Sarah Haskins takes on media aimed at women and it’s hilarious: http://current.com/target-women/

Can I just say what a hilarious show this is? When it was actually on TV I never watched it, despite my roommate watching it every week and loving it. I finally watched it on Hulu a few months ago and loved it so much I had to get it on DVD, which just arrived today. The show just gets better watching it again since I probably missed half the jokes from laughing so much the first time. The actors are all perfect in their parts and the running jokes throughout the whole series make it even funnier. I’m actually glad I didn’t watch it on TV though because I would have been super pissed when it was canceled. I know my roommate was. Supposedly a movie is in the works but I feel like movies made from TV shows don’t turn out all that well. It sounds like all the original people have signed on though so maybe.

“That’s what you do when life hands you a chance to be with someone special. You just grab that brownish area by its points and you don’t let go no matter what your mom says.”

I’ve really been enjoying HBO’s new True Blood series. I wasn’t sure I would from the initial previews but I’ve liked Anna Paquin in other movies and I love Louisiana so I decided to check it out any way. I told my mom about it after seeing it since she likes vampire books and movies, and it turns out she already has the complete series of books by Charlaine Harris that the show is based on and says they’re great, really funny. Now I’m a big proponent of always reading the book before seeing the movie (or tv show) but at this point I’m already into the show. Apparently it’s following the plot of the first book fairly well so I don’t want to ruin what’s happening next in it by reading the book. But I always read the books first! They’re usually the better story. It’s a dilemma. I think maybe I’ll watch the first season, then read all the books. I’m sure the show will start to deviate more and more from the books as it goes on so it won’t matter much any more.

I really like the opening credits too. The song is “Bad Things” by Jace Everett:

On second thought, I probably will just borrow the books from my mom now. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

I finally got the DVDs for Long Way Round, Ewan MacGregor and Charley Boorman’s 2004 round the world motorcycle trip. They had filmed it and turned it into a show, which apparently aired on Bravo but I never saw it. I had to order the DVDs from amazon.ca because I wasn’t finding them still available in the US for some reason (at least not the special edition with 10 episodes, as opposed to the original 7). The whole series was fantastic. I would recommend watching it even if you’re not particularly interested in motorcycles. Just the whole traveling into remote parts of the world and meeting the people there angle is really interesting. They had a cameraman, Claudio von Planta, on a third motorcycle with them, and two support vehicles traveling a few days behind them to meet up at borders and help with the documentation needed there for crossings. The roads for probably 2/3 of their trip were pretty much non-existent so you get to see some pretty rough off-roading as well.

They actually ran into Ted Simon in Mongolia – he’s the author of Jupiter’s Travels, about his riding round the world for 4 years on a Triumph back in the 1970s. They worked with UNICEF for the trip and met up with children in different cities to spread awareness of UNICEF’s cause. My favorite parts were when they stayed with Igor in Ukraine (episode 3) and when they traveled the Road of Bones in Siberia (episode 7).

Last year they did another trip, Long Way Down, where they traveled from the tip of Scotland to the tip of South Africa. I’ll probably pick up that DVD set soon to check out.

The Comanche Moon miniseries is finally set to air on CBS. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. It’s the last of the adaptations of the books, and again Larry McMurtry was a co-screenwriter so it will be very true to the story. There are a bunch of clips available on CBS’s website so I checked them all out. It looks like Steve Zahn and Karl Urban were good choices for Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call. Those are hard characters to live up to, especially since the great portrayals of them by Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones in the Lonesome Dove miniseries. The rest of the casting looks to be good as well. It starts January 13, and continues on the 15th and 16th, from 9-11pm each night. Definitely watch this. (Also read the four books and watch the other three miniseries if you haven’t.)

http://www.nbc.com/Video/rewind/full_episodes/30rock.shtml

Liz Lemon is my hero.

Since I’m apparently on a youtube kick, here are some videos to end the day:

Freedom

I’m not really an Eminem fan but I absolutely loved this video when it came out.

Comanche Moon (Chapter 1 here) is being made into a mini-series! Steve Zahn is playing Gus, which I think should fit just fine. Some Australian actor who I don’t know is playing Woodrow. He’d better be good. Val Kilmer is in it too. I love him. It looks like this will be coming out on CBS in November. I can’t wait!

If you haven’t seen the other Lonesome Dove mini-series (or read the books for that matter), I suggest you get to it:
Lonesome Dove – book – tv
Streets of Laredo – book – tv
Dead Man’s Walk – book – tv
Comanche Moon – book – tv
(that’s the order they were written in, which is not chronological for the stories, but I like it that way)