Weekend Recap and Looking Forward...

 

It’s never good to look back on what was but I’d argue that, that rule doesn’t hold completely firm when dealing with entertainment and sports. When dealing with entertainment it’s always good to look back, quote movies, re-watch things, and then talk about how we could have done something different if a film or show isn’t what we expected. Same rule applies for sports; living in the past is what gives us hope for the future.

On the same hand, it’s good to look ahead and what’s to come, and I’m essentially going to try and do both right now. I should note that I’m not going to look to far back, just the previous weekend. The weekends are amazing, for me it’s a time where anything is game… and I kind of think that’s how they should always be. Regarding looking ahead, we’re peeking into the full week.

Friday:

The Olympics. I managed to watch roughly three hours of the opening games and I was a bit underwhelmed. I think I’m spoiled from the Beijing opening. Truthfully I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but it was a grand scale, so there needs to be some credit handed out.

I started to question the Olympics and the various competitions. I wish there was a bigger reward for the winners because quite honestly I don’t think that everyone appreciates a gold medal. I wish the stakes were higher.

I think the opening ceremony put me to sleep because I don’t know what else happened to me.

Saturday:

I rode my bike for the majority of the day and was more tired than I can explain. I proceeded to plant myself on the couch and watch two things that I wish I could burn from my mind:

Faster with The Rock and Billy Bob Thornton. I came into this movie about five minutes late and I left after about thirty minutes. Has anyone seen this movie? What’s the premise? I love The Rock but what was happening in this movie.

Sex and the City 2. I would honestly rather watch these women in NY having the same arguments and doing the same things than ever watch them go to India. I wonder how this idea was given a green light.

Post Sex and the City 2 I loaded up on a few glasses of wine and caught up on Fringe. Fringe, is a show that is highly underrated but I can understand why it doesn’t have a larger audience. I wish I wasn’t so late to the party watching it because I would have been a larger Fringe advocate throughout the past years. If anyone wants a good Sci Fi show, watch Fringe.

Sunday:

Turned on the Olympics and female cycling was on. Turned off Olympics and ran some errands with my girlfriend. Three to four hours later I turned on the Olympics and the same exact race was happening but it was coming to an end. Somehow female cycling was captivating but I don’t know who could have watched the whole race. If you’re out there, show yourself.

It’s somewhat difficult for me to write this without some hesitancy, but I need to embrace it and just go with it. I managed to cram my Sunday night with an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians and thenBreaking Bad. I’m not sure when it started to happen but whenever I’d turn on the TV the Kardashians were there, and I occasionally started to watch. But now, I just watch them before I watch Walter White go meth crazy on everyone.

Crazy Kardashian happenings- Kim Kardashian apparently has a sixth sense for detecting cavities. Let me repeat that, wait, no I won’t. Just know that I wrote about Kim’s sixth sense and also know that I can’t believe I wrote that.

Crazy Breaking Bad happenings- Everything. It’s the best show on TV.

Random weekend facts – The Watch with Stiller, Hill, and Vaughn didn’t exactly do well at the box office this week proving that you cannot just throw funny people on a billboard and expect money. I caught the new Seinfeld webseries on Crackle.com and it was hilarious. I suggest everyone should check it out.

Looking ahead here’s what you can expect:

More Olympics. More Kardashians. More Breaking Bad. The return of Colin Farrell in Total Recall.

… That pretty much sums it up.

The Hacked Nude Photo And a New Game.

Fantasy football may be a thing of the past. I think it’s time to start a new fantasy league called: Celebrity Cell Phone Leaks. Points would be dispersed by various categories:

Naked Video: 50 points
Naked Photo: 30 Points
Enticing Photo: 20 Points
Embarrassing Photo: 10 points
Unappealing Photo: 10 points
Pointless Photo: 10 points
Incriminating Text Message: 10 points
Regular Text Message: 5 points
Address Book: 5 points

Of course there would be a few variables that could be taken into scoring consideration, ie – how they handled it, are they married, how it leaked etc… Also, this wouldn’t be a league for just celebrities but we could toss politicians and athletes in the mix too… Basically any public figure, we don’t discriminate in this league.

If this league were an actual thing Scarlett Johansson would just have scored 30 points and she just joined the conversation with about 30 other people in the past year. In case you don’t keep up with the leaking’s of celebrity photos then you wouldn’t know that 2 days ago Johansson’s naked body hit the web. She took two pictures of … well you can see for yourself.

According to Johansson this was a hacking on her phone and she’s been in contact with the FBI for months. I believe her. In most cases I would resort to thinking that she slipped up and nobody hacked her. To be honest I actually feel very bad for her and any other person who gets hacked. Your personal business is your personal business.

