Oh to be a kid! You get to do fun things like watch a lot of tv, not clean up after yourself, and bake treats with an Easy-Bake Oven! Sounds awesome!
Let’s go to town!
One of the great things about my childhood was watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. This man not only taught me a lot of lessons about being a good person, but he also inspired my love for cardigans. Thanks Fred!
But despite all his good acts, Mister Rogers sometimes scared the crap out of me. Well, to be accurate–HE didn’t scare the crap out of me, but one of his neighbors in the land of Make-Believe did. That’s right, I’m talking about that crazy bitch Lady Elaine Fairchilde.
Where’s my Boomerang-Toomerang-Zoomerang???
On one level, I was jealous of her home in the Museum-Go-Round. On every other level, those red cheeks and red nose reminded me too much of my Irish brethren, if you know what I mean.
And not only was she a little mean-looking, she was weird as sh–. Evidence below. Watch out Lady Aberlin!
See, Kimberly, who is 33, was seen hanging around LA with 19-year-old Harry, joined by her dad Rod, Rod’s wife Penny, her brother Sean who was on one of the WORST reality shows of all time called Sons of Hollywood (and I would know–I watched Denise Richards: It’s Complicated) and Sean’s alleged piece Adrienne Maloof.
It’s okay, I just barfed a little in my mouth too.
A source reveals that “Age doesn’t really matter in the Stewart family,” which is SUPER true. Rod is 68, Penny 42. Sean is 32, Adrienne 52. And Kim is no stranger to dipping into the kiddie pool. In 2006 at the age of 26, she was engaged to some 19-year-old dude from Laguna Hills for a whopping two weeks. Maybe she promised him she’d buy him booze, but then he got a fake ID so he didn’t need her anymore. And because Kim is a true Goldilocks, she has also dated old, or at least SLEPT with old. In 2011 at 32, she gave birth to 44-year-old Benicio del Toro’s baby girl after what was rumored to be a one night stand. Well at least we know she’s fertile!
I really emulate Kim for going young. After all, we ARE the same age. So now that she’s taken one of the most eligible teen celebs off the market, I’ll have to look for the next big thing. Hey, Justin Bieber is 19! Is he available?
That Jennifer Lopez. Remember when she was catching the subway “on the 6” because she was “Jenny from the block” and needed to get home to her apartment in the Bronx? Nope? Well, no worries, because I think she has blocked her memories of being a mere plebeian too.
Such a tasteful outfit.
Today my copy of People Magazine’s “Most Beautiful People” arrived in the mail–and no, I’m not in it–and a bunch of stars were asked the question “What Have You Learned to Love About Yourself?” Most of the celebs answered in the most bullsh– way, as you can imagine. “My OCD, my persistence, my instincts!” they replied while I rolled my eyes.
But Jennifer Lopez has perfected the art of the humble brag like no other. She explains:
I used to have a problem with my skinny wrists and ankles. Then a makeup artist told me that because of how delicate they were I’d be a really big star.
Wow, just wow. Talent? Ambition? Drive? Pshaw, those things are a WASTE. All you need to make it big in Hollywood, according to J Lo and her makeup artist, are dainty wrists! Because everyone knows that thin is SO not in.
Next time I bring a gentleman caller home (which is NEVER. I’m a good Catholic girl, y’all), I know JUST what to feed him for breakfast the morning after so that he’ll remember my name. Golden Grahams! Because then we’ll be “so happy together” and probably get married. That’s how it works, right?
Every time I turn on my tv lately, there is a new actor I don’t recognize. “He’s cute,” I say to myself, because I watch TV alone on my couch. “Let me look him up on wikipedia.”
This week, for example, it was Aden Young, the actor who stars as Daniel Holden on the new original series Rectifyon the Sundance Channel. In this show, Young portrays a Georgia man who has been released from prison after spending 19 years on death row after being exonerated for a rape and murder charge. Sounds like a catch, eh?
Right or wrong, I’d hit it.
Well, Aden plays an all American boy, minus the murder/rape charge that will always hang over him. He looks and sounds the part. And then wikipedia tells me he is AUSTRALIAN. G’day mate indeed!
Aden’s not the only one. Sexy Jason Stackhouse, who lives on the Louisiana bayou in True Blood? He’s played by Aussie Ryan Kwanten. Actor Robert Taylor captures Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire perfectly on the eponymous–and awesome–show Longmire on A&E–and he also hails from the land down under.
He looks like a man of America, but Robert Taylor is a man of Oz.
