The GirlAlive Blog

A thing of beauty

I know I’ve talked before about Twiglets and how they are made of Satan’s poop (also known as Marmite). Additionally, there has been a fake feud going on between Justin Bieber and Conan O’Brien, which has been hilarious. Like, I normally would hate a teenybopper Canadian like Bieber, but he is actually kind of funny (his music is cheesy pop crap, but he seems like a nice kid). So this video made me all kinds of happy.

Conan + TBS = Awesome

Conan is going to TBS. I’m sure you all expected to say something about this a lot sooner. First, let me say that I love this decision. Conan gets ownership of his own show, and he has a 5-year contract and TBS will give him the freedom to do whatever the heck he wants on his new show. What gets me is the responses from other people on imwithcoco.com. (I would do drawings of the angry commenters, but I’m tired and it’s getting late.)

WHY WOULD HE GO ON CABLE? CABLE IS CRAP.

Um, no. Cable is about the same as network tv these days. Cable channels make their own shows and people watch them, just like network tv. Ever hear of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? They do okay with late night shows on cable. Is it really a step down to go from the worst network to a pretty good cable station? I don’t think so.

WHY DIDN’T HE SIGN WITH FOX?

Fox would not give him show ownership or a nationwide audience. They were dragging their feet and making it very difficult for Conan to trust them. Fox has a habit of the same kind of random show cancelling as NBC, so I don’t think it’s a bad thing that he’s not going to Fox.

OMG! I DON’T HAVE CABLE! I’LL NEVER SEE CONAN AGAIN! I HATE HIM NOW!

If you’re posting on Facebook, there’s some compelling evidence that you have an internet connection. If you’re in the US it’ll likely be on Hulu or on TBS.com. Or you could always get cable. It’s not like it’s that difficult. Craig Ferguson isn’t broadcast in the UK, yet I see his show pretty much every day on YouTube. If you’re panicking because you don’t have cable you’re either a luddite or a drama queen.

CONAN’S A HYPOCRITE! HOW COULD HE STEAL GEORGE LOPEZ’S TIMESLOT?

You cannot steal that which is freely given. Moving to 12:00 was George Lopez’s own idea, and Conan did not agree to even talk about TBS until George Lopez himself called and talked him into it. George Lopez has been struggling to pull in a small fragment of the late night audience. Even with a move from 11 to 12, Lopez will probably see an increase in his ratings once he has Conan as his lead-in. He genuinely wants to move to 12 to make room for Conan. It’s a whole nother situation.

In short, if you’re going to call yourself a fan of Conan you should remember that he told you to work hard, be kind, and stop being cynical. If you’re not enough of a fan to remember that, maybe you at least remember him telling you, “Keep cool my babies!”

I wish I was able to go to his live show. I’ve seen a few clips and it looks completely awesome. If it is a hint of what is to come on TBS, his new show in November will be like all the very best stuff he did on Late Night and The Tonight Show.

Without Leno, Conan had good ratings

I’m just making a small aside here for a minute to apply some numbers and facts to the statement that Leno made about Conan having poor ratings back when he did his Oprah interview. I bring this up because some people actually believed him that Conan was failing. Let me show you an interesting chart.

Conan consistently beat Letterman in the ratings, and he was in fact gaining more of an audience in early September. Then The Jay Leno Show premiered on the 14th of September. Conan’s ratings continued upward for about a week, while people checked out Leno’s new show. Then the ratings plummetted downward when everyone stopped watching Leno. The truth is that Conan was on a trend of beating Letterman soundly until his lead-in changed and it was only after the Jay Leno Show started running at 10 that Letterman ever beat him in the ratings.

Don’t forget, the Jay Leno Show was cancelled because the affiliates complained that no one was watching the local news anymore. As Andy Richter pointed out on Regis and Kelly, the local news didn’t suddenly get bad. The primetime lead in was crap. Most people weren’t watching, and the few that were turned off their tvs and went to bed before the news. And yet Leno tried to say that Conan damaged the Tonight Show with poor ratings, even though it is fairly obvious that the poor ratings are directly due to Leno.

I still think that Leno is not entirely the bad guy in this. He’s selfish, and he’s a liar, and his word means nothing. But let’s not forget that the real villain behind this is Jeff Zucker. He has no background in scripted entertainment and he doesn’t belong at the head of NBC. He singlehandedly drove the former number 1 network down to number 4, where it has been since 2005. He is an incompetent moron. He should not be wearing a suit and giving orders from a big corner office. He should be wearing a paper hat and operating a deep fryer.

Who struck out?

In a recent radio interview, Jay Leno addressed the issue of people boycotting his show in the wake of the Conan O’Brien fiasco. He said, “You don’t boo the next batter up just because the last batter struck out.” Really? Let’s look at a replay and see how that game really went.

(Sorry, dad, but Jay keeps digging himself deeper and acting like an ass.)

FYI – Twitpic sucks

If you are on the Twitter like me, and you follow celebrities, you know that they like to take pictures and post them. Unfortunately, nearly all of them use an application called TwitPic. It sucks. For weeks and months at a time, whenever I click on a twitpic link, this is all I get:

Page Load Error

I originally twittered to @twitpic whenever this happened, since their own web site was invariably a Page Load Error. It would work sporadically for a week or two, then die again.

New strategy. Whenever someone posts a twitpic and it is broken, I am replying to that tweet with all my anguish over the fact that I can’t see the picture. Please, people, stop using twitpic. Working perfectly 12% of the time is not nearly good enough. There are plenty of other twitter picture posting options. Use YFrog. Use tweetphoto. Anything else. Just please stop using Twitpic. IT DOESN’T WORK.

Everytime you post a twitpic, God kills a puppy.

Alana

P.S. If you want to join me in this fight against stuff that doesn’t work right, here is a besmallened link for this blog post so that you can tell other twitterers that everytime they post a broken twitpic, God kills a puppy. http://bit.ly/c23xCS

Happy Valentine’s Day

A while ago my husband asked if I wanted to do anything in particular for Valentine’s Day. I told him, “Since it’s an entirely invented holiday, I’m not too fussed about it.” And it’s true. I don’t really care about Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t mean anything. I spent about £3 on a present for husband and I will make him a cheesecake he requested. But even that much isn’t entirely necessary as far as I’m concerned. So if you’re single and have no one on Valentine’s Day, feel free to ignore it as much as I do. It doesn’t matter.

I saw part of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics here, but not when it was aired. It was on at 1:45am here. The one thing I didn’t want to see was the tragic death of the Georgian athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili. When I saw the video footage they showed him flying off his sled and into the air, and then cut away. But I’ve heard what NBC did. They showed every moment of it in slow motion. Three times. If I didn’t hate NBC because of Conan, I definitely hate NBC now. There are a few shows on NBC that I like (The Office and 30 Rock), but I can live without them for the sake of boycotting NBC. I will not watch any NBC shows until Jeff Zucker and Dick Ebersol (the head of NBC sports programming) are fired. And I’m not the only one.

It you hate what Jeff Zucker did to Conan, join I’m With Coco on Facebook. And if you hate what Dick Ebersol did to Nodar Kumaritashvili’s loved ones, join Another disgrace at the hands of NBC on Facebook.

Also I found out that there is a fan group for this web site on Facebook. Weird. I had no idea.

Anyway, enjoy your made-up holiday or whatever.