premiere time a-gain!

the new tv season is kicking off this week with the cw starting their engines. hopefully this year, we'll get full seasons and the decent shows will have a fair fighting chance at sticking around. unfortunately, ever since i got my new computer with leopard, my scanner refuses to talk to it, so i can't scan my dweebtastic tv grids. however, i am trying a different (but equally nerdy) approach this year, and am putting it on an excel spreadsheet. do you guys want me to upload that to guide you through this? i also have a list of premiere dates i can upload as well, just let me know in the comments if that's what y'all want. and just a reminder, i don't include all new shows in my guides, just the ones that have somehow piqued my interest. i will also stick with my 2 - 3 episode with the carpool exception rule. for anyone new around here, that means that i'll give a new show two to three episodes before i officially decide to ditch it or continue watching. the carpool exception is named after that horrid sitcom that premiered last year that i couldn't make past half an episode, and will be used only in extreme circumstances. so make sure to keep coming around so we can keep track of what's on and what's good.

here is a quick rundown of some of what i will have on my plate:

RETURNING SHOWS:
gossip girl, top model, heroes - duh
sarah connor chronicles - aside from john connor, this show is pretty decent
how i met your mother, new adventures of old christine - solid sitcoms
30 rock, the office, samantha who? - awesome comedy viewing
my name is earl, entourage - i've come this far
desperate housewives, ugly betty - old reliables
pushing daisies, private practice, life, dirty sexy money - baby's first full season!

NEW SHOWS:
tabatha's salon takeover, cho show - already started, and i'm liking them so far
privileged, valentine inc - lame cw shows that i'll probs hate but can't stop watching
90210 - this just reeks of good bad and i can't wait
fringe - i will follow you anywhere but scientology, mr abrams
true blood - hbo does vampires. sexayyy
little britain usa - intrigued
ex list - watching only because i've worked with the actress. probably won't last
kath and kim - though i am dubious
knight rider - i watched the tv movie and it was bad, but i'll still be watching this


NEW SHOWS THAT I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BUT WILL PUT UP WITH FOR A FEW WEEKS ANYWAY:
sons of anarchy, easy money, the mentalist, life on mars - shrug
my own worst enemy, crusoe - according to the internetz, these both will suck badly



what shows are you guys excited for?

cockburn, mahboob, and dong dong

recently and not so recently on the blog:

(it's been a while since we've rounded up, but it makes us look more prolific!)

- rogue pony told wife who told me to yearbook myself (who told brother...). hilarity ensued for ages and then the rest of the big time blogs caught on.

- i got a serious case of olympic fever, and turned my millions of hours of viewings into some astute observations, starting with the inaugural Oh! Lympics 2008 post. from there, i came across some hilarious wording, made sure China knew i was onto them, had a psychic dream, and then slacked for a little bit, but made up for it with a jam-packed closing post

in non-olympics news

- becca cracks the case on how children get into grabber machines

- i wrote a love letter to my post office

- i got a part-time job and learned the dirty inbred secrets of the coffee family

- a note on pants

- and another on spam

- a subway spotlight i wish i'd seen

- and finally, the the 90's are back in a big way!!

90's again already?

a couple days ago, i was working on a shoot and doing some pickups with a buddy of mine, and we were noticing how the 90's are making a comeback. it started off with the radio station we were listening to that kept playing 90's hits. then throughout the day, we caught a few things here and there reaffirming our belief that the 90's are back. i got home from the cookie shoppe (as i said to a different friend, i feel like my cookie place would spell shop with a -pe) today and checked my mail and dadgummit if jennie garth and shannen doherty weren't sitting on the cover of my entertainment weekly, acting all 90's about the world.

i guess there's nothing we can do to stop it, but can we all please be conscious about not letting the fashion go back there too?



i mean, seriously

Subway Spotlight : Dance Party Edition

You know how you sometimes see something so outright strange that you can’t help but wonder if you are on a prank tv show? If you haven’t, you probably don’t live in NYC.

One of those “am I being pranked” moments happened to me last night on the subway platform at 14^th street station.

I look across to the downtown platform and there is a very normal looking young woman listening to an ipod and full out partner dancing with a support beam. At first I thought, she’s just gotten really into the song she’s listening to and snap back into reality – but nope, the dance just continued to get more and more theatrical. It started out as a little sexy dance where she was sort of dancing and using the pole to sort of slide up and down on (so not sanitary), and then it turned out into a full out ballet/broadway style musical number. It was compelling and entertaining to watch from the comfort of the uptown platform, since she wasn’t actually invading my personal space like she was the people on her platform. Then her train came and she hopped right on it like every other normal person who hadn’t just done a whole flashdance routine.

