Happy Holidays

I will be heading off to spend the holidays in a warmer clime that is not conducive to long stints on the Internet. You may see me on Twitter, but I feel that anything longer than 140 characters is just too much for me.

Thus, I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and a glorious new year.

See you in 2010.

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Top Time-Shifted Shows

Ad Age ran an interesting piece on time shifting of TV shows yesterday. They looked at the trends and what time shifting means for advertisers. But of the most interest to me was the list of the top time shifted shows:

1. House
2. Grey’s Anatomy
3. The Office
4. NCIS
5. The Mentalist
6. V
7. Deperate Housewives
8. The Big Bang Theory
9. Survivor
10. FlashForward

Of these shows, I watch The Office, V, and Flash Forward, and I only time shift The Office. My other time shifted shows are Modern Family and Cougar Town. Well, and How I Met Your Mother once Chuck starts back up.

Read the Ad Age piece, then let me know what you think about time shifting and its effects on advertising effectiveness. What shows do you time shift? Which do you insist on watching live?

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Related Posts:

• Pop Culture Roundup, June 3
• Pop Culture Roundup, May 27
• What Will You Be Watching This Summer?
• Pop Culture Roundup, May 13
• Upfronts Preview: What Will the 2010-2011 TV Season Bring?

Top 5 Posts

Here’s a collection of the top 5 posts of the year, based on traffic and return visits. (A caveat: By far, the most popular posts are the Supernatural blog carnivals, but they don’t have as much power when you re-read them, so they are not included here. If you want to read the old editions, click on Supernatural in the tag cloud.)

Pedophilia in Popular Culture
This was inspired by my new-found love of Hair Nation on XM. (Yes, I was a fan of hair metal in the 80s.) I am annoyed by the mixed messages we send by glorifying youth and teenage sexuality while writing and enforcing stricter laws on sex offenders. How have your ideals changed as you’ve gotten older and as depictions of blatant sexuality in mainstream pop culture have increased?

Airbrushing Backlash: Have They Gone Too Far?
Umm, yeah. Turning Demi Moore into a waifish model on the cover of W was bizarre and unnecessary. I mean, we know what she looks like, so the airbrushing was so blatant. Airbrushing has become the auto-tune of the magazine world: a useful tool with horrible consequences if used too frequently.

Book Review: The Forest of Hands and Teeth
This has been my most popular book review so far. I really enjoyed the book, finishing it in just a few hours. The sequel, The Dead-Tossed Waves, is due out in March 2010. I haven’t heard anything new about the movie adaptation, but I believe it is still in the works.

Celebrities and Money
This post was inspired by the question, “how can they possibly lose all of that money?” It turns out that the life of a top actor or athlete costs a lot more than our lives do, and few newly rich are prepared to handle the sudden wealth. This post gives us some empathy for people in lives we can only imagine and provides some solid financial management tips that work at all levels of income.

Would On-Demand Work?
I still firmly believe that episodic entertainment in the future will be provided when we want it, not when the harvest calendar dictates it. We will lose some of our shared culture, but we will gain control over what we watch and when we watch it.

Enjoy this little blast from the past, and let me know what you would like to learn more about in the coming year.

Thanks for reading!

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Glee and HBO Are the Big Golden Globes Winners for Television

The Golden Globe nominations are out, and boy do those Hollywood Foreign Press folks love their musicals. Glee leads the television show nominations with 4, and Nine came in second for film nominations with 5.

HBO leads the network pack with 17 nominations, including best show nods for True Blood and Big Love. Now I love True Blood as much as the next gal, but I am not sure I would include it in the running for best show.

Entourage also could have been left off the list. Its inclusion is proof that the Globes are just a guilty as the Emmys of nominating for past achievements, not current.

Read the complete list at Deadline.com. Then let me know what you think of the slate. Did your faves get nominated? What nominations made you scratch your head? And what snubs made you shake your fist at the computer and curse the HFPA for their poor decision-making skills?

