American Idol IS BACK!!!

• “Horrendous.”
  
• “What’s up, dawg?”
  
• “Ghastly.”
  
• “You’re the sweetest.”
  
• “Keeping it real, dude.”

Yeah, baby, American Idol is BACK. In the interim months, you can have all those pretender filler shows like Aka-lamey Fantasia, or your One In A Million, but AMERICAN IDOL is the REAL DEAL, the big daddy of ‘em all.

If you’re new the series, some things to look forward to…

• Simon Cowell’s man boobs bulging out of his tight, tight black baby tees.
  
• How has-been popstar Paula Abdul tries to keep sober every episode.
  
• Ryan Seacreast two day old stubble. (I can just hear the fanboys going "rowrrrrr...")
  
• How many time per episode Randy Jackson does that ‘Satan’ symbol.
  
• The freaky non-talent losers that appear on the show thinking they’re Mariah Carey. Some of these people need a SERIOUS reality check…

Can’t wait for next week’s episode. Yeah, baby. I wonder if William Hung is going to make another appearance this year…

Some Local Blog Pinging / RSS / Aggregator Services

Since it's Friday, and i've nothing else to do, i'm going to plug some blog pinging services. We all know Project Petaling Street, it's been around quite awhile. There were others that followed, some survived the first few months, some didn't (remember PPS2? Project Kacang Kuda?). A few others that are still around are Planet Malaysia and sarawho. Both actually use RSS feeds, but also acts as a blog update service.

The end result is pretty much the same with all the services - you update your blog, they'll get to know about it and highlight it on their front page either through the RSS feed or an auto-pinger, or you manually ping it (like some people still do on PPS).

But recently, (well not very recent actually), a couple other local services surfaced. The first is fakapster (what a name!) which has been around awhile in one form or another, but recently launched in it's current incarnation. The layout is pretty spartan here, but it's nice and clean, without any ads or complicated sidebars.

Another one would be FrenzRSS, run by none other than Rojaks (who was a client of mine in a court case once) and 5xmom, two long-time fehmes bloggers who... aw heck, if you don't know them, you should start reading more local blogs.

So sign up, get more people to read your blog, and get to know more cool blogs to read, it helps to pass the time at work between clocking in and clock out...

Great 90's TV Sitcoms

With the advent of file-sharing and [tag]Bittorent[/tag], i guess less and less young people are watching TV. I myself get impatient at the first sight of advertisement breaks, not to mention waiting one week for the next episode to be shown, or in the case the Hong Kong TV serials, the next day.

Astro has introduced their AstroMAX device, although i haven't seen it, it sounds a bit like a [tag]TiVo[/tag] but with much less features. Anyway, broadband internet connectivity really just took off here in Malaysia in the last few years (although one can argue Screamyx isn't really giving you 'broad'-band all the time...).

So in that sense i suppose the 90' s was the last great decade for the traditional medium of television. As most of you know, i am a fervent child of the 80's (proof is here and here...), with that decade coincidentally being the golden decade of American (and consequently, local) TV, the highwater mark that indelibly influenced the children of that generation. look at all the TV shows from that era that have been made into Hollywood movies.

TV producers make shows that they feel the audience can connect with, what better way than to make a series (most of the time it'll be a comedy) that is straight right out the biggest demagogue's growing up years? Case in point - in the 70's there was a hit series about life in the 50's ([tag]Happy Days[/tag]). Then in the 80's there was another successful show about life two decades before in the [tag]60's[/tag] ([tag]The Wonder Years[/tag]). In the recent 90's, it was another show ([tag]That 70's Show[/tag]) with the same pattern. Okay, you can argue that [tag]Ashton Kutcher[/tag] and that Fez kid shouting about isn't really a hit show.

Just that now in the new millennium there hasn't been an out and out hit about life in the [tag]80's[/tag], and '[tag]That 80's Show[/tag]' doesn't count.

Which brings me to the topic of what i wanted initially to blog about - great TV shows in the 90's. Specifically, the sitcoms. As much as i love the 80's, i'll have to say the 90's ones were absolutely killer ones. In the 80's it was always happy families with the canned laughter ([tag]The Cosby Show[/tag], [tag]Family Ties[/tag], [tag]Growing Pains[/tag], etc), memorable, but kind of in a non-threatening way. All very nice and good. Then the networks up the ante to capitalize of viewer's increasing sophistication.

Off the cuff, i'm thinking the 2 greatest comedies that truly defined the 90's were, of course, [tag]Friends[/tag] and [tag]Seinfeld[/tag]. Friends was a more traditional set-up of a comedy, although in its inception, it broached a few subjects that in its day was considered less than acceptable. Seinfeld, well, i can hardly disagree when people mention it as the greatest television series of all time. It's a different kind of show - a mixture of sharp verbal gags and physical comedy (mostly by [tag]Kramer[/tag]), interwining storylines that strangely yet nicely collide at the end, and basically a show 'about nothing' (as cliched as that sounds...!)

With the end of the 2 shows, the US [tag]networks[/tag] never really found a replacement for them, signally what is called the slow death of sitcoms on [tag]TV[/tag] recently.

But of course there were other good sitcoms - let me see... [tag]Frasier[/tag] was alright, but i never really found his brand of uptight humor all that appealing. His brother was way funnier, but Kelsey Grammer really raked in the millions on this spin-off. [tag]Tim Allen[/tag]'s '[tag]Home Improvement[/tag]' had this rivalry thing going on in the beginning, but now in retrospect it's all too easy to see who's the big winner and who isn't. Watching reruns of that show is always painful for me, it passes off as one-dimensional and repetitive. Besides, which one of us can't see his [tag]Al Borland[/tag] gag coming from a mile off? but in its defence, there was [tag]Pamela Anderson[/tag]...

What else is there? There was [tag]Wings[/tag], which i kinda like, [tag]Carol in the City[/tag] (bleargh...), not forgetting the [tag]Simpsons[/tag] (still going strong today, a fav of mine...), [tag]The Nanny[/tag] (my God! that voice!), Third Rock from the Sun...

What else? hmmm...

(all pics from wikipedia)