Is Lost great or what!

This season has been really quality so far, don't you agree?  What an excellent show!  My brain is too lazy to THEORIZE now, so here are some of my general THOUGHTS on the last couple episodes:

• I'm liking the alterna-timeline stuff.  What a great idea that was, writers of Lost!  I like how the differences between the two realities were quite subtle at first (the flight attendant gives Jack two bottles of vodka instead of one) but are getting progressively wackier (Locke's dad apparently didn't steal his kidney and shove him out of an eight-story window, and Jack has a teenage son who is just as sullen and irritable as his father whaaaaaaaaaaaaat) as time goes on.  
• I'm also loving all the Season 1-Season 6 mirror stuff.  Very Harry Potter.
• I'm fine with how people who knew each other on the island pre-Incident keep bumping into other island folks, cause that sort of thing happens all the time no duh, but what was up with Dogen being in the alterna-timeline?  I'm not sure why but that just doesn't make any sort of sense, even by Lost standards!
• It's nice to have Claire back, but does she really have to be a crazy axe-murderer?  I don't want Jin to die.  Kate, sure, but not Jin.
• What about Widmore?  Why hasn't he been mentioned AT ALL in the past, oh, 15-20 episodes??  Is he the guy Jacob says is coming to the island???  Should I even care????
• Miles has had, like, TWO LINES this season.  Not cool, writers of Lost.

And here are some non-plot-related Lost things:

• I didn't know this until surprisingly recently, but Jack's tears have a NAME (jears!), a Facebook page, and a neat video.
• Geronimo Jack's Beard is the best portmanteau I have ever heard, and it is also a pretty cool podcast that Jorge Garcia does.  Jorge Garcia, the guy who plays Hurley!  It's basically just Jorge Garcia (who, by the way, has been killing it lately) and his lady friend chatting about the mysteries of Lost, as people on a Lost podcast are wont to do, but WITH A TWIST because he's actually on the show and he reads the scripts and stuff. 
• I'm kind of glad Michael is no longer on the show, to be honest.
• This is old, but the Lost art show is still great.
• And also, this Lost subway map.

A list of my favorite rom-coms

Just in time for the day after Valentine's Day!

I didn't include anything that doesn't fit my own strict definition of what a rom-com is, which is basically "a movie that is somewhere between Legally Blonde and About a Boy."  Obviously, not every movie that is both romantic and comedic is a rom-com, no duh.  Several movies that I love have been left out because they do not fit these rigid requirements.  For example, Pretty in Pink (too many teenagers), The Princess Bride (too much adventure), Amélie (too French), The Science of Sleep (also too French), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (too sad), Benny and Joon (too much mental-patient-as-love-interest) and Chocolat (too serious) are NOT ROM-COMS.  Got it?  Okay.  Here are my 14 favorite rom-coms! 

1.  About a Boy -What a great movie this is!  Probably the best thing Hugh Grant, the KING of rom-coms, has ever done, and possibly the best thing Nicholas Hoult, aka Tony from Skins, has ever done (is About a Boy better than series one and two of Skins?  WHO KNOWS!!!)  Seriously, so great though.  Oh, and kahdooze to the ladies in About a Boy.  It is, after all, a rom-com, and not just a heart-warming tale of friendship between a lonely man and a misfit child.

2.  Love Actually - Some people say this one is a bit dumb or unrealistic, to which I say "yeah, but whatever!"  It's got everything you want from a rom-com - Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, romance, comedy, Bill Nighy (?), and happy endings for everyone!  Yay!

3.  Bridget Jones's Diary - Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, killing it again here.  Both true masters of the art of rom-com. 

4.  High Fidelity - John Cusack, another master of the form, at his rom-commiest best (Say Anything is also pretty great, but it has the same problem as Pretty in Pink [re: teenagers]).  

5.  My Big Fat Greek Wedding - Great movie!  Lots of quality laughs.  FUN FACT: this is the only rom-com on my list with Joey "the Fat One" Fatone of N*SYNC in it!

6.  Knocked Up - I feel like this one barely qualifies since it's so Judd Apatow-y and it's almost too funny.  But Katherine Heigl has been in nothing but rom-coms, so sure, this works.

7.  10 Things I Hate About You - Heath Ledger probably could have become a rom-com legend if, you know, he didn't die or whatever.

8.  The Wedding Singer - Adam Sandler is always trying to make SERIOUS ROM-COMS and usually they are pretty bad, but I like this one. 

9.  Legally Blonde -Classic!

10.  Miss Congeniality - Also a classic!

11.  13 Going on 30 - This one is also pretty good!

12.  Ghost Town - Perfectly nice movie.  Not sure if I buy Ricky Gervais' attempts at becoming a ROM-COM LEADING MAN, though.  That's hard to pull off even when one is not a chubby little fat man.

13.  (500) Days of Summer -Very cute, but we'll have to wait and see if it becomes a CLASSIC.

