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The current state of politics, particularly with the addition of Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket, is a big bummer in all seriousness, but the silver lining is that it makes for great comedic material. I’ve been particularly enjoying the stuff coming from The Daily Show, especially Sarah Palin Gender Card and Bristol Palin’s Choice. The opening of last Saturday’s SNL, however, really takes the cake, mainly because of Tina Fey’s incredibly awesome impersonation of Sarah Palin.

You know what’s even funnier? This statement in response to the skit from one of John McCain’s top aides Carly Fiorina:

“The portrait was very dismissive of the substance of Sarah Palin, and so in that sense, they were defining Hillary Clinton as very substantive, and Sarah Palin as totally superficial,” Fiorina told MSNBC earlier Monday. “I think that continues the line of argument that is disrespectful in the extreme, and yes, I would say, sexist in the sense that just because Sarah Palin has different views than Hillary Clinton does not mean that she lacks substance.”

OMG LOL. Methinks someone doesn’t get the joke or the word “sexism“. Man, women are so dumb.

The countdown timer at Cryptic Studios reached zero at midnight, and the official Star Trek Online page is now up. Soon, you can boldly go where no man has gone before with thousands of other Star Trek-loving buddies in Cryptic’s newly announced massively multiplayer online game… whenever it comes out. Considering their upcoming release, Champions Online, isn’t going to be out until spring of ‘09, my guess is STO isn’t going to be out until early 2010. But hey, those shirts we got in Vegas make a lot more sense now:

I’m not a fan of Star Trek. TNG was decent, but it was one of those shows I only watched if nothing was on and I really wanted to watch TV. I am intrigued by this game though, since the Star Trek universe is so elaborate and in depth for something fictional. We’ll see how it goes. They’ll be revealing more info August 10th at the official Star Trek convention in Las Vegas.

New thing I learned today: The Vulcan religion/philosophy is called IDIC, which stands for “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”.

Season 2 of American Gladiators came back this week, and it’s certainly at least as enjoyable as last season. The new season has all the gladiators you loved from last season (AKA Crush, Wolf, Titan), plus eight new gladiators including both winners from last season. (I guess being a gladiator pays well.) The women’s winner, Monica, is now called Jet, basically the same annoyingly perfect woman from season 1, now more manly and with blue streaks in her hair. She looks mean in the pictures, but isn’t really in person; she needs to get mean fast. Otherwise it’s just contender versus another contender on steroids.

Evan, the hyperactive, hypercheerful blonde-headed speed demon winner for the men last season, is now Rocket, a slightly more steroid-ed version of his previous self.

While it’s only been a few months, I don’t think any amount of training will get Evan to fit in with the rest of the male gladiators. I mean, look at the stats for this season’s roster so far:

6′2″, 230 lb
6′8″, 290 lb
6′3″, 220 lb
5′10″, 160 lb
6′3″, 251 lb
6′3″, 240 lb
6′4″, 225 lb

Guess which one is Evan :P

The new season has a few new events, but the first episode only showed a couple of them (and only 3 of the 8 new gladiators). I’m not impressed with any of them, but I do like the changes made to the old events. Basically, everything is like twice as big/wide/tall now. It seems like they got more money, cuz the number of arena spotlights seemed to have doubled too. What’s crazy are the changes to the Eliminator (final event). In season 1, when a contender fell off an obstacle, it was easy for them to just get right back out and climb out of the pit they fell in. So many people cheated on this with the handbike, which should be grueling, but isn’t when you just immediately let go, sprint across the pit, and climb out to continue. Pretty much zero punishment. Now the pits are deeper, and the handbike has a bunch of plastic balls in its pit.

American Gladiators: where a kid can be a kid.

So, a little bit harder, but not as good as having a gladiator run out and grab you for a time penalty. They also added a barrel run where people run down a spinning, slanted, large plastic tube. What’s fun about this one is that contenders lose their footing, slide down the tube and hit the end with their crotch. Awesome. However, the best/worst addition to the Eliminator has to be the finish line. After pushing the physical limits of your body and completely exhausting yourself, instead of busting through some cushions into some giant cushy mats at the end of the Eliminator, you instead have to rope swing through the paper finish line into a pool of water, where instead of catching your breath you drown because you’re shocked by the coldness of the water and are too tired to lift your head above the water. It’s cool tho; American Gladiators has ya covered.

