In the clip above, Tyra teaches Cookie Monster how to smile with his eyes, or "smize," which, due to Cookie Monster's fixed plastic eyes, resulted in a Cookie Monster Smize Fail. Then, Tyra talks to Elmo about Twitter, and Elmo is all "Elmo tweets. Elmo tweets." And then Tyra shows the Tweet she made about Elmo, while an audience-baby cries in the background audio. That was the part of this extra-dumbed-down version of this already extra dumb show that send me over the edge. I was like, "Wait, why is the sobbing in my head also coming out of the TV set?"

Later, Tyra welcomed one of the passengers who was on the Miracle on the Hudson plane. Why the hell not? I don't even know anymore. Just make the crying stop.

Neil Patrick Harris is "Frosty the Inappropriate Snowman" [HuffPo Comedy]

These "cursing toy" local news stories tend to come out around the holidays, with such suspicious frequency that one has to wonder if local news producers aren't finding these outraged parents on Craig's List. The most famous (and still funniest) toy audio malfunction has to be the Elmo potty training book that asked toddlers "Who wants to die?":

Hannah Montana Doll a Potty Mouth! [YouTube]
Called Who Wants to Die? [YouTube]

Some choice quotes:

"I'm over the age of 40 and that's all you're going to get from me, but I have never been able to maintain a relationship of the length or the quality that Tom and Lewis have."

"Turn on the television. We have a wedding channel on cable TV devoted to the behavior of people on the way to the altar. They spend billions of dollars, behave in the most appalling way, all in an effort to be princess for a day. You don't have cable television? Put on network TV. We're giving away husbands on a game show. You can watch The Bachelor, where thirty desperate women will compete to marry a 40-year-old man who has never been able to maintain a decent relationship in his life."

"That's what we've done to marriage in America, where young women are socialized from the time they're five years old to think of being nothing but a bride. They plan every day what they'll wear, how they'll look, the invitations, the whole bit, they don't spend five minutes thinking about what it means to be a wife. People stand up there before god and man even in Senator Diaz's church, they swear to love honor and obey, they don't mean a word of it. So if there's anything wrong with the sanctity of marriage in America, it comes from those of us who have the privilege and the right and have abused it for decades."

A former labor activist, Savino was elected in 2004 and serves Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn. But now that this speech has put her on the national radar, who knows how far she can go?

"We Have Nothing to Fear from Love and Commitment" [The Awl]
Senator Diane Savino's NY State Senate Bio

Jayde unsubtly uses an engagement party as an appropriate place to pester Brody about where their relationship is going, and Brody maturely explains that it's not the right place. And then later he makes plans to dump her. What's with these young girls wanting to get married like there's a stipulation in their trust funds that requires marriage for them to get the money or something?


Spencer confronts Heidi (who was apparently waiting in the foyer for him to call her name?) about the pregnancy test he found. He actually sounds reasonable at the end of the talk, but then you remember that earlier in this episode he passive-aggressively hounded Heidi about this in front of a small child.


Aww, Justin (Bobby) has to pretend to like Kristin here. For the script!


Justin (Bobby) and Kristin enter into a mature, loving, communicative, all-the-way relationship...or whatever. Let's hope next season she cheats first.

Britain's Missing Top Model, which premiered in the UK in the summer of 2008, began airing on BBC America last night. All of the 8 contestants are white. All of the 8 contestants are thin. All of the 8 contestants are conventionally pretty. Each one of them says, at some point in the first episode, that they think they're attractive. These are not women with confidence issues. (Debbie, who lost most of her arm in a bus crash, has posed for Playboy.) The judges make some good points — one says, being disabled is part of the world, "Why shouldn't it be part of fashion?" But while watching these women — all pleasing to the human eye — I thought, well, it's not much of a stretch to find beautiful people beautiful. Wouldn't an eye-opening show feature women with cleft palates or port-wine stains — visible differences which tend to make people uncomfortable?

Then again, maybe the fact that they're all pretty is the point? These are not your "average" disabled people, just as models are not "average" people. The contestants want a shot in an industry in which aesthetics is everything, so, naturally, they're going to be aesthetically pleasing. Maybe the point is: "I'm pretty, I just happen to have one arm, but don't let that stop you from hiring me to model designer shoes." The problem is, that doesn't make for very dramatic television.

Take Debbie, for instance. when asked if she'd show off her disability, she was totally fine with it. So her photo shoot was pretty boring.

And Sophie, who survived a what she describes as a "violent" car accident and is paralyzed, also had a boring (gorgeous, but anti-climatic) photo shoot.

At the critique, the judges said one nice thing and one critical thing about every model's picture, which Jenny from Seattle found frustrating. "Don't patronize me," she spat.

The judges couldn't even agree on what the show is really about. Two deaf women are in the final 8, but the judges wondered: Shouldn't the winner be visibly disabled? Or isn't that part of the point: Not all disabilities are visible? In the argument, the disabled judged fought for a girl with a visible disability, but was outvoted by the other able-bodied judges, and the contestant the disabled judge liked was sent home, and the judges had to watch her limp out the door. Why not listen to the one disabled judge? Dumb.

Frankly, the show would be more successful, more interesting if it followed one disabled model and her trials and triumphs in trying to get work — as well as how she was encountered in the fashion industry. Because watching the judges niggle and nit-pick over eight beautiful women is tiresome.