Moral of the story: When dancing on the subway platform, always use a support beam as your partner so that you don’t fall on the tracks. Your welcome!

Oh! Lympics - closing out

hey dudes. i apologize for my sparse existence recently, but for the last 18 days, my life has been olympics, olympics, cookies, olympics. from the opening ceremony on 8.8.08 through 8.25.08 (due to some days of working and the impressive amount of hours i ended up recording and watching, i did not finish out my olympic experience until late last night) i watched nothing but olympics. i recorded the regular shows i watch , but did not touch any of them until i watched the last of my olympic recordings. if you had an in person conversation with me in the last two weeks (which was probably rare), the chances that i brought the olympics up in conversation were probably at about 90%. i had nothing else to talk about, and therefore nothing much else to blog about. i even slacked on the Oh! Lympics posts, opting instead to keep a piece of paper in front of me, and scribbling notes down whilst i watched. so now, i present to you the final installment of Oh! Lympics Beijing 2008, which is really just a hodgepodge of random observations...

- During all the beach volleyball games, music was played between points to keep the crowd up. for the most part, it was a wildly random assortment of tunes, but the one that kept popping up in each match was gwen stefani's 'sweet escape'. not the whole song, just the call and repeat "Woo-oo!" "WOO-oo" parts. at first i thought it was cute how the audience would really get involved for this. then i got annoyed that they played it so much. then i went to a Brooklyn Cyclones game with my new workmates, and they did the same there. and it was hard to not repeat the WOO-oos. so i understand now.

- Softball, Round robin game vs. Chinese Taipei. The male commentator talks about the Chinese Taipei team having a lot of lefties. the former US Team member and current lady commentator (we've talked about her before) sets up a possibly dirty joke: "You know what they say about us lefties!" awkward pause and then "We're special!" i want to shake her hand. her left hand.

- Watching a little bit of Trampoline got me started on collecting hilarious names...Cockburn (pronounced Coburn, but i think that part was just made up) and Dong Dong were both trampolinists (i may have made that word up)...a 10K runner was graced with the name Mahboob. and a brazilian volleyball player had the first name of Fofao, which really tickled me for some reason.

- the amount of frustrated swearing by the athletes and coaches that occurred (and would obviously go uncensored, but also unacknowledged by commentators hoping their channel would not get fined by the FCC) was AWESOME! i love a good swear.

- mcdonald's commercial advertising the 'breakfast chicken sandwich'. i'm noting this because a) gross and b) they advertise the "homemade-tasting bun". nice qualification there, micky d's. also, does anyone really believe that the athletes endorsing mcdonald's really ever eat there???

- has anyone else noticed that, while athletes usually look super hottt in their athletic gear, whenever there is video or photographs of them in normal clothes, for the most part they look really awkward?

- i got really annoyed by the story repetition. i realize it's not normal to watch all the playoff games of team sports and prelim and quarterfinal rounds of individual sports, but seriously, you do not need to mention three or four separate times that laura berg likes to make chalk handprints or that beach volleyball gold medalist Phil Dalhausser hated his parents when he went bald in his 20's or how many scars that one scary looking diver has.

- what the hell is a steeple chase and why are people hurdling into water? is wile e. coyote behind this?

- annoying me more than story repetition was the mispronouncing of names. i can only officially get a rise out of the latino names because those are the only ones i can be certain about, though i did have some question about their pronunciation of some of the japanese names, and i think i have some knowledge of those. but when they kept pronouncing "Mari" as "Marie", and "Jimenez" as "Himmenez" (this one particularly angered me because the mispronunciation is similar to how my surname often gets mangled) i wanted to call up nbc and set them straight. also, i thought female volleyball player Danielle Scott-Arruda's name was actually Scott-Ahuda until i saw it on the screen. both dudes repeatedly wimped out of the double r's by subbing an h in there.

and last, but certainly not least:

- synchronized swimming. um, synchronized swimming is crazy and absolutely amazing. how have i not known it's pure awesomeness until now? seriously, we need to stop making fun of it, because it is genius.

alright guys. i can't explain why i went so olympic crazy this year, but hopefully you won't have to hear me utter another word about them until february 2010.

on junk mail

what spam email subject line could be better than:

"Britney sues vagina for divorce" ??