He looks happy to have finished the race.

There also seems to be a little less talking this season, and I’m very thankful for that. I still hate contenders who are so frickin’ motivated and so frickin’ inspired by their kids; nobody cares. Instead, I love American Gladiators‘ editors, giving us wonderful moments such as the following:

Cute girl raises up sign to encourage her mommy.

Mommy is moved by sign.

Mommy is now encouraged and motivated to face the undefeated Crush in Joust.

Mommy gets owned by Crush.

Girl’s heart is crushed shatters.

By the way, I still have a crush on Crush. *gush* I’m quite satisfied with the first episode of the new season. I mean, how can you beat broken-hearted children and contenders with disabilities? (Dude, one guy has a freaking prosthetic leg in the first episode!) Apparently, most of America disagrees and decided to watch shows with “writers” this week. And I use that term “writers” loosely. (House has been total crap since it came back from hiatus.) America would rather watch Two and a Half Men than watch people getting beat down. What is the world coming to?

New thing I learned today: The UK and Australia each have their own rendition of the show, simply called Gladiators.

I don’t consider myself particularly lacking in brains department, but I do have my intellectual weak spots. One of those weak spots is my obsession with the uber-popular reality show, America’s Next Top Model. Yes, I know the show is dumb. Yes, I know the people on the show are dumb. Yes, I know I have to be dumb to enjoy the show. I can’t help it! Something drives me to watch this garbage CW/Tyra Banks craps out twice a year now. I like this show so much, I try to watch all the ones from other countries. (Australia’s is by-far the best spin-off, with girls who actually look like top models. Canada’s and Britain’s was boring… I didn’t even finish the latter. I tried to watch Germany’s, but not knowing German scared me off in the first episode. I’m in the process of downloading China’s.) Anyways, since most of the people I talk to are straight guys, and since no straight guy I know willfully watches this show, I’m going to ramble about this show on my blog because if I can’t talk to my friends about the show, I can at least talk to the internet (or basically myself). Today, I’m going to talk about my initial impressions of the girls after the first episode in New York, so there’s spoilers for 10×02, if anybody cares.

Aimee

Who’s Aimee?

Allison

She’s pretty… pretty boring. Doesn’t seem like a model to me yet.

Amis

She reminds me of Lisa from Cycle 5, except less drunk and slightly better looking. Not better enough looking to be a model, as far as I can tell. I’m not surprised she was in the bottom two.

Anya

Can’t stand her accent, whatever the heck it is. I also think she’s unattractive, but she looks surprisingly decent after makeup and in pictures. Regardless, I hope she doesn’t last too long because her confessionals are going drive me nuts.

Atalya

Another pretty and boring girl. Doesn’t look like a model either, and not surprisingly she got sent home. I guess she wasn’t as lucky as Allison.

Claire

Is it just me or does she look like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac?

Despite this, I actually like her look. Her face is edgy, but soft at the same time.

Dominique

The “extra” girl picked in the first episode. I don’t know why they picked her since she’s orange and looks like a man. I’m not impressed.

Fatima

I like Fatima, even though she seems to be the “black bitch” of the season. I like her pretty Ethiopian look, but damn, is her hair terrible. I’m sure they’ll do something about it during the makeover episode. Also, while I know it was horrible, horrible experience in her life that she wants the world to know about, I hope we’re not forced to hear about female genital mutilation EVERY episode. It’s kind of a buzzkill, ya know.

Katarzyna

Though her face is kinda squished together, I think she’s pretty hot (and like they said on the show, she looks like Polish Scarlett Johansson), and her eastern European look makes her look exotic. Interestingly enough, it was impossible to capture a really bad frame of her in the second episode.

