Bob hates reality TV. What he really hates is the elimination at the end of so many reality shows, where someone is ritually exiled from the group, their torch is put out, the supermodel tells them they’re ‘out’, they are fired, or they are told to pack their knives and go. Which may explain part of the appeal of the show that has snagged Bob. Folding laundry one night, searching the TV for something to distract him, he came across The Real Housewives of Orange County. And now he’s a fan.

The Real Housewives follows six white, upper-class straight women who live in Orange County. They depict the Orange County lifestyle, which according to the show is gated communities of McMansions, Republicanism, rampant materialism and boob jobs. Cameras follow them around to catch them at their most entertaining worst. We are there when one of them goes to a consultation with a plastic surgeon to get her breast implants removed because her doctor says her DD’s are the cause of her back issues and her husband complains that he doesn’t want her to go too small.

Part of it is the unsparing but uninsightful eye of the camera. We see what the women do and what they say, but other than superficial commentary from the women themselves, we never get any real insight into why, for example, Vicki is so driven and controlling in her business and with her children, or why she drinks so hard at parties. (“They say I did a ‘woo-woo’ shot with the bartender,” she says, “but I don’t remember it.” A pause. “I don’t!” And then we see her on film, doing a shot with the bartender and shrieking ‘woo-woo!’ with him.) There is an old saying that people who marry for money earn every dime. The same might be said for these women, who may not have married for money, per se, but who certainly pay a price for their devotion to what they call ‘the OC lifestyle.’ Many have been married a couple of times, several have difficult issues with children, all of them have issues with their bodies. Read More »

Dramatis Personae: Me and Emily the Dog. Place: our sunroom, where my favorite arm chair for working is located. Local temperature: 54 degrees. I am sitting in the arm chair (squishy brown leather, able to hold two adults, tightly, or one adult and one child, or two children, or one human and one dog).

Me (shivering): Brrrrr.

Emily (moseying into the room): Hey, let’s cuddle. (Lopes up into chair, shoulders her way into 3/4 of the space) That’s better.

Me: Hey, I was sitting here. Share.

Emily (expanding more than a 40 pound dog could reasonably be expected to do): This is sharing.

I push back. Skirmish ensues, at the end of which we are each in possession of roughly half the chair. Resigned to temporary sharing, Emily noses her head under my left arm and begins to radiate warmth. I can feel my fingers begin to loosen up. I write for a while, check email. Occasionally Emily sighs gustily; with each sigh she expands slightly. At the end of an hour I realize that she is now in possession of something like 3/4 of the chair, and my right hip, jammed into the arm of the chair, is beginning to go numb.

Me: Shove over, Em.

Emily: Urgghhh. (This is a sound roughly resembling that of Lurch on The Addams Family when asked to do something.) Read More »

From IGN:

20th Century Fox and Apple have launched an iPhone tie-in site for the forthcoming sci-fi adventure film Jumper. In the Doug Liman-directed film, opening February 14th, a genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere.

And later in the same article:

The Jumper iPhone site is formatted specifically for iPhones, allowing the user to experience the “jumper” phenomenon by redirecting them — “jumping” — to other cool iPhone sites. Just punch JumperTheMovie.com/iPhone/ into an iPhone browser and you’ll “jump” to a custom iPhone site.

Furthermore, the Jumper iPhone site offers a Jumper graphic novel (an iPhone first), wallpapers, trailers, character bios, and more.

It sounds like pretty much the same info and stuff that’s available on the regular web site but I can’t really tell. I don’t have an iPhone. If you punch that into a regular browser you’ll get redirected to the web version.

Some more over at Apple