None, right??? Wrong, it's this one:



"Britney Spears Stashes Guns in her Vagina -- Paparazzi Duck for Cover"

on pants

i don't know if it's living alone, the heat of my apartment in the summertime, or the nearly two months of unemployment i just got through, but i've developed a habit of immediately removing my pants when i get home. and it's awesome.

everything makes sense now

i recently had to pick up a part time job because we're in an effin recession and i wasn't making any money sitting around my apartment waiting for PA jobs. my ultimate goal (the plan is still in action) was to get a bartending job. this was ideal for me for a variety of reasons that i won't bore you with here. however, while i make a great mixed drink, i have minimal bartending knowledge (expanded slightly by some youtube lessons) and zero experience. and while it's easy to pick up bartending knowledge along the way, it won't help you in new york if you have no experience.

so i put that dream on the backburner and started looking at other food service jobs that might be somewhat related to bartending. i answered an ad for a barista at a cookie shop (no experience necessary) and got the job. let me tell you what's funny about this: I don't drink coffee. i can probably count on one hand (okay, two if you count the all nighters i pulled in college) the amount of times i've had coffee. my mother quit drinking it before i was of coffee drinking age, so i didn't really grow up with it around me. also, my stomach hates it, and since i have to live with my stomach all the time, i try to keep it happy. and now, i have to make beautiful coffee drinks that people will enjoy without really knowing what they taste like. this has actually gone alright so far. i love learning how to do knew things, expecially so i can impress people with my wildly random experience bank. one of the things i really like pulling out is my past as a pole vaulter. that and my former employment as a post office worker. so, learning all about something i don't partake in really isn't a problem for me at all. i haven't had any complaints about my beverage making so far.

however, can i just say coffee drinkers are crazy!! there are like 12 different names for basically the same thing!! it's all coffee and milk! sometimes it's really strong coffee in a tiny cup with no milk, then there's another name for that exact same thing with a dollop of foam...sometimes it's the same thing with two names and the only difference is that one you are getting less liquid and some pretty foam. it's all the same!! anyway, this is the thing that really baffled me once i started learning to make the variety of coffee beverages. for some reason, i just assumed all these drinks were wildly different. they aren't! the differences are so subtle! i feel like i found out the secret to the world!!

goodbye to you! forever!

i was at my local post office last friday to pick up a package from my wonderful mother. i never expect a pleasant experience at the post office (unless we're talking about when i worked at my college PO), so i usually just try to be as patient as possible with both the line and the postal employees. i've had bad experiences at the post office by my old apartment, but nothing beyond hour lines at the Kensington branch. However, on friday, i noticed there was a particularly pissy woman working.

usually, post offices have a window designated to pick packages up. the kensington post office does that, but only sometimes. so if i go in and see an extra line or a person in the fifth window, i head there to pick the package up. if not, i get in the normal line and wait it out. this particular friday, there was no line or person at the window, so i got in the normal line. the bell rung and i approached the window bearing my package slip. before i could do anything but give a lovely smile to the worker, she grunts out 'uh, you need to go to the last window.' i remind myself that most PO workers are bitches (i wasn't) and to just remain pleasant and not raise a fuss. i head over to the fifth window, which by this point has a customer waiting for service. i slowly approach him from the side and notice there is no one even offering to help this man, so i look back through the windows to see if there even any extra workers. at this point, the bitch from before snappily says 'not that window' (i've stopped in front of window 4). i decide to not take this sitting down, so i assertively say back to her "Yeah, i know, but someone's already here waiting to be helped." She sights the man and just goes 'oh...'

The two of us wait a few minutes before anyone even comes to the window. finally another worker comes to collect the dude's slip, but spends an excessive amount of time looking for it. i'm chillin, because i know how incompetent some brooklyn post offices are, but the man in front of me keeps turning to me to complain. "can you believe this? we pay for this service." etc, etc. I nod my head in agreement, and offer a few incredulous laughs. he then says "you know, it's on youtube!" i'm all "say what?" and he says "type in kensington post office".

so i did just that, and I'm about 80% sure that the postal worker that is heard in the following video is the same bitch who snapped at me for no reason.



and might i say, while he probably didn't go about it in the best way, this man had a point. that worker was not only antagonizing the customer from behind the glass, but she also seemed to forget that she's a government worker and can't just throw out attitude everywhere because she hates her life.

