On the one hand, NBC’s The Singing Bee will premiere this summer, featuring ordinary people singing along to popular songs and then they have to get the lyrics right once the music stops. On the other hand, FOX’s Don’t Forget the Lyrics premieres this summer, featuring ordinary people singing along to popular songs and then they have to get the lyrics right once the music stops. Totally different. And not at all alike.

I had almost forgotten that FOX and NBC did this before with The Contender and The Next Great Champ, but I think singing shows are probably a lot more enjoyable than boxing shows so maybe everyone can win!

As also noted in the article, FOX typically goes at it with ABC in this game, as with Supernanny vs. Nanny 911 and Wife Swap vs. Trading Spouses, but also The Chair vs. The Chamber. Nice to find a new sparring partner.

As a What Not to Wear addict,*I decided to take in the pilot episode of Shut up! It’s Stacy London. Truth be told, I was prepared to not really like the show based on the commercials, which made it look rather annoying.

And watching it, certainly for the first half, was pretty irritating. Stacy had dipped into the big bag of desperate talk show tricks from the get go, principally the handing out of many, many gifts to the studio audience - sometimes as a “reward” and sometimes randomly. Another thing that turned me off was this bizarre posture issue that Stacy developed, where she was slightly hunched over and had no neck, despite the fact that she is in reality a gazelle with a very long neck. The other thing that drove me crazy was the sheer number of segments that she crammed into her hour long show, specifically:

• a fashion show of the worst Friday night outfits that her studio audience ever wore and selecting the absolute worst for a makeover and an end of show reveal,
• a young woman who wore the same dress to a wedding as another guest - a grandmother,
• a trip to Lisa Rinna’s store Belle Gray,
• an excursion with four friends to Rebecca Taylor and shopping with the adorable Miss Taylor herself,
• a road test by three viewers of the season’s hottest trends (orange shiny leggings, super high wasted jeans, mega-platforms),
• cool beauty products with a Redbook editor (including something I didn’t know was a problem or that you could talk about on TV),
• Stacy and two “high heel virgins” testing comfortable all day high-heeled shoes, and
• Jane Krakowski’s life in five outfits - including a very awesome coatdress in orange from age six.

And Stacy kept saying, randomly, inappropriately, “Shut up!”

But somewhere during the show, somewhere between Rebecca Taylor telling us her vaguely useful five fashion essentials for spring (the laminated lace trench coat was cute, but the cropped swing jacket, not so much) and Stacy giving an audience member a brooch that was attached to the back of Stacy’s dress, I got it. I realized that Shut up! is not a talk show. It’s basically a magazine, except you don’t have to read it, you don’t have to buy it, and it’s on TV.

I don’t buy or read fashion and beauty magazines, basically because after a run with Teen magazine during my adolescence I became firmly convinced that it didn’t make much sense to pay for the same information over and over again. Especially where the advice never really squarely fit me, but rather some idealized creatures with entirely different hair, skin, and body type specifications. The magazine never made me feel bad about myself (quite frankly, I was at my physical peak during my teens, playing soccer three seasons a year), but rather, I was pretty sure I wasn’t the target demographic. (Though Lauren Christy’s “Magazine” does resonate with me.)

But what I liked about Stacy’s show was that launching off of what she does on What Not to Wear, the clothes, the accessories, the advice, and the beauty products that she talked about on her show were appropriate for a much broader range than I envision the big fashion and beauty magazines really satisfy.

Once I came to this realization, I began to appreciate the show a lot more. I’m a busy person, and, notwithstanding the fact that I would never buy a fashion or beauty magazine because I wouldn’t want to subscribe and the cover price on a one-off purchase is highway robbery, I liked the idea of a TV version of such a magazine. It was a highly efficient way to get some good information.

It reminded me that I’m pretty tempted to stop my subscription for Real Simple when it expires, because, quite frankly, it’s a lot quicker for me to watch the weekly episodes of the show, which take less than half an hour, versus reading the whole magazine, which certainly is full of helpful information applicable to my actual everyday life and my aspirational everyday life but takes me the better part of a month off and on to read. And I can get the details from the show online.

So will I watch in the fall when Shut up! formally debuts on TLC? Maybe.

*It was the BBC’s What Not to Wear that originally sucked me in - I have Trinny and Susannah’s book (not that I’ve actually followed it!) but never got around to Stacy and Clinton’s - when I was off at school because BBC America was some convenient, sub-100 channel (got me into The Office too), but I can never find the channel now so that ship has sailed.

So I have found that when I get home, I am tired of one-handed typing due to my broken finger. So I have hit upon a solution of sorts. I have decided to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for home writing since work writing makes my left hand all tired. I’ve had a Dragon NaturallySpeaking for some time but was always too lazy to do the training to get it too understand to my voice. So this past week I have devoted some time to getting the training done and, in fact, this post is written with the program. Of course, I’ve had to go back and correct a lot of the things that have been written, but mostly it’s just an occasional word here and there. So hopefully I will be able to do more posting before the cast comes off (did i forget to mention the cast?) and who knows? This might make it easier for me to do more posting in the long-term.

alas, i have broken my right pinkie finger. my dreams of blogging about the missives of McCain, Hilary, Barack, and the heretofore silent Giuliani are thwarted by the effort required at this time. i shall soon regain the ability to type away furiously (if with bad form, sorry mavis!). in the meantime, take a moment to remember that here in SF we get a mayoral election this year! That should be fun!

