Dear Celebrities/Celebrity photographers,

Please, for the love of god, stop "re-creating" the following things for your photo shoots: anything Marilyn Monroe has ever done, anything Brigitte Bardot has ever done, anything James Dean has ever done, anything Bettie Page has ever done, The Wizard of Oz (I'm looking at you, New York), that late-night diner painting, anything from the '80s in an attempt to be ironic, Barbarella, Audrey Hepburn's cigarette holder and pearls photo from Breakfast at Tiffany's, scenes from Bond movies, the Abbey Road album cover, or the Rat Packers doing anything, especially in Vegas. It is played. It makes dead people roll around in their graves. Nobody likes that.

And just in case you get any ideas, don't start re-creating: Dogs Playing Poker, Britney's crotch shots, Einstein's "Wazzup?!" photo, Friends drinking milkshakes, the Pink Floyd back catalog poster every stoner has in their dorm room, Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, this thing, or this thing.

Love,
TWoP

In the battle of ridiculously stupid game shows specifically created to fill up the summer with cheap lighthearted and forgettable filler programming based on popular Japanese-style game shows where people do stupid stunts, there is no clear winner. Well there is, but it is Ninja Warrior on G4 and it is actually a Japanese game show. As far as these new knockoffs on ABC, there's good and bad about both of them, but I can't really see either of them sticking around for all that long. That won't stop me from trying to determine which one will reign supreme based solely on their premiere episodes, however.

Is it my birthday or what? Hulu has just rolled out 25 full-length episodes of ALF, so like any god-fearing woman I've been pretty busy scouring them all for the very best one to share, and I believe I've found just that in the episode entitled, "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue." You see, in this episode ALF's crush, his human family's teenaged daughter Lynn, has a dreamy human boyfriend. A dreamy human boyfriend who's also in a hard-rockin' '80s garage band, no less. Not to be discouraged, our furry Melmac native puts his camcorder/musical prowess to use and bangs out the greatest music video ever created to win her heart! And let me tell you, ALF talk-singing the lyrics "You're the one who's out of this world, sweet baby!" while dressed as The Boss? Swoooooon! He also does a mean Stevie Wonder impression, and his ZZ Top get-up? Forget about it.

I think it's better for everyone if I just come out and admit that I am a food voyeur. I watch the Food Network like horny teenagers watch porn. Plop me in front of a Barefoot Contessa marathon and I'm rapt for hours on end. So you'll forgive me if I'm inordinately excited about the new lineup of shows that the Most Delicious Channel has announced. According to a press release, the new slew of shows will include:

When I heard that Diddy's former pretend butler and sometime R&B recording artist Fonzworth Bentley would be turning 14 "gangsters" into old timey upperclassmen on a reality show called From G's to Gents for MTV, I could only imagine this is how the sole creative meeting for it went down:

You've probably heard about this Baby Borrowers show, right? You know, the one where five teenage couples are given the responsibility of caring for infants, toddlers, teenagers, and the elderly... Good luck! It will be like watching Jamie-Lynn Spears and her fiancé care for their new baby girl. Although I haven't yet seen the show, I can already determine the outcome just by looking at the preview clip (see below). They think they are responsible and well equipped to handle screaming babies at 2 AM. You know, because they are "mature" for their age. Give the couples five hours, they will be crying, screaming at one another and pulling their hair out. Give them one week and they are exhausted, need a break, and realize this is a lot harder than it seems. Give them the full six weeks and all five couples realize how much work caring for another human being really is. The social experiment will hopefully teach them what it really means to compromise and to take on adult responsibility. I don't even need to watch the show to know what happens, but it might be pretty entertaining to watch ten teenagers fail miserably... or maybe learn a thing or two.

First, you can't say that I didn't warn you about the Olympics obsession. Second, I just found out that I might have new and different ways to watch the Olympics without making my TiVo explode. Awesome. Some geniuses as a company called Wavexpress (hi there, my new favorite people, can you make it friendly for Macs too?) came up with a way to make events available for download onto your laptop during the Olympics for free so that fans can watch them closer to when they actually happen instead of hours and hours later after all the news networks have already "spoiled" the winners because Bejing is 12 hours ahead of us here in the States. Apparently people who subscribe to this free service (which is too long and boring for me to explain so just read about it here.) can pick their favorite sports (um, how 'bout all of them) and get nice, nearly high-def content (which would look so nice on my beautiful macbook... hint, hint) in the middle of the night, so they can watch while commuting. If I can either convince my husband to let me use his laptop and upgrade to Vista, or if those nice Wavexpress people find a way to make it Mac friendly (they've got a whole month and a half), or I can convince my boss that I really need Vista at work to do my job, then this news will make me very happy indeed. I'm still holding a grudge against the girls in my old office who spoiled the Tara Lipinski gold medal figure skating win during the Nagano Olympics in 1998 before I had a chance to go home and watch it. Trust me. It was a very upsetting experience.

These three shows are going to head up the CW's fall roster: 90210, Gossip Girl, and Privileged (which used to be called Surviving the Filthy Rich), a show about some privileged people starring Anne Archer. Can anyone tell me the difference between these shows and why we need three separate shows about mean rich people on one network? Throw in a reality show about mean rich people (Stylista) and you've got a network on a serious appeal-to-people-who-just-can't-get-enough-of-mean-rich-people mission! Also, they cancelled Friday Night Smackdown (too many mean poor people on it?), which broke my heart into a million little pieces. Yes, I'm bitter.

I am an Olympic junkie (my obsession will probably reach its fever pitch by the time August 8th rolls around, expect lots of rants about scheduling) and I'm already feeling baffled and overwhelmed by the prospect of having to figure out how the new gymnastics judging system is going to work.

I, like many others (there are others, right?), consider myself a bit of a sofa judge. I pay little attention to the popular sporting event in the off years, but by the time it rolls around I feel overly qualified from my sedentary position to critique how well someone performed on the balance beam or if they really stuck their landing.

So there's a company that's making a Knight Rider-themed global positioning system for your car. It's black, with flashing red lights, and it speaks in the voice of the original KITT, William Daniels (not the new KITT, Val Kilmer, thank god). And while this sounds pretty damn cool and totally worth the $300, we can see some problems with it.