Illin'

(cough cough cough) I'm sick (cough cough). Posting in depth will recommence when coughing and feeling like shit ceases.

Which at this rate will be 2032. (cough).

Woo!

We got 12 Daytime Emmy nominations, the most of any talk show!

We're up against the Wayne Brady show, Dr. Phil, Live With Regis and Kelly, and the View for best show, and all of the hosts of those shows for best host.

The only show that got more Daytime Emmy nominations was the Young and the Restless, for which the Ellen DeGeneres show staff will collectively shake their fists at Conci's mom. Just kidding...I think.

But that's huge. For a freshman show to get that many Emmy nominations is pretty rare, and it means we've gotta be doing something right (not that the ratings and the 10,000+ phone calls I have to return weren't already telling us that).

Hopefully there'll be some sort of celebration when everyone gets back from vacation. For now, the Audience department will be doing the onsite celebration. Woo!

Nobody's Home

We're on hiatus for about a week and a half, and everyone on staff got Wednesday through Friday off. Of course, since I technically work for a contractor, I don't get paid days off, so I have to come in if I want to pay my rent.

So me and most of the rest of my department are all there, and except for the sporadic appearance of an executive producer or a random assistant, the office is absolutely dead.

It's really weird to be in an office where nobody's around, especially if you're working like it's a normal day. You expect to take a break and go make small talk...except every office is dark.

You can run through the halls, you can shout obscenities at the top of your lungs you can (theoretically) play ping-pong for hours (except I returned phone calls all day). But somehow, it's nowhere near as fun as if you were doing that at school.

The one nice benefit is I can get my car onto the lot and park right next to the building I work in. Usually I park across the street, but it's nice to get to be supremely lazy for a couple days.

And I can steal parking spaces that are normally assigned to people with way, way more power than me. It's kind of a weird little vicarious thrill to park in an Important Space. It's such a cliché Hollywood thing, but it's fun.

Alas, just until Friday. Monday everyone comes back from vacation and we all get to play catch-up for a week before we start taping again. Thaaaaat'll be lots of fun.

Score!

So I did not win the Oscar Pool at work. That honor, and over $600, went to one of the producers, and the iPod went to one of our production coordinators.

I did, however, hit the length of the ceremony right on the head (at 3 hours and 47 minutes), so I won some DVDs and a CD from the Giveaway Lockup (of stuff we already gave out) at work.

I got:
- 2nd season of Frasier DVD
- Spellbound DVD
- Lost In Translation DVD
- The Beatles on Ed Sullivan DVDs
- the new Indigo Girls CD (which I had been planning on buying this weekend anyway)

I was gonna grab a season of X-Files we gave away, until I realized it was one of the seasons with Doggett, and those episodes bite.

But still, I'm very happy that I actually managed to pull the correct length of the Oscar ceremony completely out of my ass, and thus accumulate Free Shit.

Exxxcellent

Courtesy of Television Without Pity's Pixel Challenge, one of the more amusing photoshops I've seen in a while:

Randomness

You're The Grapes of Wrath!

by John Steinbeck

You're mired in a deep depression that encompasses you and everyone you know. You're trying to get out of the depression, but your idea of help is, in itself, pretty sad. While some are convinced that this all has a deeper meaning, you're really just dull and tedious. And utterly obsessed with dust. You really need to focus on something other than dust. Your best moments center around turtles.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

You know, I'd like to think I'm not that depressing. Right? Right?!

Eeeverybody Loves New Zealand

Lord of the Rings swept. Certainly not unexpected, but at least much more deserving than the last movie that won 11 Oscars (Titanic. I fucking hated that movie).

The show itself was...an awards show. Little variation from the script, most jokes not that funny (although the Jack Black/Will Ferrell "You're Boring" song did crack me up).

Peter Jackson looked like hell, but he actually reminds me quite a bit of my late uncle Harry, if Harry were from New Zealand and hadn't lost all his hair in his early 20's. Similar affable geekiness.

I'll have to see how I did in my office Oscar pool, first prize is about 500 bucks, second prize is an iPod. Being the Gadget Geek I am, I think I'd probably use the money to buy an iPod if I won the money anyway.

But I work with entertainment industry geeks, so I probably lost, even though I went 5 for 6 in the major categories, and was only off by about 2 or 3 minutes on my prediction of how long the ceremony would last.

Fingers crossed!

Hee

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Volcano is my favorite So-Bad-It's-Fucking-Hysterical movie ever made.

Tommy Lee Jones in full "All right, listen up people! The Fugitive was a huge success, so I'm going to act this way for my next seven movies!" mode.

Anne Heche, showcasing her complete inability to act, ever. Don Cheadle as the Affable African-American Sidekick (who, in the movie's only unobvious plot twist, actually manages to live through the whole movie).

And of course, dozens of character actors you recognize but can't remember the names of, running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

And I haven't even talked about the premise.

Which is that, after a massive earthquake, lava is erupting out of the La Brea Tar Pits, and is slowly but surely threatening to take over Los Angeles.

The CGI is laughably obvious, even for something made in 1997. If you're a geek like me, you're thinking, "Jesus, guys, could you have let the whole movie render over more than about two days?"

It's just a terrible, terrible movie. And it cracks me up so badly that I can't not watch it, whenever it's on. As it is right now, when I'm currently laughing at things I shouldn't be laughing at (like the guy melting).

It's a great movie to half-watch when you're half-drunk.