The Grouchy Editor

Gwyneth Paltrow Week!

It was quite a week for Gwyneth, who topped both Star magazine’s “Most Hated Celebrity” and People magazine’s “Most Beautiful People” lists.

I can’t get too excited for Gwyneth because, to me, she is a bit of a has-been whose most memorable role was as the severed head in Se7en (below), followed closely by her turn as some shapely buttocks in Shallow Hal (above — assuming they are not stunt buttocks).  It’s a tough call to say which was the better performance, so I’ll have to flip a coin:  heads or tails?

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Quote of the Week #1

“The guy who was stripped naked and then later set free, do we have any idea who he was?” — CNN’s Jake Tapper to Watertown’s police captain

The captain didn’t know.  I’ve been wondering about the naked guy.  That’s certainly a unique way to be introduced to the national news media, getting escorted to a police car with your junk exposed.

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Travis Alexander’s ex-girlfriend, Deanna Reid, took the stand at the Jodi Arias trial.  Her appearance might have explained a thing or two about Alexander’s fatal attraction to Arias.  If you were Travis Alexander, who would you choose?

                   The Travis Alexander Girlfriend Quiz:

      A)  Girl who wants to marry you, or …                                      B)  Homicidal maniac

     A)  Girl who wants to marry you, or …                                     B)  Homicidal maniac

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Quote of the Week #2

“Did he talk to you about blowing enormous loads every time?” — Arias attorney Kurt Nurmi to poor Deanna Reid.  HLN’s censor was apparently asleep at the wheel.

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Wanted?

“He was a complete jerk.”

“He frightened all of the children in the neighborhood.”

“When you saw him coming, you just wanted to deliver a good, swift kick to his ass.”

Those are comments you never hear about people like the Boston bombers (or serial killers).  Instead, we usually hear about what nice, quiet, unassuming fellows they were.

That is why society ought to celebrate the jerks in our midst, like the sweet man pictured above.  Jerks are generally harmless and always mean well.  We– er, they never cause problems.

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Events this week did not bring out the best in Fox’s Bill O’Reilly.  Within hours of the Boston bombing, O’Reilly was politicizing it, chastising President Obama for using the word “tragedy” to describe the attack.

O’Reilly loves to spring unusual words on his audience, but apparently he needs a definition of this simple, seven-letter word:

Even more distressing for O’Reilly, archenemy MSNBC showed up Fox (and CNN) by exhibiting restraint during Wednesday’s erroneous reports of the arrest of a suspect.  O’Reilly refused to acknowledge this embarrassment and chose to credit CBS — but not MSNBC — with a journalistic win.

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The Game was on cable.  It’s about the only movie I can watch, repeatedly, and laugh out loud with each viewing.  Michael Douglas’s performance as a harried business honcho is a comic masterpiece.

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I was so bored that I actually watched golf on television.  I’ve never understood why fans on the golf course are expected to watch the competition in absolute silence.  Same thing with tennis.  Player concentration, you say?  OK, then why aren’t fans shushed when a basketball player is at the free-throw line, trying to concentrate on a game-deciding shot?

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Word that needs to be banished from the advertising lexicon because it no longer means anything:  awesome.

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Quote of the Week:

“To be truly feminine means being soft, receptive, and — look out, here it comes — submissive.” — volleyball star Gabrielle Reece

No comment.

© 2010-2024 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

20-Second Gripes

1:  If North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is as immature and hyper-sensitive as some experts seem to believe, maybe all of this satire by The Onion, Saturday Night Live, et al, isn’t such a great idea.

2:  Jimmy Fallon “interviewed” Rolling Stone Keith Richards and allowed Richards to actually speak for about 45 seconds.  Is it too late to rehire Leno?

3:  When I get up in the morning (or sometime), the first thing I do (OK, second thing, after the cigarette) is turn on cable news.  This, I’ve come to believe, is a mistake.  Some people get up and listen to music.  That has to be a healthier, happier way to greet the new day.