oh! lympics - i'm so psychic

uh, guys. we need to talk. so as we all know, i've been watching an enormous amount of olympics. and i was complaining to myself the other day that there are so many fricken swimming matches. i mean, i was going a little overboard watching a lot of the heats and semifinals...i probably won't do that next time, but i did want to get familiar with who the competition was. okay, blah blah blah, watching a lot of olympics...all the swimming events are bleeding into one another. i get confused because i feel like i already saw someone win a medal so how did this other guy just win it too. a lot of it had to do with me recording all the hours and hours of stuff, but prioritizing the primetime offerings before going to the affiliates. so, i would actually see a medal race before i would watch the semifinals for it. ok, with this in mind, i could've sworn i saw a news story yesterday in my reader about rebecca soni winning a gold. i explicitly remember not clicking on the story because i didn't want it to further spoil anything i hadn't watched. so, just effing now, i'm watching the primetime olympics, and sure enough, rebecca soni comes up for a swim. oh, i wonder if she'll do good, since she just won the gold in that other event. so i'm watching it, and she wins. and i'm like...cool, another one. but, everyone's saying that this is her first gold and i'm like 'but she won one yesterday, i saw it in the news'. and i'm doing all this internet research (aka a five minute google search), and this gold medal seems to have been her first. and this event is happening live, so it's not a repeat of something i already saw. guys, am i psychic? did i dream this last night? has watching all these olympics unlocked some hidden power in me? or do i have a brain tumor? these are all very important questions. if you guys can find out why i feel like i saw an article yesterday saying rebecca soni (an athlete i wasn't even that familiar with) won a gold, then please let me know. i feel like i saw it in my reader, but when i combed the backlogs of cnn, there was nothing. !!

*addendum

can i also quickly just say...considering that these girls' government issued passports were the accepted proof of age, and also considering that these girls were taken from their homes at the age of four for training (i've been watching a lot of these olympics. but they always say the same story every time. get some new material pleez.) i mean, wouldn't strings easily be pulled for them if the purpose was to train them to be better than all other countries? i'm just throwing that out there.

Oh! Lympics - China's gold

ok, first off, sacramone, can i just say that you took it all a little too hard. even if there was no balance beam or floor fall, the chinese were just way too far ahead. chill out girl. you got a medal. no tears baby.

now, the real business. dearest google reader shared with me today this article about how one of the girls on China's team had her age reported as 13 just nine months ago. and since we all know that there is absolutely no way at least two of those girls were 16 (unless they were using east asian age reckoning to count, and He Kexin's birthday is actually January 1, 1994, then she would be 16...but that's cheating), let's just skip over the content of the article and go to a specific paragraph. tell me this isn't confusing:

"If the age reported by Xinhua was correct, that would have meant He was too young to be on the Chinese team that beat the United States on Wednesday and clinched China's first women's team Olympic gold in gymnastics. He is also a favorite for gold in Monday's uneven bars final."

just to clarify. He is a she. hehe. i could do this all day.

children in grabber machines: the saga continues

remember this picture post from back in August 2006 of children stuck in grabber machines?

well my friend meg just forwarded me this surveillance video today, which is essentially the 2nd chapter to that saga. or perhaps it's a prequel for all those who have spent sleepless nights wondering how the hell those children get into the grabber machines.



now just in case the video is not enough instruction for you, here is becca's never fail step by step guide to getting trapped in a grabber machine:

1. make sure you are at least a relatively small child
2. make sure that you are completely unattended
3. pretend to play with grabber machine for a minute
4. when coast is clear, put your head in the door of the grabber machine
5. by some sort of child magic, squeeze yourself into the actual toy deposit area
6. when your mother finally comes to retrieve you (1/2 hour after she realizes you are gone), mock her and then scurry up into the toy area (aka the promise land)
7. sit atop your throne of stuffed animals until someone rips you out by your feet
8. emerge from the grabber machine like a baby lamb being violently pulled from a sheep's birth canal.
9. take one of the stuffed animals as reward for your efforts
10. walk out of store like nothing has happened
11. repeat steps 1 through 10 as necessary

Inaugural Oh! Lympics*

The fortuitous convergence of complete control over my television watching (yay for solo living!) and an enormous amount of free time has resulted in me really enthusiastically throwing myself into the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I've always loved the olympics, both winter and summer. i remember when i was a little kid, i would pretend to skate around on a mattress pad while the competition was going on. however, this is the first year that i've REALLY gotten into it. thanks to dvr and my penchant for making complicated schedules, i've mapped out everything that i want to watch and when it's on. i started by watching the full opening ceremony (okay, i ff'd through a few countries i never heard of, but i paused for the hottt ones. serbia, anyone?), and the next day tentatively stuck my toe in uncharted waters. I started out on saturday by only watching the main nbc channel, and it was then that i would discover i apparently enjoy watching volleyball. interesting, since it's one of my least favorite sports to play. from that, i moved on to beach volleyball---there was comfort in familiarity but still the intrigue of something new. after this, i had an epiphany-- if it turns out that i like watching volleyball (and apparently football), how many other sports that i brushed off would i be able to get into?