It’s just not the men. The ladies of Australia are also taking over the American airwaves faster than we drink our Bud Light. Clare Bowen plays a country singer on Nashville. Anna Torv is an FBI Agent on Fringe. Adaelaide Clemens joins her countryman Aden Young on Rectify. What the shrimp on the barbie, people???
I bet when you read the first four words of this headline you got SO excited. You were all, where IS Carmen Sandiego? I haven’t seen that international criminal mastermind in a WHILE.
Neither has Rockapella!
I fooled you, huh, just like Carmen has long fooled the ACME Detective Agency. See, I’m talking about the original big girl on television, the Melissa McCarthy of her day, Camryn Manheim.
As a lawyer on The Practice, she might have defended Carmen at some point.
Carmen was EVERYWHERE in the late 1990s. She was the token big girl, and boy did they shove it down our throats. After winning an Emmy for her work on The Practice, she proclaimed, “This is for all the fat girls!” Not enough for you? She wrote and performed in a one-woman show titled, wait for it, Wake Up, I’m Fat! which was followed by her memoirs by the same title. Okay Camryn we get it! You’re fat!!!
Don’t get me wrong–I am totally on board with showcasing all sizes on the boob tube. It was just the smugness of the whole Hollywood machine that annoyed me. “See!” the powerful Hollywood bigwigs seemed to say, “We’re so accepting of ALL SIZES that we’ll give Camryn an Emmy. But that means that her costar Lara Flynn Boyle can never eat again.” Puke.
Since The Practice ended in 2004, I haven’t seen Camryn around much. Apparently she was on Ghost Whisperer and Harry’s Law, but did anyone watch either of those shows? I must confess I did enjoy her as Nurse Daly in the 2010 Lifetime movie The Pregnancy Pact, but other than that she has been absent from my life. I guess she is content with passing on the torch to Melissa McCarthy.
And for all of you are really craving some Rockapella, here you go!
Once upon a time I liked Gwyneth Paltrow. The year was 1995 and she was dating Brad Pitt and had short blonde hair which she OWNED and she smoked cigarettes and she seemed kind of normal, except for that whole dating Brad Pitt part.
They kind of looked like the cover of an incestuous V.C. Andrews novel, but whatevs.
At any rate, you couldn’t get really jealous of Gwyneth because in the movie Seven Kevin Spacey put her head in a box which was so sad.
But then nearly 20 years went by and Gwyneth became, how do we say it, insufferable. Now, I don’t begrudge anyone wealth or success. That’s their business. I’ll just envy them from afar (but I WON’T cut off their head, I promise). No, what drives me cray cray about Ms. Paltrow is, as I read in a comments field of a Gawker post once, she was born on third base and acts like she hit a triple. Bish, please.
Let’s talk Goop, the lifestyle website she owns and operates where she plugs, in her words (or the copywriter’s–tomayto, tomahto), an “elegant set of white pajamas and a robe to wear on top for lazy days spent at home.”
Wow, Gwyneth, sounds good! How much does it cost?
$295 for the pajama set and $298 for the robe!
Okay then, sticking to my yoga pants (which I have never actually used for yoga) and tank top ensemble.
If this was all, I’d move on. But it’s everything . . . her cookbooks, her stupid diet, her fake complaints that she hates working out and that she likes Oreo cookies. Ugh, stop trying to be a plebe. We do not accept you!
And to top it off–she was recently crowned People Mag’s Most Beautiful Woman and they decided to give us five reasons to “secretly love” her. Heh. Even People knows no one will admit they like her out loud. But the list itself is, er, quite desperate. To wit–here is reason # 4:
4. She has the funds to be fashionable.
You couldn’t believe she recommended $150 sweatpants, but you’d totally buy them if you had her bank account.
Wait a minute–are you serious? I’m supposed to “secretly love” her because she is rich. Interesting. Here is how we could modify that sentence so that I openly love her. “She has the funds to be fashionable so she buys clothes for her broke ass friends.” There. Fixed it for you.
Now–I am sure Gwyneth is a lovely person up close and personal. But her continual attempt to act like a character from an Edith Wharton novel is just a BIT dated.
I am a middle child. That’s my gig, more or less. Sure, I wear other hats. Daughter, comedian, snarky blogger . . . but the relationship that defines me the most is being the younger sister to Katie and the older sister to Andrew.
I love my brother and sister. I might not always tell them that, I might not always treat them like I do, I might give them every reason in the world to want to kill me–I send more late night drunk texts to them than any piece of potential, er, friend– but at the end of the day they’re stuck with me, they love me unconditionally, and I am so. freaking. lucky.
I was three when Andrew was born. My mother went into labor just two days before Thanksgiving in 1982, which I LOVED. Not only did I get a chocolate cigar, I got to eat a tasty frozen meal at the hospital. No, I am not being sarcastic. It was delicious! I also got to play with toys that were not mine. HOW could that be bad??? It was flat out awesome!
