught in an infinite loop of fast-forward, accidently press next, try to fast forward to the right place again and so on. I might really be thwarted by this whole podcast thing unless I sit down and listen to the whole thing in one go.

Also, sadly, I kind of liked Paris Hilton's song Stars are Blind. I don't suppose one can have it on their iPod ironically? P.S. I haven't bought it. Yet.

And my mom and sister had the Keith Urban album and it was kind of catchy, so I might have to start looking at country music. Any recommendations?

The WB will close its doors by airing the pilots of Buffy, Felicity, Angel and Dawson's. Sadly, I might watch and I think it might make me cry, if only for the past goodness that was the WB, which it really lost in the past couple seasons. Sigh. Too bad Gilmore Girls didn't make it on that list.

Thanks to Entertainment Weekly's list of 100 best entertainment sites, I have a few new sites to surf.

The Us Weekly blog
The Entertainment Weekly blog
Pink is the New Blog

These are a few that have been pretty entertaining.

There will be an Amazing Race Summer RV tour, which will tape interviews with former racers when it visits their hometowns. The interviews will be broadcast on CBS' Innertube

There's a contest to create a 20 second promo for the Office. Damn, this could be funny. I should think about what I would do for this. Would I do one about the co-worker who ordered the same thing as me every time we went out eat, and always wants to eat pizza in foreign countries? Would it be about the co-worker who recently introduced me as pregnant, when in fact that is NOT TRUE? (No, really, it is NOT true.) Hmm, the possibilities are endless.

I had a great weekend on a camping trip with some high school friends, including my roommate gecko. Those friends now have a link to the blog, so I may either get a tiny bump in traffic and maybe one new consistent reader. I'm well on my way to achieving my bar of success with the blog, which is either getting preview tapes of TV shows to review from network PR people ... or getting 20 unique visitors to the blog per day. Achievable goals, people!

Also, exciting news for gecko, in that her parents are getting a DVR from Comcast! Now she won't have to scramble to get home in time to watch the Amazing Race live when she's at home.

Oh no, a David Hasselhoff musical!

An appreciation of the work of Aaron Spelling

And for the tomcat, season 3 of the Chappelle Show is now airing.

If you are completely addicted to any and all dance reality shows, you could watch Pants Off, Dance Off, which features "normal people" who dance to music videos and yes, also strip during the course of the song. Frightening. Or maybe really entertaining? Who can say until they watch it. I wonder if I get this channel on my hotel TV in Salt Lake City. I'm guessing no?

It's the end of an era. Aaron Spelling, the man who brought us Hart to Hart, Charmed, TJ Hooker, Charlie's Angels, has passed away.

For the women who like shopping, please note that Nordstrom has added a Wish List feature. Woo! Christmas will be fun this year!

Update: Okay, I know the link goes to a shoe, but there's a button to add to your wish list. I don't have a wish list right now, but I could start one! Anyway, you get the picture.

Comedy Central has ordered new episodes of Futurama, which will resurrect the series from cancellation.

You can buy a Tivo Desktop upgrade that will allow you to put programs from your TiVo onto your iPod, PSP and other devices. I guess I just need to get a video iPod or a portable video player now... Although I feel one can have too many iPods and three might qualify for too many.

Also, the free upgrade for TiVo Desktop now allows for automatic transfers, which seems kind of nice.

This news was courtesy of the tomcat, who has been commenting under the name Audio Nomad, but I think that's a silly name so I'm going to keep calling him the tomcat. Although tomcat might not be the best name either since it could either refer to TomKat or might mean he's tomcatting around. Oh well, consistency wins out for a while. Maybe I'll eventually start calling him the audio nomad.

I finally bought a new TV - a 32" LCD - and it looks amazing! My apartment gets great over the air HD signal, which is great, but unfortunately, TiVo won't handle HD signal. Maybe I'll consider the Series 3 when it finally comes out. I think this is my first big technology purchase, beyond the TiVo. Of course, it took me six months since I started talking about this back in January. The upside of the new tv is that I now have the old TV in my bedroom as well. Woo!

I had to make the conscious choice to not put the new TV and TiVo in my bedroom because I figured if I did that, I would never leave my room, or my bed, for that matter... So, yay, TV viewing parties at my house!

A roundup of all the news on downloadable movie services via Netflix, iTunes, etc. and a quick note on whether Microsoft will get into the portable media player business.

I finished watching Treasure Hunters last night and the overall verdict is ambivalent. I still have a season pass and I'm intrigued because the show has a number of aspects that I wish would be incorporated into the Amazing Race. In particular, I like that the clues are ambiguous and that the teams have to figure out where to go, and may even end up at the wrong place. I also like that the teams were paired up so they had to work with another team that they did not know.

The show doesn't really focus on the personal interactions of the teams, which I wish they would do a bit more of, but that might increase when there are less teams to cover. The three person teams may result in interesting conflict over decision-making. Unfortunately, none of the teams seem super smart, including the self-proclaimed "Geniuses" or "Grad Students," which can make the show a bit painful. We also realized that the descriptive names of the teams tended to be stretching the truth - for example, the Grad Students have two members who are working on or have masters degrees, but all seems to currently be bartenders. And one member doesn't seem to have an advanced degree at all. Go figure. And it's unclear if the Ex-CIA were only in the co-op program of the CIA.

