The most ridiculous ads I've seen on facebook

Look kids, it's like a quiz, where you pay us for something that you can get for free! Isn't that "whack"?


Here's an ad that appeals to us Bachelor lovers. The only thing thing that could have made this ad better is if they put "woo" in quotations marks, rather than capitalizing it.


Come on, a kit? All you need is a $3 pair of nylons—anyone who subscribed to my high school e-newsletter knows that. But the ad gets points for its picture, which is just on the verve of graphic.

TV shows in my hulu queue

hulu is a pretty freaking awesome new website where you can watch Fox and NBC shows for free. It's definitely worth checking out, because they have the entire series of Arrested Development...and Hey Paula! I was excited to find Dragnet, the TV show I listed on a "favorites fill-in" in 3rd grade. I watched a lot of Nick at Nite back then.

For a retro TV addict like me, the real thrill is being able to see TV shows I've heard about (not on the streets or anything...I edited a couple of TV encyclopedias) and never seen. Here are some of my choices:

McHale's Navy: I'm disappointed they don't have the episode starring Guiseppe McHale, McHale's identical cousin. But one where the sailors adopt an orphan girl can't be that bad.

Simon & Simon: I think this show is about a 1970s Shane Vendrel, his gay buddy, and their dog Hooch.

Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot: Entertainment Weekly described it as "crazy, dubbed '60s Japanese sci-fi starring a winsome kid and his giant robot."

St. Elsewhere: I just want to see Howie Mandel with a fro

Hart to Hart: Even though it isn't backed up by a single viewer star-rating, I decided to go with the episode "Murder in Paradise," because of the first five words of the description: "At a Hawaiian croquet tournament...."

p.s. you can also watch shitloads of Movies on hulu. They have The Jerk, but no Space Camp.

Words I wish I knew how to spell

Since I'm an editor, you may be under the mistaken impression that I'm a good speller. But historically, I'd whip through diagramming sentences on a sheet of notebook paper, but put me in front of that week's 2-page spread in the spelling workbook and I'd suddenly become completely uninterested. So I'm still a bad speller. But since I'm an editor,
a) all of my superiors not only have pristine spelling, my boss sometimes uses words I have to look up in the dictionary; and
b) if I ever misspell anything at any time, some one inevitably says, "you're an editor, you should be able to spell!" I always get picked for the spelling questions on Cranium. A bad spellers worst nightmare.

To that end, I have striven to become a better speller. Afterall, by my estimation, I type more than 12,000 words a day (2.5 hours a day typing at 82 words per minute). But there are some words I can never seem to get straight:


necessary - is it two Cs, one S; or one C, two eses? I can never remember
traveling - I'm sorry, but the rules of spelling dictate that a short vowel (the "e") should have a double-consonant after it if adding -ing. The British do it correctly...so why only one L? This baffles me.
occasionally - the only way I could get myself to remember that there were two Cs is to start to pronounce it in my head wrong: OCK-casionally. But since I type it more than I say it, I always want to say it wrong now.
Michael - the "a-e-l" just seems so unnatural. Every time I type it I have to say in my head "m-i-c-h-A-E-L!" I have to say it with an exclamation point, too (therefore, it always makes me happy to write it).
their - my fingers somehow started spelling their as "thier" all the time. I have to retype it the correct every time. But I've typed it wrong so many times, I'm never 100% sure how to write it when I'm writing longhand now.
Renaissance - ugh. there is no hope for me and this word
absorption - I actually totally know how to spell this word, but I always have to pause when writing it. I find the changing of the "b" in absorb into a "p" absorption to be awesome, and how often do you get to write "absorption"? When you do, take a moment to appreciate it.

How I Met Your Mother: The Latest Show I Will Try to Get You to Watch

Each of you, if you have souls, are secretly waiting for that ONE SHOW to come back from the writer's strike--whether it's The Office, or Ugly Betty, or [SHUDDER] even Boston Legal. My secret show was How I Met Your Mother, which returned yesterday in a brilliantly timed St. Paddy's day episode.

I know you're all secretly relieved we get a little more new TV before summer, and those of us who invest in DVRs have not been getting our money's worth. So to pay back in karma this proverbial groundhog running back into its hole, I command that you all watch a yet another well-written, critically acclaimed, awesomely acted show that no one watches: How I Met Your Mother.

I know you all don't want to watch it, because it's a sitcom, and the sitcom was proclaimed dead around the time that According to Jim and The King of Queens became popular. But it wasn't dead--remember overlooked Arrested Development? And remember how you regret not watching that show when it was on? Well, now is your chance to make up for that. If, anything, it's got:
* Free episodes online.
* adorable Jason Segel (recently hired to write the next Muppets movie)
* Alyson Hannigan (aka Willow).
* Bob Saget in the Daniel Stern narration role.
* Neil Patrick Harris on The Price Is Right (pre–Drew Carey)
* Neil Patrick Harris playing Patrick Swayze's role in the "c'mere, loverboy" scene of Dirty Dancing.
*Neil Patrick Harris' abs. No, seriously


In fact, the only caveat I have about HIMYM is its laugh track. Though I hardly notice it anymore, it adds a campy quality that the show doesn't need. Though it does harken back to Seinfeld, which had a laugh track and was the only other show with such great New York specific lines as Barney's already infamous area code break down:

She might dress like she's 718, act like she's 212, but trust me, she's 516. Oh, and her husband, letting her out alone on St. Paddy's Day? If that dude's not 973 I'm 347.

But whatever, I'm done spending my free time trying to convince a small, imaginary audience to watch a show for the sake of the art of television. If you don't believe me, at least watch it next week: It's Brtiney's primetime debut.

Lost: Get better copyeditors

Even in this, the most awesomely awesome of all Lost seasons, you know the Jin/Sun episode is gonna suck. Sure, Sun was part of the Oceanic Six, but what did we get to see of Jin? Some throw-away story? We wasted that time on Jin's dumb story when we could be figuring out what the eff is going on with Michael.

But if that wasn't bad enough, the punctuation in the subtitles of the Korean they were speaking the whole episode was all wrong. We're talking double hyphens instead of em dashes, missing commas, even misplaced periods! For those of us intimately familiar with correct punctuation, this is not only distracting, but disheartening. Are we the only ones who care about proper punctuation?

But hey—maybe it's hard to find good copyeditors in Hawaii. If that's the case, you just let me know, Lost producers, and I'd be happy to move there in a minute.

GOD DAMN IT!!!!

There's no denying that one of the juiciest benefits of cable is Project Runway, and with the strike going on, it's amazing that I've been able to NOT watch the addictive show, especially with as many times as Bravo reruns it. I HAVE been DVRing them, and after my friends and I watched the first 7 eps in a row we vowed to save the next seven.

I have somehow managed to avoid watching any episodes of Project Runway and have avoided all airings of it, as well as blog posts, RSS feeds, office gossip, and ads about it. I have no idea what "the twist" was, and I didn't know who the finalists were. Until just now, when I was innocently watching a Lifetime movie waiting for Law & Order to come on so I could get my Jeremy Sisto fix. The clock tolled 10, and my DVR, forced to choose between the 2 shows that I had set to record, chose not L&O but Project Runway!! And there were the fat guy and the bald guy.

Fucked by our own technology again.

the play-offs

From the NY Times