14.  Serendipity - Some people might think this one is very stupid, but I like it. 

HONORARY MENTION:  Moonstruck, because it's my mom's favorite movie.

A few thoughts on Mongolia

Last night I had a dream about Mongolia for no discernible reason.  I can't remember the last time I thought about Mongolia, and it's probably been years since I saw the movie Genghis Khan.  Anyways, in this dream I visited the Mongolian countryside and stayed in a yurt.  It was very cold and I had to buy some gloves from a guy on a horse.  I also visited the capital, Ulaanbaatar, which was nice.  I took lots of pictures in both places.

 In commemoration of this event, I have done some research ("done some research" = consulted Wikipedia) on Mongolia.  Here are some interesting bullet points!

• Mongolia has a population of 2 million people and 20 million goats (10 goats per person!)
• Ulaanbaatar not only has the highest number of A's in its name (5!) for any world capital (probably!), but it is also the coldest capital in the world, with temperatures regularly reaching -40 degrees Fahrenheit!
• Mongolians are famous for their throat-singing, which sounds craaaaazy!
• And there was this American kid whose autism was cured when he went to Mongolia and hung out with some shamans and their horses!
  

Look at what I bought!

A "Garden Gnomes for Obama" pin!

 

From the coveted garden gnome demographic.  They're probably what put him over the edge! 

Speaking of gnomes (best transition ever, probably), I just found this amazing site called Better Gnomes and Gardens, which has all of the latest gnome gnews and information.  As a fan of gnomes, I cannot tell you how absolutely ECSTATIC I am to have found this!  I just wish I had known about it two months ago, when there was an alert for a giveaway of 300 garden gnomes in Phoenix!  (My mom would have loved that!)  Better Gnomes and Gardens has quickly rocketed up towards the top of my list of the Best Things on the Internet, Ever (I'd say it's above This is why you're fat but below Videogum and Wizard People, Dear Reader).  

Peep Show is great!

I may have mentioned earlier that the British television comedy Peep Show is great, but I will mention it again.  Peep Show is great!  Oh man, it is SO GOOD.  I'm midway through the third season right now, and I have to say, I am quite impressed by the consistent super high quality of this show!  ALL OF THE EPISODES thus far have been top-notch, hilarious, cringe-tastic entertainment.  Let me tell you more about it, and why I like it so much!

I came across Peep Show after watching the excellent sketch comedy series, That Mitchell and Webb Look, which has the same two guys as Peep Show.  It's very funny!  Here is a sketch from it:

Ahaha.  That's funny even though I don't live in England where there is, apparently, an excessive amount of football (soccer) coverage; instead, I live in America, where there is, in fact, a dearth of football (soccer) coverage!  But if you substitute all the "football!"s for "American football!"s, it makes TOTAL SENSE.  (The heroin addict Christmas one is also great.)

I enjoyed watching That Mitchell and Webb Look for quite some time, mostly via YouTube, but also sometimes at ungodly hours of the night on BBC America (and one glorious Tuesday afternoon three months ago, when there was a marathon!).  But THEN I found out about Peep Show, which is a real non-sketch show (!) with Mitchell and Webb (!!) that has actual narratives (!!!) and an innovative point-of-view camera technique (!!!!).

SO.  Peep Show is about these two flatmates, Mark and Jez, who are what could be called an "odd couple."  Mark is a terminally pessimistic and awkward office worker and Jez is the opposite of that, but also a "musician."  But what makes this interesting is the innovative point-of-view camera technique and the inner monologue voice-overs.  Here, watch THIS!  Okay, did you watch that?  Good!  Wasn't that neat, how each character's thoughts play out over the action, which is often from their point of view?  What a great idea that was!  (Also, did you notice how immensely quotable it is?  "Tinned food is for crackheads and wores.")  The point of view thing took a while for me to get used to - there was a lot of staring down at food in the first season - but it's pretty neat.  And the voice-overs are great because they double the LPM (laffs per minute).

ALSO:

• Like my other favorite British cringe comedies, The Office and Extras, Peep Show is sometimes very painful to watch!  It gets really bad at times, but in a good way.  It still manages to be very funny even when the characters are at their most unlikable, which is impressive.
  
• Speaking of The Office, it is very much like The Office sometimes, but just because half of it takes place in Mark's office and there is lots of Office-type humor.  But it is unique and different!
• Also speaking of The Office, the Guardian claims Peep Show is the best British comedy of the decade (lofty claim, I know!), better even than The Office (because Peep Show has been on the air for six seasons without a decline in quality, which I'm not sure is how you judge these things, but sure, IT IS THAT GOOD!)!
• The first season was great, but I've been loving the second and third ones because there has been more action from the supporting characters, all of whom are great, but especially Super Hans the crackhead. 
• Okay, so Peep Show is great.  Watch it!  It's all on YouTube!