I was BORN to be a big sister, though not the responsible, care-taking one. That’s has been my older sister Katie’s job, and she has EXCELLED at it. No, I was put on this Earth to be that silly sister who you know will one day become the crazy Auntie Lizard to your children, the one where you drop off the kids for the weekend, and they’ll come back with finger paint all over their faces and they may be kind of wired because Lizard totally burned the Gorton’s fish sticks that she was supposed to feed them and instead took them to Friendly’s and let them get adult sized-sundaes and three bags of M&M’s–regular, peanut, and pretzel. Oops!
No kids in my family will eat any kids sundaes. Hell no! Only the Reese’s Peanut Cup adult-sized ones for them.
Luckily, we have not gotten to that point yet, though we will soon! My brother Andrew is a grown man, and he’s expecting his first child, my goddaughter Charlotte. At 6’7, Andrew may not be my LITTLE brother anymore but he will always be my younger brother. And I will ALWAYS be there to take care of him, even when he thinks he doesn’t need me to.
Once a big sister, always a big sister. And that’s why the story of Sean Collier, the brave MIT police officer who lost his life at the hands of the Boston Marathon bombing perpetrators on Thursday, has hit me so hard. Just 26, Sean could have been my brother. We both grew up in Catholic families North of Boston–he in Wilmington and I in North Andover. We both graduated from local public schools, we both moved to Somerville after college graduation, we both even played kickball for WAKA, the World Adult Kickball Association. It’s interesting how in some ways our lives completely overlapped, though separated by almost a decade.
The Boston Marathon bombings devastated me on so many levels. I grew up attending the Marathon every Patriot’s Day. My father would take us close to the finish line on Boylston Street and I’d push my way to the front, just like beautiful, innocent Martin Richard, who was killed by the bombings on Monday, April 15. I was actually supposed to go home and watch the marathon this year for the first time since I moved to New York City in 2006. I was so excited, but then I had to cancel my plans because I had an interview on Monday. Even that morning I was sad I would not be there. My friend Christina posted a picture on Facebook of the finish line before the start of the race, and I commented at 8:40am: “This kills me! I was supposed to come home to watch the marathon but I have an interview today. Have fun!”
I went to my interview Monday morning and decided to spend the day as a tourist. I was leaving the New York Public Library at 3:45pm when I saw I had a flurry of texts, emails and voicemails. My New York friends all thought I was in Boston, and they wanted to make sure I was okay. Okay from what? I thought. Then I noticed a text from my brother, who lives in Chicago, asking if I had heard from dad. Why, I asked. Andrew wrote back that there was a bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Our father works a block away. What the …? I dropped to my knees in Bryant Park, the wind knocked out of me. I called my mother, a teacher in the North Andover public school system who was home due to April vacation, to check if Dad was okay. She assured me he was. And while I was relieved to know he was safe–so many people were not okay. I was blinded, devastated, and heart-broken.
Three people lost their lives on Monday, April 15: Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi. Many more were injured. And as if that wasn’t staggering in its magnitude enough, one more person was murdered in the pursuit for justice in catching these killers. Sean Collier. Sean Collier, who woke up on Thursday morning, not knowing that the day would be his last, who was just doing his job in keeping the MIT campus safe.
Martin Richard. Krystle Campbell. Lu Lingzi. Sean Collier. These are the names that matter. These are the names that I choose to remember.
As a city and nation grieve, let us be reminded that every day is a gift. And part of that gift–for better or for worse, in good times and bad–is our family.
To my brother Andrew–I love you. To man who could have been my brother–Sean Collier–I thank you.
Hey all! I’m baaaack! Don’t you feel better? I wish I did, truth be told. I was out way too late last night and yes, there was drinking involved.
It’s always 5 o’clock somewhere!
One of the great things about being exhausted/hungover (sorry Mom) on a beautiful day is that instead of enjoying the outdoors, you sit down on your couch watching TV. Wonderful world we live in, isn’t it? My DVR is under 10% for the first time, well, ever, and I’ve moved onto watching Downton Abbey DVDs from the library. LOVE IT by the way. But that’s not what we’re going to talk about.
No, what we are going to talk about is God. Let’s just pretend we get to be Him for a day. And Our special power is that We get to resurrect one character from an HBO show who died. They could have been murdered, killed in a car accident, died of old age. Whatevs, We’re God! We can do what We want.
Let’s discuss who We’d save.
Adriana La Cerva from The Sopranos
Christofuh!
