TV is my crack – at least certain shows, but this summer, only three are on my list. :( But DWTS starts up soon, so here goes!

Sorry, no Sarah cartoon today, but I found this on Facebook – the best dancing dog video I’ve ever seen. Look at his tail wagging the whole time! It brought tears to my eyes!

And Television Without Pity is my favorite place to play. So, anyway, lots of guessing about who the pros and who the stars will be each season, and last week it was rumored that Bristol Palin will be one of the “stars”!

Now, we all know she isn’t a star. At all. I think it’s terrible she wasn’t using birth control, and I do believe in abortion, which I know disappoints some conservative readers, but there you go. She’s just a kid.

But how fun would it be to see lovely Sarah each week in the audience, however long Bristol can be voted to stay in?! Ooh, I just found that I made a joke about Sarah and Obama on Dancing with the Stars back in 2008. How prescient am I?!

From a commenter at TWOP:

Bristol Palin would be a dealkiller for me. The message would be: get knocked up as a teenager and have a fundie lunatic for a mother and you too can be on Dancing with the Stars. Apparently ABC wants to give Sarah Palin free publicity because you know that every show will include at least 5 shots of her sitting in the front row.

No thanks.

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I have nothing against Bristol, it’s better than if we end up with some Jersey Shore moron. And Sarah tends to stick to FOX News since they gave her that fat contract, so we may not see her as much as you think.

———————

I thought it was tough to watch Heather Mills, I thought it was tough to watch Tom Delay. Kate Gosselin almost did me in. I’m sure Bristol is a nice person but…maybe I should take this season off.

I liked Heather Mills and Tom Delay, and even Kate! So this might be a good season for me!

Other stars rumored to be on the show, according to Daily Kos:

A friend at ABC Entertainment informs me that Bernadine Dohrn, professor and former Weather Underground militant, is among contestants soon to be announced for “Dancing with the Stars.”

Along with Dohrn, the newly added contestants include:

Chris Kattan, comic actor
Nastia Liukin, Olympic Gold Medal gymnast
Ron Gettelfinger, former union president

They join the “stars” announced earlier:

Bristol Palin
David Hasselhoff
Brandy, R&B singer
Audrina Partridge of “The Hills”
Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino

Politico reports it, too. But I don’t believe the rest of this list at all. ABC keeps the cast under tight wraps, and always lists fake ones each year! The leaks this year are coming mostly from Twitter – actors and dancers cannot keep their mouths shut. (Who didn’t know that?)

Other rumors:

I’m not sure how credible Star magazine is, but according to them, Audrina, Jennifer Grey and Florence Henderson are signed up for this season.

Michael Bolton & Kym
Rick Fox & Edyta
Mike “The Situation” & Cheryl
Kurt Warner & Cheslie
David Hasselhoff & Karina
Troy Aikmen (or whatever male star) & Lacey

Bristol Palin & Mark
Brandy & Maks (just don’t give my girl Alec lol)
Margret Cho & Louis
Florence Henderson & Derek (one can hope right lol)
Jennifer Grey & Tony
Audrina Patridge & Alec

There will be a Press Conference! tonight on Bachelor Pad about the cast, so stay tuned!

More cartoons:

1. The vampire and Sarah Palin.
2. My first Sarah Palin cartoon, gun included.

goodbye lost cartoon

Haven’t watched the finale yet, but they said on Jimmy Kimmel that Vincent will live. Good boy.

After watching it: It made me cry buckets, but I was unhappy in a fan/writer/shipper way that is longer lasting. That was not an ending I appreciate, after watching for 6 years.

Tom Richmond, a famous MAD cartoonist with a very active blog, wrote a good summary here. (He writes at one point that he doesn’t watch much TV, but that’s my line, and we know that ain’t true!)

My comment I left there:

I loved this show – it showed that television can be art. Every other show will be held up to this one, and it’s good to have something to aspire to.

This season kind of sucked – the mystical temple, magic waters, and mythology was overdone and hammered into the scripts.

I don’t know anyone who didn’t get the ending – it’s pretty obvious if anyone watched the series, or even this season. But the NYT poll said only 2/3 of the viewers liked the ending, and I’m in the unhappy part. First of all, when I say I want a happy ending, I don’t want the protagonist to DIE in the last 5 minutes.

And is there really a happy? Because if Jack’s OWN SON wasn’t real in the sideways world, who’s to say all the happy reunions were real? Okay, he gains his LOST pals, but loses a son. Yeah, maybe the son wasn’t real, but then what about all the people we know? Logic disconnect.

I’ll write more in my TV blog, when I get time.

As far as the science mentioned here…

Molecular biologist J. Craig Venter, the primary author of the report detailing the findings, described the converted cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

Not that impressive, it turns out: the inside part is artificial, but it still lives in a real cell! Spin, much?

No related posts.

Before Haiti, it was all about the Jay Leno – Conan O’Brien scuffle. (With Carson Daly thrown in the mix somehow, but I’ve never watched him… and some other talk show host I never watch.) I didn’t know if this was a real news story – I mean, networks move stuff around all the time, because they’re as bad at guessing as the rest of us, and does anyone really care about late night talk shows?

Well there’s sure been a lot of buzz about it, so, yeah.

