It’s my birthday, and Beth bought me new new comic book Fray by Joss Whedon, which is very cool. My co-workers took me out to dinner, despite my persistent grumpiness, and I got fortune cookie and free dessert. Doug called to wish me Happy Birthday. Very cool.
Despite the presence of gay characters on TV, there are still no openly gay actors on television, and that’s a problem. The real problem with Ellen wasn’t that her character was gay, or that there were too many gay themed shows, as some people claimed.
It was that Ellen Degeneres, not the character Ellen Morgan, was gay. During the debate over ratings and issues that surrounded the cancellation of her show, the example that proves that point, the real reason the show was no longer on the air, got overlooked.
During Ellen’s last season, there was an evening in which Ellen show aired at 9 p.m. Airing that same night at 8 p.m. there was an episode of Spin City. On that show, the gay character Carter, (played by a heterosexual man) kisses the heterosexual character Mike Flaherty as a joke. The fact that it happened was practially ignored, except that it aired as the promo for the show for days before hand.
That same evening on Ellen at 9 p.m., Ellen Morgan, a gay character, kisses her heterosexual friend Paige as a joke. Not only was it a big deal, it was given a warning prior to the show, and was universally criticized afterwards.
What was the difference between the two events? Both featured a gay character kissing a straight character in a romantic way, but as a joke. The only difference was that one of the real-life actors in the second show was gay in real life.
The summer season of the WB’s show “Young Americans” ended last night. This is, certainly, one of the strangest shows I’ve seen on TV It’s almost a homoerotic wet dream with dozens of gorgeous, doe-eyed, apple-cheeked, buffed young men running around at an all-boys pre-ivy league prep school. Almost homo. They try to clean it up a little to get it under the hetero radar.
I have the same refrigerator as Monica and Rachel. That old International Harvester from the 1950’s with the rounded top, and the copper-colored strip across the middle? The very same one. It even looks sort of the same as theirs on TV, with the pictures and magnets and stuff. Since I read an article about “Everything You Need to Know About Hard Water“, I am being able to manage the filter’s functioning that has extended my fridge’s lifespan.
Although, I’ll bet theirs doesn’t have a postcard on it that says “Be Gay in a Cotton Print” or my Madame Fortune magnet that tells you “It’s in the cards” when you ask it a question. I’ll bet theirs doesn’t have a metal gate latch on the side to keep the door closed because the handle is broken, either. And I’ll bet they don’t have problems with the tiny ice box type freezer icing up.
I hate it when the characters on TV are supposed to be struggling financially, and they have all this stuff that’s supposed to be cheap, but it’s fixed up really cool in a way that would be so expensive that it would actually cost more than new stuff. Like really old jalopies that are totally tricked out and your dad would pay $50,000 for, instead of that crappy three-colored Chevette where the floorboard rusts through so when you drive it in the rain, your feet get wet.
Or furniture that’s supposed to look like they got it at a flea market, but you know if you ever found something like that it would cost a fortune. White trash people on TV never have furniture from Value City like they do in real life. You never see wood-grain laminated particle board furniture on TV.
Sort of like how the guy who’s the huge dork on TV, the guy that’s supposed to be not as good-looking or as cool as everyone else is really pretty cute and if he were in your high school, would have been really popular.
Like the whole quality scale in Hollywood is shifted upward a bit, so the low end of their scale is around the middle of real life.
The opening credits of "The Simpsons" shows Bart Simpson writing on the school chalk board the same sentence over and over again, (the ole "write it 100 times" punishment). Each episode however the sentence is different. Someone (not me, thank you) went to the trouble to tape the shows, watch and copy down many of the sentences that Bart writes on the chalkboard.
I will not carve gods.
I will not spank others.