There has to be a solve to this, right? The obvious solve is to not take the pictures, and I think that’s the knee jerk reaction from the public. But that’s not the solve, it can’t be. It’s no fun. DON’T LISTEN TO THE PUBLIC, PLEASE KEEP TAKING PICTURES.

A letter to the Hackers:

Dear Hackers,

Stop ruining it for everyone. Please let these people slip up on their own and allow them to send pictures of themselves to their ex’s after a long night of drinking. The ex will then accept the picture and not think anything of it for about a week, but ultimately the ex will then send it to a friend or post it on the Internet after another night of drinking.

If you keep on hacking cell phones then people will (God forbid) stop taking pictures. Not to mention, you potentially hurt my future Fantasy Celebrity Picture game. If you want to do us a favor, be cool and hack Starbucks online system and change the prices of coffee for a day… or something like that. Stop ruining things.

Always and Forever,

Josh

What’s to make of all these pictures floating around? I’m wondering if the cell phone naked picture is going to be the new porno. I feel like the celebrity porno kind of died out, and I’m willing to bet at this current moment in time if you were to ask someone with a high profile to make a porno they would immediately deny. But, if you take pictures of them via cell phone… that’s still doable, is this going to change?

God I hope not.

Can we please just take a step back and dive deeper into this: What I think is great about leaked pictures is that the pictures we see are the pictures that are SAVED on the phone. We all know there were about 10 pictures before the saved ones that were deleted, so what we’re looking at, assuming they took the picture solo, is how they feel best. These naked pictures are essentially how they’d want to look if they were in playboy. Any time you see a leaked naked photo you have to say to yourself: “They think they look really good.”

So what’s in store for Johansson, what are the repercussions of taking a photo? Well, it changes depending on who you are:

If you’re a Sports Athlete: Tons and Tons of shit from teammates and fans, not to mention crying fans under the age of 13 (Brett Favre, Greg Oden).

If you’re a Politician: Donezo. Send out a naked anything of yourself and you aught to hope that you have any resemblance of some sort of career as this basically strips you of all credibility. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to have a show on CNN. (Anthony Weiner).

If you’re a Celebrity: Basically nothing negative can come from it UNLESS you’re in a relationship and the picture isn’t intended for your significant other. The reality of the situation is that nudity actually can make you more popular. The poster child for this is Kim Kardashian. Prior to Keeping Up With The Kardashians the only screen time Kim had was on millions of men’s computer screens. If you’re a musician and nude photo’s come out then you’re earning street cred. So, in the Johansson case, she has nothing to worry about. Johansson can say hello to the laundry list of celebrities that have done this same exact thing.

The other reason SJ is going to be okay is because seeing a celebrity nude has become such common place that I’m not too sure how much anyone really cares about this. Technology has once again paved the way for things that were one time uncommon to completely common. In my expert naked picture prediction I think that this will all blow over before you can say What is Scarlett Johansson’s next movie?

And just for shits and giggles below is a list of Public Figures that have been caught with questionable cell phone pictures… not to mention they would all be great for either a starting position or on the bench for Fantasy Celebrity Cell Phone Leaks.

Side note: Maybe Vegas should start betting on who will have pictures next. (Do it Vegas).

Brett Favre
Anthony Weiner
Ron Artest (What!? Seriously)
Paris Hilton (No duh)
Kardashian (See Hilton)
Tito Ortiz
Chris Brown (“Look at my picture or I will beat your ass”)
Christina Aguilera (figures)
Vanessa Hudgens (When she’s floating from the limelight we’ll probably see another one… coming soon.)
Brittney Spears (Does her getting out of a car flashing no underwear count? No)
Scarlett Johannson
Miley Cyrus
Jessica Alba
Selena Gomes
Demi Lovato
Blake Lively
Rihanna (See Chris Brown)
Ka$ha
Ali Larter
Busy Phillips
Tm Cruise (Just Kidding… can you imagine… eh, shit, horrible mental image)

There are too many… that’s just 0.3% to name a few….

Jersey Shore and other "Reality" greatness.

I’m trying not to swear, especially when writing something, but in this case I just don’t know any way around it. Sometimes curse words manage to emphasize something in ways that other words cannot. And with that in mind…

I can’t fucking believe I’m watching Jersey Shore.

The last time I was watching anything on MTV was probably the Real World 734 with Coral and Mike aka The Miz aka How did this guy because WWE world champion? But alas, I’ve somehow started to watch the Jersey Shore and all of its pre planned, and over processed glory. I’ve been telling myself that it’s okay, and that it’s just one reality show, can this constitute as a guilty pleasure?

I’m going to ignore the Jersey guilty pleasure aspect because there’s more to this, the more being that not only have I gotten into Jersey Shore but I’m starting to occasionally pay attention to other reality shows. I’ve never been a reality TV guy, what happened to me?