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The New Year of TV

I am looking forward to January as if it were the beginning of the new fall season.

I can’t wait to see how they explain the Kate/Peter relationship on White Collar. I am looking forward to seeing all of the loose ends get tied up on Lost. And our Winchesters will be back!

But, by far the most exciting series return in January is Chuck. NBC is launching the new season with a multi-day extravaganza. The first episodes of the new season will air Sunday, January 10, and then the show will settle back into it’s Monday night time slot.

Can’t wait til January? Join fellow Chuck fans in daily missions in the Chuck Me Out game.

What shows are you looking forward to in the new year?

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Related Posts:

• Pop Culture Roundup, February 11
• My Fall TV Viewing Schedule
• Pop Culture Roundup, May 27
• Countdown to New Shows: Spring 2010
• Pop Culture Roundup, February 4

Weird Pop Culture Crap

Perhaps I’m tired, but today seems to be filled with inexplicable pop culture stories.

Jessica Simpson and Billy Corgan

The rumor is that J. Simps and the rat in a cage are getting quite cozy. What sort of weird-ass match up is that? How would they have met? What would they possibly talk about?

Miley Cyrus is Covering “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”

This song was played out in the last century, so why is it Miley’s favorite song? And why does she feel the need to inflict “her own spin” on it?

Women Are Having Babies at Home

For some crazy reason, women have decided to eschew the hospital and have their babies at home without even a midwife in attendance. If the unnecessary interventions are really the reason, can’t you just refuse oxytocin or a C-section? I mean, you can discharge yourself form the hospital even if you re dying, so I think you could reject surgery.

What do you think? Am I just way too foggy to get it, or are these three of the most bizarre things you’ve heard in a while?

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The End of the Daytime Drama?

With the recent news that CBS is canceling As the World Turns, it makes me wonder if the daytime drama will soon go the way of the dinosaur.

My mom watches her stories every day. In fact, one of my earliest memories was of mom feeding me in my high chair while the opening of Days of Our Lives came on. Yes, that means that my earliest memory includes the phrase, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

When I would visit my grandma in the summers, I would sit in on her stories, too, although mom and grandma don’t watch all of the same shows.

My first couple years of college, I recorded All My Children to watch in the evenings so I could keep up with Tad, Adam, and Dixie. But, as I got farther into my studies, I became less interested in the ridiculous storylines and often over-the-top acting. I bid a fond farewell to the residents of Pine Valley.

But it still makes me sad to hear that daytime dramas are being canceled right and left. It seems like the end of an era, and I don’t like to see that.

Do you watch soaps? Did you ever? Are you happy or sad to see them go? Do you think they will move online, like everything else on TV seems poised to do?

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There’s One Less Pop Culture Dog in Our Household

The Pop Culture Curmudgeon household experienced a loss over the weekend. Our miniature dachshund, Heidi, succumbed to the treatment for Cushing’s Disease. If you have an older dog who shows any symptoms of Cushing’s, please get them tested. Early detection offers more treatment options and a stronger dog to undergo treatment.

Some of the symptoms include food guarding, food stealing, begging, a seeming inability to get full, excessive water consumption, and a pot belly. There is also hair loss, but for Heidi, that didn’t occur until later in the disease. That symptom was the trigger for testing,  but unfortunately by that point, Heidi wasn’t strong enough to handle the medication.

Here’s some information about Cushing’s in dogs and in people.

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New Michael Jackson Cologne: A Disgusting Way to Capitalize on His Death

So, when you heard that Michael Jackson had died, was your first thought something about how you could make money off his fanbase without having to share any of it with him? If you are John Reznikoff and the folks at My DNA Fragrance, it may have been.

They have partnered to create a fragrance based off DNA pulled from MJ’s hair. Reznikoff has a large collection of celebrity hair (WTF?), and he shared a strand or two with the My DNA team. They extracted DNA and somehow sublimated it into fragrance.

This makes me sad. But, this Guardian blog post about this sad turn of events makes me happy. There’s nothing like British snark to start my day off right.

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