Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Throwaway Thoughts

There's a ton of goofy things on the Internet these days, but this one caught my eye. Our culture has deemed celebrities more important than real issues like war, health care, genocide and such ... so I figured I would jump on the bandwagon and stroke my own ego. So, here are my celebrity look-a-likes:



I had a nice little laugh when I tried this with a photo of myself with dark hair and some facial hair and the top three responses were Johnny Depp, Luke Wilson and Thomas Jefferson. I'm just a bigger fan of Albert Finney, Alan Rickman and Johannes Brahms ... so I though I would share this one with you.

Grammy Nom and Best Cameo in a Music Video

Major congrats to Weird Al Yankovic for his Grammy nomination. The nominations for the 49th annual Grammy Awards were announced December 7th, and I'm very happy to report that our old friend Weird Al made the cut! His recent album Straight Outta Lynwood was nominated for 2 awards: Best Comedy Album (the other nominees are George Carlin, Lewis Black, Bill Engvall and Ron White) and Best Surround Sound Album.

There's a category for Best Surround Sound Album? Or should I just stop reading press releases that come from Weird Al himself?

When MTV or VH1 (or whoever actually shows music videos these days) has their next award show they need to nominate Donny Osmond for best cameo appearance in a video. If you haven't checked it out yet, here ya go ... the hottest video out there:



That's Great Shat!

In my last post I pointed out that we will all soon be missing the remarkably talented William Shatner's game show and have to simply be content with the man's brilliant performances on Boston Legal. Luckily, I stumbled across this piece of video that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Shatner is a talent like no other.



... yes, I promise future posts will have more thought put into them. It's the holiday season ... cut me a break.

Monday, December 18, 2006

One Year Later

This entry officially marks the first anniversary of the ol’ Hippopotamus’ blog. Yup, the very first entry was posted December 20th of 2005. In the past year a number of things have changed, but not the opinions expressed in the very first entry. So, for the two of my three readers who weren’t around for that first entry, I invite you to jump in the time portal and check it out. Yes, I still hate actors.

Isolation

I have to admit that the past few weeks have been refreshing. On the other side of the country with only a minor distraction here and there, I was able to finally (FINALLY!) spend some time getting my thoughts together. No real worries about health and happiness. No major deadlines to meet. No need to be social. I was able to isolate myself briefly from the world. I was able to spend each evening in the gym sorting through the jumbled mass of confusion that my mind had become.

2006 was a year of chaos for me. Frankly, it had overwhelmed me. Too often over the past several months I had lost sight of just who exactly I was. I was exhausted. I was directionless. I was uncertain. And I hate to be uncertain.

So I shut out the rest of the world for a bit. I should do that more often.

Hot Babe on the Campaign Trail

So, late one night in my hotel room, I’m flipping through channels when I stumble across a hot redhead on … CSPAN2? What … ?

It’s Dennis Kucinich announcing that he’ll be running for President again. Standing next to the diminutive Senator was this glorious beauty of a young woman. Having done so much political polling work during the last election, I was fairly familiar with Mr. Kucinich. One fact that I had remembered was that he was often referred to as the bachelor candidate.

Little did I know (how should I? I don’t live in Ohio.) he had recently been married. To a woman thirty years his junior, nonetheless. The former Elizabeth Harper is his new bride – she’s 27 years old and from England – and she’s easy on the eyes.

Here’s hoping Kucinich doesn’t drop out too early … we could use some eye candy on the election trail.

Shat-tastic

William Shatner began hosting a terrible game show last month. A blatant rip-off of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Deal or No Deal, this show has the added attraction of dancing girls and Bill being as campy as humanly possible. It’s called Show Me The Money (they couldn’t even come up with a title that wasn’t a rip-off) and has already been cancelled.

From the show’s press release: After answering a trivia question, a contestant will choose one of 13 dancers, each of whom has a scroll with a dollar figure to be added to or subtracted from the player’s winnings. Contestants must answer at least six questions. ABC is calling the hoofers the "Million Dollar Dancers" and says they’ll always be "ready to break into any style of dance, while audacious master of ceremonies William Shatner spontaneously boogies with the beauties onstage."



Seven more episodes have already been taped and will air … but after that, nada.

Oh well … at least there’s still Boston Legal and Star Trek re-runs.