The show was also set up such that there were two starting points, each with five teams who did not know about the existence of the other five teams, but the meeting of the teams was really scripted and fake, so that was kind of funny. So, overall, I'm interested, but not totally taken in, but I have hopes for improvement!

ABC's site streaming of television shows (with ads) has been deemed a success, so they'll continue to stream more shows in the fall. I have to get on the site in the next week or so to watch the two episodes of Alias that I missed...

If you want an insane amount of TV and are willing to pay for it, DirecTV will hook you up (via tvtattle)

The tomcat's dad got a 32" LCD TV for Father's Day, and let me tell you, it looks nice! Suddenly, I can see what it would look like in my own home, and maybe I could stop sitting in the middle of the living room, like a little kid, when I'm watching TV. This may be a new addition to my electronics family sometime this week, if I can get up the guts to buy it. It's at Costco, which is quite convenient.

I watched the Britney Dateline interview and although I was worried it was going to be a disaster of Chaotic (the Britney TV show, not the general adjective) level proportions, I actually think it ended up achieving Britney's main goal of making public opinion more sympathetic to her. It wasn't pulled off brilliantly, but I think overall, she said largely reasonable things and Matt Lauer threw her a bunch of softballs. The main takeaways from it were that it seemed like a giant music video/promotional event for her (so one might really say that Dateline sold out for this) and also that Britney used to look so gorgeous. All the old clips and pictures of her really reinforced that she doesn't look as good anymore. Sigh.

I'm in the middle of watching Treasure Hunters, (and I think I got my roommate sucked into watching at least the premiere as well) so I'll have a review of that tomorrow.

Entertainment has a list of lots of entertainment links. Some of them seem pretty well known, but I'm going to check out a bunch of them that I haven't heard of before.

Dead pilot televisions shows are showing up on YouTube, including one by the creator of Scrubs. Hmm, maybe I should troll YouTube...

I finally watched at least one of my Netflix, Casanova, and it was decent.

My thoughts: Siena Miller isn't very reconizable - she just looks like an attractive woman in general, but I think her blond mod look is the only thing that makes me recognize her in pictures. And Heath Ledger doesn't enunciate well. I thought maybe the unintelligible speech was part of his "character interpretation" in Brokeback Mountain, but I now realize that's just how he talks. And Lena Olin is really pretty, even in weird wigs.

The good: Venice is pretty. I'd like to spend several weeks in Venice filming a movie. The plot is frothy and fun.

The bad: Blah blah, Siena as empowered feminist trapped in the eighteenth century, blah blah, betrothed against her will, forced to marry for money, blah blah. That plot is much more appealing in Jane Austen remakes, except those that feature Keira Knightley.

The final verdict: I must have been in a good mood, because I found it fun and entertaining. It's worth a cheap rental on your own. I would not recommend forcing others to watch with you unless they also like non-serious period pieces.

I finally got off my butt, or rather, sat on my butt, and watched the end of season 2 of Battlestar. Yay, me! Now I can finally talk about the end of season with the tomcat. And unfortunately, I discovered all the commentary podcasts, so I'm probably going to listen to every single one, although I'll see if I can do it without watching the video. So you might see me walking around the park cackling about the commentary.

And my roommate mbn enlightened me to the fact that there is software that convert .avi and other movie files to the TiVo format, so I'm thinking of using that so I can watch some Amazing Race eps on my TiVo. Watching on the TV is definitely easier than watching on the computer, if I have the choice.

CBS' show Smith (airing at 10 pm on Tuesdays) has a good review from the futon critic I'm intrigued. And for the boys, Amy Smart is a psycopath Vegas showgirl running scams.

If you go to the SciFi website, you can watch a teaser for Season 3 of Battlestar. Totoro, hurry up and finish watching season 1 and 2 so we can gossip about it!

Updated: The teaser is in the banner on the top of the page.

Julia Stiles gets the fame audit, and it's not pretty for her career. I'm still scarred by the Prince & Me. Oh, and the movie where she's got Shirley MacLaine as her crazy mom. Sigh. And yet I still watch most of Julia's movies. Thankfully, I can't take horror so I'll be skipping the Omen.

Entourage has started up, and you can get your Entourage podcast too!

And I also am kind of interested in this group, which had a song in the last episode of Everwood Warning: music and sadly, it's a myspace link.

To counter with my own music recommendation, I have currently been listening to the Weepies who I first heard on Grey's Anatomy. And here is the Brokeback Mountain remix.

So, apparently my many short link-only posts made our blog look like a spam blog (horrors! Also, totoro hasn't been posting enough to contribute to making it look like a spam blog), but I finally figured out that the word verification on the posting page wasn't happening to everyone and got the blog reviewed. Happily, we passed and have been designated not a spam blog. Phew. How horrible would it be if they looked at the blog and still thought it was spam. Maybe that would prove that I'm a cylon...