And the letter that Conan wrote was kind of fun and sly! For some reason the Times has parsed it, as if we couldn’t understand the original FU letter, which was perfectly direct, well-mannered, and open.

In a scathing letter addressed to the “People of Earth,” O’Brien ripped into NBC for undercutting his brief reign at “The Tonight Show” with a move that he said would “seriously destroy” what he called “the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting.”

“I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me,” O’Brien said. “I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future.”

Today the Times announced that Conan O’Brien is definitely being kicked out, fired, or paid off so King Leno can do his thing. What a surprise. Like we couldn’t see that coming.

NBC said early Thursday that it has reached a deal with “The Tonight Show” host Conan O’Brien for his exit from the show, allowing Jay Leno to return to the late-night program he hosted for 17 years.

Poor Coco. No, that’s not my pet name for Conan, but apparently his fans think Conan is too ethnic or something, so they call him that on Twitter.

Even though I never ever watched Conan O-Brien more than once or twice, I still feel resentful towards Jay Leno now. What is wrong with me?

Cartoon Caption: Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Late night, 12:35 PM, Midnight, etc.

“Just tell me. Who will sing me to sleep each night?”

I read an article that no one likes changes of  late night shows. You’re in your nightgown or pjs, things are winding down, you don’t want to think about work the next day, you either are or you aren’t looking forward to sex before bedtime, and it’s best that TV just give you a routine, and put you to bed.

What is that baby doing, exactly? I shudder to think. I redrew Jay Leno in a later version of this, but I do think Conan came off very well.

I wasn’t thinking of the bands and singers they have on late night programs, as I meant this metaphorically, but as so often happens, that works, too!

More cartoons:

1. Star Trek for Mother’s Day?

I see Top of the Ticket in the LA Times just reviewed Going Rogue: An American Life. No, not really! Instead, Andrew Malcolm just quoted from a review in the WaPo written by Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette from Gawker.

One thing is clear: No one can say today with any certainty what lies ahead in national politics for the hockey mom and Todd’s biggest snow-machine racer fan.

Now, one minor disclaimer: We haven’t actually read Palin’s new book. Not one single page. We have a copy. We intend to read it. And we imagine it’s fairly entertaining, perhaps revealing, as self-serving inside political stories go. We may even autograph it to ourselves from her.

Also, hopefully, it’s short on exclamation marks!!!

But after reading the Washington Post’s review of “Going Rogue” the other day and the reviewer’s candid confession that she hadn’t really had time to finish the book that she was writing so authoritatively about, we realized this is the latest thing in U.S. society and journalism.

Why bother reading any of it? Just talk about it.

Well, if I get a review copy – and I don’t know why I would, although that would be swell – I’ll review it here! Go, Sarah, Go!

Meanwhile, let’s see if it turns up in Oprah’s Book Club…

To set up the drawing, I wanted to pay homage to a wonderful painting of Soul or Spirit touching man, when their fingers almost touch, but I can’t find the name of it or a photo of it! I saw it in the Huntington, I think. Does anyone know the name of that painting?

Instead I found this, The Creation of Man by Michelangelo, a fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Okay, Oprah as G-d! I love it! And at the last minute I tossed her book in, as if she was playing booksie with Oprah. I think there is some great strong tension in this cartoon. Happy.

Photo of Michelangelo borrowed from here.

Cartoon caption: If Oprah can shake hands with Sarah Palin…why can’t we find peace in the Middle East?

More cartoons:

1. The vampire and Sarah Palin.
2. Do pregnant women have sex?

In this cartoon, I’m saying that they do put a negative spin on Obama (“bad info”) at times. :) But geez, everyone’s entitled to an opinion. And he hit them first! This time!

Mike Luckovich’s cartoon after the jump.

Luckovich had a cartoon with a different approach, including CNN as a casualty in the White House’s newest obsession, according to Daryl Cagle.

Cartoon from the great cagle.com.

Actually, I don’t quite get this cartoon. I thought CNN was conservative. And aren’t Fox ratings down after the White House dissed them? I guess I need interpretations of opinion cartoons, too!

Newsbusters had an interesting scoop on the White House’s attitude towards Fox as compared to MSNBC:

A senior White House advisor on Tuesday told Campbell Brown that Fox News is biased, but refused to comment when the CNN host asked her, “Well, then do you also think that MSNBC is biased?”During a taped interview at the Woman’s Conference in California later broadcast on CNN’s “Campbell Brown,” Valerie Jarrett sidestepped this marvelous question and instead haplessly said, “I don’t want to just generalize all Fox is biased or that another station is biased.”

Later Jarrett said:

So, this isn’t anything that’s simply directed at Fox. We really just want the American people to have a clear understanding. There’s so much at stake right now. We really don’t have a lot of time for nonsense and distortions.

Cartoon caption: “Obama kicks off the Fall TV season by giving bad info (oops) interviews to every network except us! That’s not Foxy. In other news, he also defriended us on Facebook.” from Fair and Foxy Fox.

Haven’t done silhouettes in forever, so this was fun. I used a texture brush for the couch. Hee!

More cartoons:

1. The Ghost of White House Christmas Trees Past.
2. Obama introduces culture to the American people.