a lot, it turns out. i went to the nbc olympics website and looked at all my different sports options. i knocked out ones that i figured would be boring to watch (sorry rowers and archers) and then checked out when my chosen ones would air and on which channel. then i set my dvr in blocks to record everything that i might be into, prelim matches and heats included. I DO THIS EVERY DAY NOW. i am up to my ears in glorious olympics and i feel so in the know!

so here's my point - there are some really hilarious things that happen when you watch hours and hours of olympics all day every day, and most of them have to do with the commentators. there was a period of time i considered live blogging what i was watching, but i figured that would just be too extravagant and unnecessary. so i decided to feature comments every once in a while that really tickle me.

There were quite a few from the past two days, but I only remember a couple, so we'll kick this feature off with double the fun:

#1 - Finals, Women's 30m platform Synchronized Diving. China is kicking ass with their amazing (read: robot) synchro divers. these girls are tiny little carbon copies of each other, and when they enter the water, there is barely any splash. canada comes up to dive, and one of their girls is a little thicker than the rest. she is definitely not chunky, definitely not fat, but she is noticeably bigger. through two jumps, the female commentator is like, subtly calling her a fat ass! after they dove, she mentioned that it's harder for them to avoid making a splash because the "Chinese are so slight". After the Canadians' last dive, which was not great, the commentator described the splash the bigger girl made as a tidal wave.
bold.

#2 - Prelim Softball USA vs. Venezuela. Another lady commentator, talking about a specific player who is fond of pranking. apparently, when this player has chalk on her hand, she likes to put the hand print on as many backs as possible, once even doing it on President Bush. With the following quote, she was demonstrating that the player had done this to her many times, but when you take how she worded it, how she said it (man i wish everyone else had heard this because it doesn't have the same effect in written form) and the stereotype of softball players (Team USA wouldn't win all the softball gold medals if Lesbinonia had a team, ifyouknowwhatimean), it makes for an amazing exchange:

** i didn't really know the proper punctuation to convey the feeling of this sentence, but basically after each phrase, she was trying to correct herself, but it just kept getting worse

so, lady commentator is talking about how she's not realized that pranky player has handed her until later, when she finds the hand prints on "all different areas--all different shirts--on the back--oh god"

SHE LITERALLY SAID OH GOD AT THE END OF THAT RAMBLY SENTENCE!!!!

go america.

*thanks to CtS family member Bill, who won the title contest!

a trip down memory lane

eternal thanks to my wife for bringing this to my attention because if you've got some time to kill and some giggles to spare, then that is definitely the website for you. here are my favorite years:








if you do it, you have to share pleez!

takin up all your googles

Recently, on the blog

- i have a failed brilliant idea

- the better blog was good to us by posting both Boot Balance AND my rant against homophobes and their damn excuses.

- Becca travels to philly and apologizes for an eerily portentous comment

- i decide that i want to marry cat deeley

and finally,

- google me? i just met me!

i've really made it!

i was hanging out with my dear friend of, like, 14 years tonight and she asked what comes up when i google myself. i told her it was mostly stuff about some lady named Sara Martinez-Tucker, who is president of some hispanic something or other, and that i don't actually appear until the second or third page. i decided to verify that by googling myself, "sara martinez" again just now, and the first appearance i make, which comes on page 2, is rather curious. actually, it's not only the first appearance i make, but also the ONLY appearance i make on the first ten pages. apparently, i, sara martinez, have a page in the movie section of the nytimes solely because i've worked on a movie with molly shannon and on ivana trump's reality show. how VERY curious! hopefully this post at least ups my google appearances to two. me being sara martinez.

UPDATE: it did NOT up my appearances. at least in the first 10 pages. i didn't have the heart to go on.

HOLY S%&$*

whoa. i sort of want to apologize now about making that joke about murdering the guy sitting next to me on that bus the other day! seriously, the same day that i made that post about my annoying bus buddy, there was news of a deranged maniac who beheaded the man sitting next to him on a greyhound bus in canada and then calmly walked to the front of the bus displaying the head. after doing so much bus travel lately, this news sort of makes me want to pay the fucking $600 a gallon to drive my car. i really wish i had the balls to make a joke about it, but beheadings freak me out so much that i just don't think i can do it! this is probably the least funny post i have ever written.

the story (but only readi it if you aren't currently eating)