4:  Nightly cable news personalities, compared to the blithering idiots on morning talk shows, are a wealth of Mensa candidates.  Anderson Cooper, for example, apparently takes a stupid pill at some point between hosting his evening program on CNN and taping the syndicated crap he presides over during the day.

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Nice try, CNN.  You watched The Five on Fox, envied its ratings, studied its setup, and then devised your own camera-under-the-table-aimed-at-sexy-women’s-legs.  Sadly, The Point got the shaft.

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Quotes of the Week (courtesy of HLN and Jodi Arias)

                              Eiglarsh                                                                        Walsh

“She killed someone.  She murdered someone.  So this, to me, is a pimple on the butt of what she’s dealing with.” — attorney Mark Eiglarsh, about Arias using Twitter

“There’s something else I want to point out about this and other phone-sex conversations that I’ve heard between them [Arias and Travis Alexander].  You know, I’m a grown-up woman.  I’ve had some much better phone sex in my life.” — psychotherapist Wendy Walsh

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Thanks to the Jodi Arias trial, the blogosphere is discussing Cameron Diaz’s panties.  That’s a good enough excuse to run this picture of Cameron Diaz in panties.

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The Huffington Post is still in search of a few good editors.  Unless, of course, the Post has unearthed evidence that O’Reilly is is, indeed indeed, a victorious homosexual.

© 2010-2024 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

 Ass You Like It

“Shake your wiener!” — Welcome to Myrtle Manor’s Chelsey, above

TV Report

Winning Me Back:  Welcome to Myrtle Manor.  OK, I’ll admit that a lot of this stuff is probably staged (how many trailer parks conduct beauty pageants?), but the knuckleheads at Myrtle Manor are an engaging bunch, gosh darn it.

Losing Me:  The Walking Dead.  Major, longtime characters keep getting killed off by the show’s writers, and I’m just fine with that, which is probably not what AMC’s producers have in mind.

Game of Thrones:  Downton Abbey for the dungeons and dragons crowd.  It’s soap opera, but so well-produced, well-acted, and visually arresting that it’s easy to get sucked in to its fantasy world.

Orphan Black:  I don’t know if it’s a good sign or a bad sign when your opening episode goes out of its way to showcase the heroine’s derriere.  OK, I’m lying; it’s definitely a good sign.

Basic-cable channels seem to occupy a nudity no-man’s land.  Not bold enough to flash full-frontal and too timid to bare boobs, basic channels opt instead for shapely rear ends.  So do we.  Keep up the good work, basic cable.

Tatiana Maslany and her two co-stars on the premiere of BBC America’s Orphan Black.

Myrtle Manor’s Chelsey doing what people usually do at trailer parks:  strutting her stuff in a beauty pageant.

Game of Thrones’s Emilia Clarke demonstrates why teenage boys want their parents to get HBO.

An extra on the set of AMC’s The Walking Dead.

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From New York magazine:

No, no, no.  Bad idea.  You’ll ruin the show for teenage boys and for … other people.  You want male nudity, go watch Spartacus.   Below, a gratuitous penis for Matt Zoller Seitz (and, of course, for Myrtle Manor “wiener girl” Chelsey).

Meanwhile, on Survivor, Brenda (below) strives for success.

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I haven’t been watching much Rachel Maddow lately.  She spends too much time on issues of great importance to a relatively small number of people, including gay rights.  But when Maddow turns to matters like government corruption or military misadventures, there’s no one better in cable news.  On Tuesday, she and Eliot Spitzer skewered former SEC chief Mary Schapiro, and it was terrific journalism.

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Two weeks ago, I introduced a “please let them be struck by lightning” list by spotlighting a pompous, irritating spokeswoman for AARP.  Money-grubbing, shameless Fred Thompson, shilling for AAG in the picture above, makes the list this week.

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The thumbs are all buried now, and that’s a bummer.

I thought Roger Ebert was a superb writer but a critic with … uh, peculiar taste.  But if you love movies, Ebert was a big part of your past, and it’s sad to see him go.

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