There’s 3 parts to this: The obvious is that my girlfriend watches it and there is no escaping the man and woman viewing cross over. The next is that deep down I really appreciate these shows. When someone creates a reality show it’s hit or miss, anyone can toss a bunch of train wrecks together, give him or her alcohol, and watch the madness unfold. It takes a precise mish mash of personalities to really click. The last reason is a little more complex, which means it deserves it’s own paragraph.

I watch a lot of stuff on the web and I don’t mean shows on Hulu, I mean I watch a lot of web series’ released on youtube, college humor, blip, etc… Many of these series are free flowing, they’re 3-minute clips of shaky camera’s and obnoxious people occasionally being funny, also, I watch a lot of video blogs. So what does this all mean? It means that my common Internet watching is basically like watching a reality show, but when I see glimpses of Jersey shore with significant production value I almost appreciate it. I’ve become more tolerable to reality because it’s something I’m so used too. Good or bad, that’s the case.

Truthfully my partial reality TV resurgence didn’t start with Jersey Shore; I think it started with Lamar and Khloe on E! Seriously. Much like my initial reaction when I’m done watching the show I say “I can’t fucking believe I just watched Khloe and Lamar.” But this got me thinking about reality TV. I had to dig deep into my bag but I have compiled a list of the 10 “why can’t I quit you when I accidently turn you on” mind sucking reality shows.

This is in no specific order:

1 - Jersey Shore: Obviously this is mentioned above. But the most impressive thing about this show – It’s 1 hour long. To its credit, it’s stylized and keeps me watching like some bad car accident. Also, it broke the USA barrier and is currently in Italy.

2 - Kardashian Anything: Keeping up with, Khloe and Lamar, her porno… whatever. I can’t stand in line at Gelson’s without seeing US weekly and some airbrushed shot of this family. I bet when Bruce Jenner was in the Olympics this is exactly how he saw his life play out.

3 - The Rachel Zoe Project: This is the most pointless reality show on TV. It’s a designer trying to dress celebrities and running around with her sexually ambiguous husband – she always encounters some issue with clothing or an assistant – then figures it out. In order to watch this show you need to be a woman, live in NY, like fashion, or between the ages of 18-60… Dammit! This is a perfect show.

4 - Kendra: Huh? You mean that chick that used to sleep with Hugh Hefner and then tried to make a career of being that chick that used to sleep with High Hefner? Yes, her. She has a reality show. If you ever watch it, you retain nothing aside from knowing not picking her husband in fantasy football.

5 - The Real Housewives of Anywhere: These shows are kind of bad and definitely almost cross into Shore territory. I’m currently occasionally watching the housewives of Jersey and – wait – random tangent:

Is Jersey the official worst place to be from? What other place has ever been depicted as bad as Jersey has? If Kim Kardashian’s husband resigns with the Nets then he could have his own Jersey thing going on. This family will never stop like Chucky the doll. This state may never stop. Which brings me too…

6 - Jerseylicious: See #5 and please make me stop talking about Jersey.

7 - America’s Got Talent: Is this a reality show? If it is does this fall in with The Voice, American Idol, and the soon to be X factor? I actually like The Voice, but Talent kind of sucks at times. I feel like Nick Cannon is a shell of himself waiting to burst out of his current self on stage. I guess an excuse for him is that he did marry into the Mariah family. Either way everyone on this show is too nice, this is basically a show of 3 judges who know they want to be on a different reality show.

8 - The Bachelor(ette): I don’t ever watch these shows - or do I and just forget them because they’re almost as memorable as Halle Berry in Catwoman.

9 - The Real World Challenges: Yup, these are still on. Yup, there is still some of the same cast as from 2001. Yup, they’re all wondering how Mike the Miz is the WWE champion too.

10 - Teen Mom anything: I can’t eve believe this is a show. This isn’t a show it’s a mistake. I don’t want to watch depressing reality TV shows, I want to watch uplifting drunken cluster fucks of people sleeping with each other and accidently becoming teen moms. Wait… I got it…

How can we fix Teen Mom? Every show the teen mom should take the kid out to a club and we watch her try to pick up on people, and then change the name to: After school Pick up. Eh?

I’m sure there are plenty more out there, I know there are, but I need to get my reality compass in a better place before I start making snap judgments. On the flip side there are some great shows that I actually feel good about watching: No Reservations, inTransit, Chopped, anything-on HGtv when my girlfriend watches it. You know what, I think I may need to acquire a list of solid reality TV to work it’s way through this mess of mindless repetition that I somehow always watch.

You know when people used to say “I look at Playboy for the articles” – that’s how I feel when trying to justify reality TV. I tell myself I watch it to see what works because it interests me. How can these people hold our attention for this long, what is this show doing right?

I can’t fucking believe I watch reality TV.