Random stuff

So this bit of news is almost a week old, but congratulations to Meryl Streep for winning her 7th Golden Globe award. Her portrayal of Julia Child in the film 'Julie and Julia' got her another trophy for best actress in a comedy or musical. So she now holds the record for the most Golden Globe wins AND nominations. She's also nominated in the Screen Actors Guild awards. Here's hoping she wins that and gets nominated for a 16th Oscar.

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Major bummer. This is the single most horrible season of Liverpool since I became a fan more than 8 years ago. No chance for them to win any title this year, and it's only January. They are currently 6th in the Barclays Premier League (although 5th place Man City and 7th place Aston Villa both have a game-in-hand) so they have to fight really hard to get a top 4 finish and secure a spot in the Champions League next season. Really hope they start doing better...

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American Idol 9 has started. I can remember how I used to rush home on Wed and Thu nights to make sure I caught it on Starworld. Somehow I've lost a large amount of interest in it, despite the fact that a lot of talent has come out of the last few seasons. It took a while for me to figure out why but I realized that I got turned off due to the fact that now, the judges have a habit of excessively 'pimping' their favorite contestants.

It didn't use to be like that. Or at least not to the degree that it's been done the last 2-3 seasons. It must be the Taylor Hicks effect. Coz in Season 5 and in all seasons before it, there was a lot of favorite-pimping going on but good praise was shared as well to other contestants a lot of the time, and favorites were also criticized when they didn't meet expectations. Now in S5, Taylor was the hands-down winner even if the show really wanted either Christ Daughtry of Katharine McPhee to win. As it turns out, Taylor never really broke into the mainstream and is the first Idol winner not to have sold more than a million albums. After that, the powers that be must have figured that by pimping their favorite contestants, they make sure that someone who they feel is hip and current and can sell lots of records ends up winning.

The problem with this is that now, when the favorites turn in a sub-par performance, they still get praised to the high heavens while other contestants who do incredibly well get a cursory nod. I was getting so annoyed so often that I realized I didn't really want to watch it as often anymore. If I'm home and it's on, I tune in. But it's definitely not in my list of fave shows. And with Simon leaving next season, I'll probably start tuning in even less.