In July 2008 a reader spotted a Nordstrom catalog featuring a model in a wheelchair. I'd much rather watch a series about how this came to be and follow as someone, Michael-Moore style, asks execs why we haven't seen other catalogs/ad campaigns do the same. Maybe the world is "missing" a "top" model to tell that story.

Earlier: On BBC Show, Disabled Models Learn Same Lessons As Any Other Models

Kristof begins by discussing how the problem of the 20th century was slavery and gender inequity is the major problem of the 21st. He and WuDunn then launched into a long-ranging discussion about their observations from global conflict zones. Celebrities like Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Demi Moore, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also did segments for the show.

While the effort was wonderful for consciousness raising, some issues felt as though they were glossed over. For one thing, images of suffering women were shown often - but where were those who inflicted the suffering? A warlord was featured at the beginning of the show, but perpetrators were conspicuously absent from this narrative. Where were the pimps? Former sex slave Long Pross was stabbed in the eye by a female pimp - but this was barely touched upon. In the clip above, Kristof also brings up how the owner for one of the brothels is also an employee of the local police force.

Watching the segment reminded me of the frustration many activists felt when reading The Woman's Crusade article in the Saving The World's Women issue in the NY Times magazine. As Melissa over at Shakesville wrote:

If I'm not mistaken, I just read seven pages that are the philosophical equivalent of "She got raped." Passive. Rape is something that happens to women. Something that gets done to them.

So, apparently, is worldwide institutional oppression.

I don't guess I need to say that I am all for giving women around the world every tool, every resource, every dollar and dinar, every bit of choice and opportunity and access, everything possible to lift themselves up and achieve everything they could want or imagine.

But how can we talk about lifting women up without a serious discussion of, no less without more than the merest passing reference to, who and what has been keeping them down?

The segment focused on women's oppression, but glossed over other complicating factors. For example, Kristof actually purchased two girls from sexual slavery and returned them to their villages. One girl remained in her village and wed - the other went back to the brothels, presumably in search of drugs. Kristof mentioned that this made him understand that "freeing" someone is "more than just opening a door" - but that type of analysis was lacking in the articles and segments that Kristof appeared on. Instead, the focus was on feel-good narratives and painful images of poverty and suffering.

On Oprah's website, she has a registry sub-site set up to help.

The various ways to assist (financial and awareness-based) are helpful, but is human intervention enough in the face of structural and societal problems of this magnitude?

George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Demi Moore And Hillary Clinton [Oprah]

Related: Half The Sky Movement [Official Site]

The Women's Crusade [NY Times]
Here's Your Big Chance To Ask: What About The Men? [Shakesville]

Augustine is facing eviction by the city of Gretna, Louisiana, if she doesn't get her home up to code, so the show brings in a team of professional junk removers and housekeepers to remove over four tons of garbage and human and animal waste from the premises. They also bring in Augustine's two adult children: Jason, who hasn't seen his mother in four years and now lives in Seattle, and Susan, who raised Jason after he was removed from her mother's home as a teenager. They're supervised by an OCD counselor and a professional hoarding counselor, who miraculously remain positive and chipper throughout the entire ordeal, which, as you'll see in the clip above, involved retrieving Augustine's false teeth from layers of garbage, and the disturbing discovery of a decades-old cat corpse. (Later, they found another one.)

This show is always hard to watch (I find that the best way to watch it is to grab a drawer and start throwing things away while you watch), but this episode was especially difficult because Augustine has no remorse for what her actions have done to her family and her community (not to mention the cats), and absolutely no gratitude toward the people who are trying to help her stay in her home. She only blames other people for her situation — her son's father for abandoning her, her mother for not loving her, and especially, her daughter for throwing her stuff away. The camera lingers over some of the few items in Augustine's possession that aren't covered in excrement: little plaques that say things like "Bless This Mess" and "As soon as the rush is over, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. I worked for it; I owe it to myself; and nobody is going to deprive me of it." Augustine certainly followed through on the plaque's threat, though there's no evidence that she ever worked for anything.

Watching this episode, it's impossible not to be struck by the generosity and caring of the people who are helping Augustine, and to wonder if their resources couldn't be used helping other people who actually want to change. Her children are both remarkably well-adjusted, and it's hard not to wish that they could have this woman out of their lives for good. At one point Jason says, with sadness in his voice, that he feels no emotional obligation toward his mother, only a moral one, and he's a hero for even feeling that. If this were the first episode of Hoarders, I probably would never watch it again, because there was no lesson to be learned: Unlike most of the people profiled, Augustine seems less like a person with a compulsion caused by feelings of loss who desperately wants to get her life in control, and more like the clinical definition of a sociopath. And a failed one, at that. Hopefully, Jason and Susan will be able to get over the guilt they feel about "abandoning" Augustine, because she clearly stopped caring about them long ago.

Talk To The Moose - Gap 2009 Holiday Commercial [YouTube]

[With Jon & Kate Gone, The Soup Pitches New TLC Show [Mediaite]

"Lisa you're too young to be a witch! Savor the steps leading up to it: college anorexic, string of bad marriages, career disappointment, failed pottery shop, then when you're old and alone you can hit the witch thing hard."

Ouch! At least they left out "grow hair so long you can sit on it and add a purple streak."

Of course, it wouldn't be a Speidi interview if the couple didn't talk about Lauren Conrad's sex tape.