Grid Effect

A few links to close out the week. We’ll try to make this a weekly installment as it keeps us up to date on recent news items and is usually an easy read. We doubt we’ll have the discipline to actually stick to this, but whatever. It’s a pleasant thought to think we’d follow through with it.

Entourage is stockpiling cameos, which tends to be in lieu of quality. In other words, this season might suck hard. But the list includes Ben Silverman (he has to find some other line of work when NBC cans him), Richard Roeper (he has to find some other line of work after being replaced by some rich guy’s kid) and the “cast” of The View. This is in addition to cameos that have already been announced. Not a bad lineup, but hardly enough to redeem a series.

Here’s a two and a half minute trailer for HBO’s upcoming series True Blood. We’ve mentioned before that it shows potential, but whenever you take a risk with a series like this, it has a deep, deep basement. Anyway, we watched the trailer without any volume, so we don’t really have any context with what we watched. But it looked amazing, let me tell you. There are few things in this world that get me going more than cold, hard stares and intermittent inaudible screaming.

It's sleek, it's sexy, it's apparently about vampires. And this kid looks like Dexter.

Some professor with too much time on his hands has gone out of his way to spin a bunch of numbers and prove that Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Bump”, a term used to facetiously describe the increased approval ratings a politician will see if he or she appears as a guest on his show, is indeed effective. Whether or not this is actually true is irrelevant. What is relevant is that this guy is from UC San Diego, implying that he lives in San Diego and spends his time conducting this absurd research. You could live in Mystic, Iowa and figure this shit out. While you’re on the coast I suggest you get outside.

BBC America will begin airing the British teen drama Skins this Sunday, and it doesn’t sound like a television show so much as an edited soft core porn with a Trainspotting “plot”. Additionally, the show was created by a father-son team which makes it all the more horrific. I guess this is what happens when baseball isn’t mainstream where you live: Instead of “tossing the ball around”, you trade tales of sexual conquests in high school with your father. I know we in America have the stereotype that Europeans are much more progressive, liberated, etc. when it comes to sexuality, and that is not always a bad thing, but they don’t have to do everything in their power to fit the bill.

Probably it for the week, have a safe one and we’ll be back on Monday.