Crappy the Smart-Assed Toilet

(Note: this post is a public service, intended to break up the monotony of Survivor: Guatemala-related nonsense).

We are pleased to announce that we finally learned how to announce Sufjan Stevens’s first name today, because WOXY.com generously played the brilliant track, “Casimir Pulaski Day,” off of Sufjan’s new Illinois album (that and they back-announced the artist’s name). It’s pronounced SOOF-yan. (Or at least, we’re pretty sure it is, since we Googled after that, to make sure). See also his brilliant song for NPR, “The Lord God Bird.”

We now return you to your regularly scheduled drivel.

We realize we’re setting an unsightly precedent with four straight Survivor-related posts. Lord help us, we hope this won’t happen again. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that MLive’s late-breaking Gary Hogeboom investigative story published yesterday (i.e. after our last post) cited both the approximate time of the official cast reveal (”early August”) and the apparently official premiere date: September 8th.

That’s a week or so earlier than it’s been in recent years. And we note that CBS has yet to publicly release its schedule of premiere dates for the Fall 2005 season. So golly, in that sense, CBS spokeswoman Kim Sartori appears to have been, uh, leaking top-secret info. True, this info is of interest to maybe ten or so people in the entire world, as is any particular cast spoiler, but still….

So anyway, does this premiere date make sense? Well it does in the sense that FOX has announced the same date for the premiere of The O.C. Since that show attracts the young viewers CBS so desperately covets, it would make sense not to let that audience get hooked on FOX’s soap for that first week. And it would explain the “early August” time to release the cast names, since that usually occurs about a month before the premiere (giving you plenty of time to forget or ignore them until getting whacked over the head with them four weeks later). This will be a feat in itself, since the cast doesn’t return stateside until August 5th, so “early August” is probably the next week, when they’re still good and skinny. Although the many models on Survivor: Guatemala look pretty skinny to begin with.

But whatever. More Survivor crap will be flying at you, sooner than you might think. Make sure to duck.

Update: Fashionably late, CBS has finally gotten around to announcing their fall premiere schedule. And Survivor: Guatemala will debut on September 15th.

So, on Monday morning, Mark Francescutti of the Detroit Free Press reported that Gary Hogeboom is a contestant on the currently-filming Survivor: Guatemala (partially tipped by a report on some web site). Since then, this has made the rounds in various sports media, from ESPN to SI’s web site. But the most entertaining responses have come from, as you might expect, the blogosphere. A sampling thereof:

- From EntertainmentWeekly’s Popwatch (and less entertainingly, here, apart from the intriguing LOST spoilers).
- From the Ellenport Report
- From Scandalous Sports.

But surprisingly, by far the best response has been from traditional print media, albeit a slightly bloggish branch of it. Here it is, from the Baltimore Sun’s Flip Side column:

“Maybe you’ve been wondering what Gary Hogeboom has been up to. More likely, you haven’t thought of him since Tom Landry was mispronouncing his name as “Hogenboom” back when he was a Dallas Cowboys quarterback.

Either way, Hogeboom, 47, a land developer in Michigan, reportedly is one of the competitors on CBS’ Survivor: Guatemala, which is shooting now in Central America.

CBS wouldn’t comment to the Detroit Free Press on any Survivor contestants. The Free Press said it learned of Hogeboom’s participation from the Web site truedorktimes.com. You have to trust a site with that name, don’t you?”

Corvis has found the name for one of his mysterious Survivor: Guatemala contestants, in this case, the Kansas woman with the cherry tattoos.

As it turns out, she’s Danni Boatwright, former Miss Kansas USA (1996), and almost Miss USA that year (first runner-up, in fact). She now appears to model and co-host a local sports radio weekend show. We take back our shock at the casting of Rafe Judkins yesterday. Danni is everything SEG is looking for in a contestant these days, it seems: she’s pretty, and…. Well, she’s pretty.

The post-retread contestant spoiling drought for Survivor: Guatemala appears to be lifting. Corvis has a couple of contestant pictures up at his SurvivorThoughts blog. The woman is fairly easy to find on Google, as long as you keep in mind that she’s a competitive model from Kansas. We expect someone will out her fairly soon.

Meanwhile, VolcanicGlass at SurvivorPhoenix has put a name, face and bio on another contestant, Rafe Judkins. Rafe attended Brown University, and presumably graduated this year. So he’s smart, especially by reality TV standards. He also appears to be an aspiring screenwriter, and has some comedy experience. Oh, and he’s a math geek. We’re not sure how someone so apparently normal and interesting slipped through the rigid Survivor modeling/beauty pageant screening process, but we’re sure they’ll rectify that before the next season.

Answer: Self-spam with bad puns.

New content on the main TDT site:

(1) Bush’s SCOTUS nomination is going to the dog. (Trust us, the actual story is even more low-brow than that).

(2) Celebrate the New Dark Age with us! (Calculate the irony of us building an article on that with someone you can trust. Then name the band we ripped off).

As usual, we’re a bit confused by this year’s Emmy nominees. First off, we wish Emmy voters (along with other awards shows) would quit with the “parting salute” nominations to shows, just because they’ve been around a long time.