Nine years after it first aired, just thinking about Adriana’s murder still makes me upset. Ad confessed to Christofuh that she was a mole for the FBI, and after nearly strangling her to death he ended up telling Silvio, who then concocted a story that Christofuh attempted suicide and he was going to take her to the hospital. Instead, Silvio pulled his car over in secluded woods and shot Adriana as she tried to flee on her hands and knees. We didn’t actually SEE her get shot, so at first there was speculation that maybe she didn’t die. When we realized that yes, she was dead, we were comforted by the fact that Drea de Matteo, the actress who played Adriana, was going to be on the show Joey. How’s that for a nice pleasant Sunday. Now I’m depressed. Let’s move on.
Keith Charles from Six Feet Under
Man in blue
Six Feet Under has perhaps the best ending of any TV show, period. Six Feet, which was set in a family-owned and operated funeral home, concluded by revealing how all of the main characters passed away in the future. In a six and a half minute sequence featuring the song “Breathe Me” by Sia, we learn that Claire and Ruth and David and others got to live long lives, but poor Keith’s life was cut tragically short when he was shot to death by armed robbers while he was unloading his security truck in 2029. In 2044, David Fisher, Keith’s true love, passed away after seeing a young and healthy Keith in a vision. Heartbreaking. Still makes me cry every time.
Ned Stark from Game of Thrones
I miss you Ned.
Game of Thrones is like a medieval version of The Sopranos to me in that I accept that I never quite understand who the hell is who, what’s going on, who’s evil, etc, etc. That said, both shows are thoroughly enjoyable shows filled with violence and cool nudity. What is NOT cool, however, is when evil (and false) King Joffrey ordered beloved dad Ned Stark to be beheaded in front of his daughter Sansa. What a jerk!
Augustus Hill from Oz
He never got “lost” in prison!
Depressed yet? Let’s keep it going.
Oz aired from 1997 to 2003, though I didn’t start watching it till 2008. It is one of the absolute BEST shows ever, but it is hard to watch. Set in a maximum security prison, every week someone either gets raped, murdered, or both. I can never watch this show at night because it gives me nightmares. It has also prevented me from living a life of crime, because I do NOT want to go to prison, so I guess there is some good.
At any rate, Augustus Hill, portrayed by actor Harold Perrineau, was paralyzed from the waist down after falling from a roof after he murdered a police officer. Sentenced to life in prison, he got sober and was the moral center and heart of the show. During the fifth season, he relapsed on drugs and there was a big fight between the Homeboys, Latinos, and Italians about the drug trade. Augustus was stabbed when he stopped Frank Urbano from attacking his father figure Burr Redding. As he died, he told McManus that he could feel his legs. So sad.
Leo Funkhouser from Curb Your Enthusiam
Let’s be honest–Leo was not really that important, even though he was Marty Funkhouser’s dad. He died of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which Larry cannot understand because isn’t that the good Hodgkin’s, like what Charlie from Party of Five had?
So everyone, since We’re God, who are We going to save? This is a REALLY tough decision. But I am going to have to go with Ned Stark. See, as much as Adriana’s murder haunts me, she wasn’t exactly a model citizen. And Keith was really awesome but at least he got to live to be 60ish. Leo Funkhouser also lived a long life filled with golfing. And sorry to say Augustus was stuck in prison anyway and it was inevitable he’d get killed because everyone on Oz always does. Ned, on the other hand, could have saved Westeros if he were alive (Is that even the name of the kingdom? I always get confused, remember?). There wouldn’t be all this fighting in all the lands and everyone would be happy. Damn Ned I miss you.
All right now go back to being normal people. You’re not God anymore.
So last night I got my latest issue of People magazine, as in the kind with pages that you flip through while sitting on the toilet. TMI? Too bad.
I look just as cute.
I didn’t have to even go far till I found something that made me gasp slightly. On page 6, underneath the letters to the editor lamenting the shocking downfall of Katy Perry and John Mayer’s romance, was an update on the Johnston family, who were featured in the mag in August. You see, the Johnston parents are dwarves, and they have five children, also dwarves, three of whom are adopted. Quite touching.
Hahahaha this is the third pic that comes up when you google “7 Little Johnstons.” Bristol has BURNED you Levi.
Now, what made me gasp is not even that they are getting their own tv show, which they are. I mean, we live in a world where TLC exists. But what shocks me is that this show will NOT be on TLC . . . it will be on Oprah’s network OWN.
And the other gasp-worthy element is the name of the show. 7 Little Johnstons. REALLY??? All I could think of was those t-shirts that all my male high school classmates wore in the 1990s that positively traumatized flat-chested me.
The DVR Files 