Anyhoo, there's a Battlestar blog, but I'm not allowed to read since I'm still about five episodes from the end of season 2 and I don't want to get too spoiled. There's also an article about where to get your fix on TV news.

And in other funny news, the dance radio station that I always listen to has a remix of the Brokeback Mountain theme. Surprisingly, it works pretty well as a dance song, but it's super funny.

I'm sad because there's a terrible review of Treasure Hunters. I really want this show to be good.

Playlists

After getting dinner with Nyanko last night and once again receiving some pressure about blogging, I decided I'd start talking a bit about some of the music that I've been listening to, since my TV life has gotten stagnant. (note the edited "watch list" to the left)

Since subscribing to Yahoo! Music Unlimited (omg this is almost like an ad), I've been able to keep up with some of the newer music out there a lot more easily. Those of you who know me realize that I listen to everything out there, with the possible exceptions of hardcore rap and country, although there are exceptions to the exceptions as well. Unfortunately, the pop music scene has been almost nonexistent since the demise of the teen pop movement and Britney's various non-musical exploits. We've got Kelly Clarkson and that's about all I can think of. I am a sucker for a catchy tune, so music snobs should stop reading right now.

Here's a list of some albums I've been listening to more recently:
Matt White - Bleecker Street Stories (EP, full album will be called Do You Believe)
Teddy Geiger - Underage Thinking
Augustana - All the Stars and Boulevards
K.T. Tunstall - Eye to the Telescope
Snow Patrol - Eyes Open
AFI - Decemberunderground

these are roughly sorted in order of Least Common Denominator -> Kind of Alternative

I form opinions on music very slowly, and I don't really pay attention to lyrics, so most of what I listen to would just fall under the category of "I heard one of their songs on the radio and didn't hate the rest of the album" or "my sister told me to download the album."

Also, a more indepth review of Heroes is up at the futon critic.

The dolphins got extra-friendly with Jessica Alba when she worked on Flipper (via tvattle)

And Kristen from E!Online provides a link to a funny Alias spoof.

It was a productive media weekend for me - I cleared off my TiVo substantially (I hesitate to admit to how much TV I actually watched, but did get through 28% of the saved stuff on my TiVo). Unfortunately, that was just shy of the goal of watcing 30% of TiVo, but I'll go with it. The Netflix are woefully neglected as well, but since there's nothing on TV, I figure I'll give them some love as soon as TiVo is clean.

The trailers for Treasure Hunters (a new series on NBC premiering soon) are looking distinctly like a number of the scenes from National Treasure. One can only hope that the clues will involve the Freemasons and that Nicolas Cage will make an appearance. Please, please, please let it be so.

And finally, I saw Cars this weekend. I didn't have huge expectations for it (although I still expected it to be cute) since some of the early reviews were positive, but not overly so. However, I just thought it was adorable and made me go sqeeeeee! So, I'll have to put the DVD on my Amazon wishlist now!

Tivo will have Guru Guides, which will have "experts" selecting shows that you might like and which will be auto-recorded for you. It would be cool if eventually I could create my own guru guide and then force all you readers to check it out!

A rundown of what to watch this summer. Deep in the article, it mentions that Office webisodes will start on July 13th. And that there's a crappy Blade TV series that will be starting in late June, in case you're a big Blade fan.

TiVo has plans to allow you to watch web videos on your TV. I think I would like this. I could finally watch the behind the scenes videos of the Amazing Race on a normal screen, rather than hunched over my laptop. It would be nice if it could also play videos I bought from iTunes...

Also, the OC has only been picked up for 16 episodes for next season, although it could get an order for more episodes.

The other movie I watched on the plane was Last Holiday, which my mother loved, but which I found to be completely enh. So, I cannot recommend it.

But I think I have gotten well enough into Battlestar Gallactica to start telling all of you to watch. It's scifi in the sense that it takes place on a spaceship, in the future, but is pretty much your basic action drama. There's a little bit of romance, as well as lots of suspense, so you really should watch! No, really!

The futon critic has started reviewing the new pilots, so you can find out which pilots to be excited about. He posts one review per day. He already posted Studio 60's review. Today's review is of Traveler, which I hadn't really heard about before, probably since it's a midseason replacement. Anyway, it's a 24-esque conspiracy theory/action show that sounds both hilarious and totally addictive. The review was pretty positive, so I'm excited about this one.

Movie Review: Failure to Launch

On my flight home yesterday, I finally got around to watching Failure to Launch, which got a miserable 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. It wasn't so terrible that I turned it off, but definitely was not very cute.

The good: Zooey Deschanel was kind of cute as the oddball roommate. Kind of.
The bad: Sarah Jessica Parker just seems way too old for the character. She's 41 and she's living with Zooey Deschanel, who is 26. When was the last time you saw that age combination for roommates? SJP is not as annoying as in the Family Stone, but well, she's no Rachel McAdams.
The weird: There's a whole subplot where Matthew McConaghey keeps getting attacked by animals (chipmunk, lizard, dolphin) because his lifestyle or something is 'against nature', which really made no sense to me. There's also a very unfortunate giving-CPR to a bird scene as well.

Final verdict: Only watch if you're on a plane and are killing time. Don't waste a Netflix!