emmy diarrhea

I got home from a short weekend trip out of the city later than I expected because the bus I was on decided it would be more fun to take an obscure tour of central New Jersey and stop at a creepy abandoned gas station with a broken vending machine rather than just stay on the turnpike and give us a shiny well-lit rest stop with fast food and a Starbucks.

So I get home and turn on the TV and unpack, and what do I find but the Emmys. Unfortunately for the Emmys, I could care less. Those awards mean nothing to me because they don't tend to reflect much of the small percentage of true quality television; I lost interest long ago. The only passing interest I had remained in whether or not "The West Wing" would sweep its nominated categories as a pat on the back for a final season well done -- it didn't. I also was curious if Ellen Burstyn would walk away with an emmy for a 14 second performance for the TV movie Mrs. Harris (watch the performance in its entirety here) -- she didn't.

So, I started flipping back and forth between NBC (a station I never seem to watch, so all those promos for their forthcoming fall shows I probably won't watch caught me off guard) and the old-standby Food Network. Sunday programming on the Food Network tends always to be competitions and reruns of "Unwrapped" that I have absolutely no interest in.... but last night they featured the "Food Network Challenge: Bartender Battle". At first it seemed kind of cool, because I find the trait of spinning liquor bottles around in your hands and actually making a drink in the process kind of sexy. The problem? The contestants didn't really show off their bartending skills all that well. They should have had a bouncer round or something. I don't want to ruin your view of tricky bottle-twirling, but the realm of "entertainment flair bartending" (or whatever they call it) is just glorified juggling at the end of the day. Not even glorified, really.... just juggling liquor bottles. One guy juggled empty liquor bottles. Where's the fun of spilling booze on people? Bottom line: I wanted Coyote Ugly, and instead I got a low rent circus act with dirty-ish Las Vegas bartenders. I think I'm sworn off Food Network weekend programming forever now, (except of course for the morning block of real cooking shows).

So then I ended up flipping back to the Emmys, where the Charlie's Angels came together after some long standing feud I didn't know existed. They held hands and paid tribute to Aaron "stroke of genius" Spelling. Farrah Fawcett, who used to be plastered to the tank of a toilet in the house I lived at in college, looks like she's hiding gravity's wrath with a big blond wig. Thanks to what I can only guess is generous plastic surgery, Kate Jackson looks disturbingly like an alien from the original Star Trek now. I remember watching her in some TV movie in the early 1990s about the bubonic plague breaking out in modern day New York City, and I decided at my young age that I liked her voice. At that age, the movie was scary and captivating too. That's all I have on Kate Jackson.

What little I saw of the Emmys was just like every other awards show on the planet. They're always the same, and yet no one has quite clued in to the monotony it seems. Part of me is thankful there aren't fourteen different awards shows for television like there are for movies, though.

Also: another Aaron Spelling tributeer, Joan Collins, doesn't look half bad at all. Strange though: she looks pretty much the same as she did in "Dynasty" twenty years ago.... and let's keep in mind she wasn't all that young then. This leads me to believe that she perhaps is the real-life version of Death Becomes Her.