Don’t know if it’s mine or the US Postal Service’s, but who doesn’t honestly think a lot of these are going to get stolen or supremely messed with?

In honor of California moving up its primary (and to spark up the blog and make me “care” about politics again), I am starting my 2008 Presidential Campaign watch now even though that goes against my better judgment. I am starting with an experiment. today, I “joined” the campaigns of Hilary, Barack, Giuliani, and McCain - I can’t be bothered to use full names and you know who I mean - that is, I signed up for their e-mail lists. I’m tempted to sign up with a different e-mail address and zip code because it would be interesting to know whether there’s any blue state/red state variance in e-mail campaign messages. Iowa City doesn’t get the San Francisco speeches or ads and vice versa so why would the written communication be the same (other than the logistics of parsing that out - but modern technology is amazing).

I picked the four people I could stand the most and plan to compare, analyze, and mock their messages. I’ll think about signing up for a few of the longer shots and people whose messages I imagine I’ll have a hard time stomaching. I should be fair, but I haven’t got a lot of time to devote to this. We’ll see.

One observation, so far. I only got confirmations and thank yous from Giuliani and McCain. Both were amusing. Giuliani, mindful of aggressive anti-spam defenses, asks me to add his site’s url to my safe senders list. McCain asks me for money and to set up a “McCainSpace” page, which made me giggle because it comes off like an awkward, desperate to be hip (”the kids still like MySpace, right?”) rip-off. But I give them points for the effort. Why do Hilary and Barack take me for granted?

I, obviously, did not win either of the lotteries. So I’m still here, but feeling a need for a transition. Of course, this is because while my life is standing still, so very many friends and co-workers are transitioning out of or into new jobs. I feel the need to change something, though it’s hard to justify change for the sake of change. But all the thinking has been quite a distraction.
My current thoughts, i.e. list of many options I’ll probably never execute on:

• Cut my hair - wait, I actually am probably going to do this
• Buy a new (to me) car - hard to justify when I have a (9 year old) car (that is no longer manufactured) that is paid off, my registration and insurance fees are negligible, I calculate that I’ve driven about 10,000 miles in the last four years, I drive at most twice a week and about 20 miles total in a really heavy week (occasionally up to 60 miles total if a trip to see my mom occurs)
• Start a running program with the goal of running Bay to Breakers - inspired irrationally by my sprained ankle
• Finish learning to play the guitar - can’t even type that with a straight face
• Write a novel
• Travel more
• Brush up on my Spanish
• Learn French
• Cook more
• Clean my office
• Blog more

We’ll see.

The jackpots are so very high. The chance to put down a buck or two and walk away impossibly rich is alluring. I wasn’t sure if I could get beyond the amusement of the fact that this week is National Problem Gambling Awareness Week (a little awkward, no?) - as it says right on my Mega Millions ticket - but I did and made a late afternoon dash to the one place near my work that I knew sold tickets, worried, but kind of hoping (for forced rationality’s sake) the shop was closed. It was not and I have to admit to buying into the madness by purchasing 3 plays for tonight’s record Mega Millions drawing and 2 plays for tomorrow’s respectable $57 million California Super Lotto jackpot drawing. I don’t expect to win, but, well, to quote the lottery slogan that I usually find horrifying - you can’t win if you don’t play. (You can, of course, lose miserably by playing, but no need to go into that.) The lottery has worse odds than just about any game in Vegas, but if you can take it for a lark, a bit of entertainment, it’s all right.

p.s. This all makes me think of (as I always do) that great The Simpsons episode involving a fervor over huge lottery jackpot, the best part of which is when people start checking out Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” from the library, only to discover it’s not quite as helpful as they presumed.

So I was just watching a show in Discovery Channel HD about righting a “capsized logging boat in the Pacific Northwest.” “Why” you may ask? I honestly don’t know. It’s just that it’s in HD and it’s so awesome. I was turning on the TV to relax with an episode of The Simpsons that I’m sure I’ve seen a hundred times, but the the TV was on Discovery HD and as the picture came up I saw this barge tipping, tipping, tipping, and all these red logs sliding off the deck and suddenly the craft was upside down. And then . . . they righted it! Fascinating.

I am so excited for Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? The commercials make it look like it’s going to provide so many priceless moments. It looks certain to prove both (1) that most people really do forget more than they remember on balance and (2) that a lot of the things you learn are lovely but have absolutely no application in your adult life and shouldn’t clog up your brain space. Although none of the questions I’ve seen in the commercials seem that hard - how many sides does a trapezoid have? what’s a diameter? what’s a pronoun? So I suppose maybe I shouldn’t find this so funny - I mean 45% of these people vote, right?