Everybody Loves Raymond and Will & Grace are/were not funny. And that is the main reason why the sitcom format is currently dead. So the apparently desperate need to nominate every person ever associated with Raymond for an Emmy as a nice parting gift is somewhat confusing. Especially when it means actual talented, funny actors like Will Arnett, David Cross, Tony Hale and Portia de Rossi (or even Henry Winkler) are locked out of nominations. But whatever. More room next year, unless Will & Grace decides to call it quits, or something. Oh, wait. Bastards.

And how the hell does American Idol keep getting nominated in the (admittedly cesspool-esque) “Reality/Competition” category? Okay, yeah, it’s popular, and maybe the Academy was desperate to get teenagers and pre-teens watching their awards show. Fine. But Idol is unlike fellow nominees like Survivor, The Apprentice (grossly undeserving of nomination this year) or The Amazing Race, in that it doesn’t (at least in the latter half of the series) try to tell a story by weaving together scenes from hours of live footage. It’s essentially straight live performance. What happens on the show is the direct result of the show itself, not some larger, artistic narrative woven together by the producers. Simply put, there’s no more art there than in your average televised sporting event.

And if a widely-watched competition is the only criterion for nomination in this category, why the hell wasn’t the Red Sox’s miraculous journey through the ALCS and World Series nominated here? It was far more compelling, surprising, and entertaining than anything Idol has ever done. The music probably sucked less, too.

The new meme sweeping the Right side of the blogosphere today, like, say, here, is that President Bush never said he’d fire the people responsible for leaking Valerie Plame’s identity to the press. Guess this must have been at the top of today’s edition of the talking points.

Well, that’s a good story, and if you look back at the specific quote they want you to pay attention to, you will indeed see that Bush specifically said he’d only fire someone if they were guilty of committing a crime:

“And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”

Which is fine, because it might be difficult a prisoner to show up for their daily job at the White House. Sure, they’d probably get security clearance and everything, being a Bush loyalist, they just might have problems getting out of the prison in the first place.

But the problem is, the President actually did say he would fire the leaker(s), after all, as we see here:

“QUESTION: Given — given recent developments in the CIA leak case, particularly Vice President Cheney’s discussions with the investigators, do you still stand by what you said several months ago, a suggestion that it might be difficult to identify anybody who leaked the agent’s name?

THE PRESIDENT: That’s up to –

QUESTION: And, and, do you stand by your pledge to fire anyone found to have done so?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. And that’s up to the U.S. Attorney to find the facts.”

But, you know, we guess that depends on what the definition of “yes” is.

Shockingly, for two straight days, reporters at the daily White House press briefings have been asking tough questions (and expecting answers).

If all it took to transform the White House press corps from a cuddly collection of playful puppies into a snarling pack of pit bulls was sending Judith Miller off to prison, why didn’t anyone think of it sooner? During the run-up to the Iraq War might have been a good time to try it.

If you’ve ever wondered why the networks insist on trotting out one unfunny sitcom after another, and why your best bet for a laugh appears to be watching hapless reality show contestants make fools of themselves, you need look no farther than the people who get paid to write about TV. Or, more accurately (in the case of ET), the people who breathe heavily and grin like insane mannequins about TV. It’s really quite revealing.

For example, as you might expect in a piece of, uh, “journalism,” excreted by ET, we’re led to believe the coming fall season will be a banner one for comedies, specifically sitcoms. At least, that’s what they get from Debra Birnbaum, who apparently is the “Senior Editor” at a publication called Inside TV. Not ever having seen said publication, we had to Google it, and it appears to be a hard-hitting magazine for people who are scared off by all the big words in TV Guide, and feel it doesn’t have enough glossy pictures of celebrities. Oookay.

Anyway, here’s some of the wisdom we gleaned from this joint ET-Inside TV effort:

- The expert editor at Inside TV apparently thinks Chris Rock’s upcoming series, “Everybody Hates Chris,” is in fact called “Everybody Loves Chris.” So apparently, do the editors at ETOnline, if such a job description actually exists. See, part of the joke of the title (perhaps the only joke in the entire show, considering it’s on UPN) is that it’s the opposite of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” See? Eh, never mind.

- From the mouths of ET: “CBS brings HENRY WINKLER back to the sitcom format.” Wow! Really? You mean we were just hallucinating his recurring role as Barry Zuckerkorn on “Arrested Development” the past two seasons? See, Barry even jumped over a shark last season, which was funny because… eh, never mind.

- More telling is the dual glowing reactions to “Hot Properties” on ABC, variously described as “reminds us very much of ‘Sex and the City’” and “setting itself up to be the next ‘Sex and the City’.” Maybe we’re going out on a limb dismissing a show we haven’t seen, but those feelings of similarity just might be because it’s completely ripping off “Sex and the City.” Except, since it’s on a network and relegated to Friday nights, it’s highly unlikely to be funny.

- But perhaps most insightful is the cooing about Henry Winkler’s new series, “Out of Practice.” You probably won’t believe this, but TV expert Birnbaum lets us in on a highly-guarded trade secret: “I think the fact that it comes from the ‘Frasier’ team speaks really well for it. I think it means good writing, which is one of the secrets for a good comedy.” Get out! You mean you can’t just slap a few banana peels and a laugh track on old scripts from “Punky Brewster” and have a comedic bonanza?

I guess that’s why she’s the TV expert, and we’re sitting at home, cringing, as we fast-forward through CBS Monday night sitcoms, looking for Survivor ads to vidcap. Silly us. Although if this really is such a secret, perhaps someone ought to inform the networks.