Kimberly

“A lot of people think that I’m this dumb blonde, but actually, I’m really down-to-earth.” Poor Kimberly doesn’t understand that being a down-to-earth doesn’t make her any less of a dumb blonde. And her true (dumb) colors came out in the second episode when she told the judging panel she thinks the fashion industry is lame and wanted to leave… and so she left, totally wasting a contestant’s spot and further crushing the 6 girls that got rejected first episode. I don’t even get why they picked her in the first place; she looks and sounds like a retarded cheerleader with a huge underbite.

Lauren

I think she is supposed to be the so-awkward-she’d-make-a-great-model girl, but she’s just awkward. She’s painful to watch, I don’t see her beauty, and she dresses like a hobo.

Marvita

I didn’t like her ghetto-ness and bad teeth and weird mohawk at first, but I think she’s grown on me a bit. I think it has to do with her Im-gon-keel-you-bitch look she has all the time. I’m probably mistaking it with “fierce”.

Stacy-Ann

Gawd, of all the strippers, they choose this one. Annoying voice, ditzy, and weird-looking. I miss Lisa the stripper from Cycle 9. I wish she did better.

Whitney

I’m tired of plus-sized models on the show. I don’t care how pretty they are or how great their personality. They’re a joke on this show (which is already a joke). No plus sized models PLEASE! (Either that or make everybody a plus-sized model.)

My personal picks are Claire, Katarzyna, and Fatima. My guess will be Whitney because it’s the 10th cycle and no plus-sized model has won the show yet. If they’re going for a normal model, I would have said Marvita because she has sob stories (homeless, poor, raped) and was in the semi-finals last season, but Jaslene pretty much covered that. Now… I… guess… Claire? No clue. Anyways, I think I’ll got watch episode 3 now…

New thing I learned today: Paulina Porizkova, new judge on ANTM, was born in Czechoslovakia in 1965. She got her modeling start with Elite Models and was the face of Estee Lauder from 1988 to 1995.

Under the recommendation of friends, we finally checked out the first two episodes of NBC’s reincarnation of American Gladiators. I was expecting that, being older and more mature, I wouldn’t be as into this show as I was when I was kid. I mean, the show’s got overconfident contestants constantly trash-talking and totally ludicrous gladiator characters (LOL at Toa and Militia), and all they do is beat the sh*t out of each other in a giant, padded/pooled playground… Okay, nevermind, that sounds freakin’ awesome. (I still play with toys and video games anyway.)

Here’s a Youtube video of Crush pummeling the brains out of some blonde chick with pugil sticks:

In the second competition, there was this squirrelly little Asian guy named Molivann “Spider Monkey” Duy who was HI-larious. The amount of trash-talking he did between each event and seeing him running around next to guys twice his size made for a very entertaining episode. And he actually did okay! If you’re only going to check out one episode, make sure to at least watch the second half of the 2-hour premiere.

Moli slapping his butt

The gladiators need some work though. Some of them seem like pushovers this season. One gladiator was DQ in his event against both contenders for breaking the same rule twice, and another gladiator got injured in first event, messing up his arm swinging on gymnastics rings. Hellga has yet to live up to her name. I think it’s because it’s still early in the season, and they still need to get the hang of the games and their rules. There are still some decent gladiators though. Crush is definitely the best female gladiator: she’s actually good at… gladiating, doesn’t talk much, and looks the least like a man. I’m not sure about men, but I think I like Wolf’s character the best at the moment (though the incredibly cheesy Titan is a close second). Anyways, I’m looking forward to this new show. It’s no Ninja Warrior, but it’s still very entertaining. Maybe we don’t need writers after all…

On a different note, I am super, SUPER excited about Wednesday’s Smash Bros. update:

Pikmin was my favorite game on the Gamecube, so it rocks my world to know that Olimar and his little buddies are playable in Smash Bros. Of course, now there’s rumors of yet another delay for the game. March?? UGH. Damn you Nintendo! And when the hell are you going to announce Pikmin Wii?!

New thing I learned today: American Gladiator Crush’s real name is Gina Carano, and she’s a well-known female fighter in the world of MMA (mixed martial arts). She specializes in Muay Thai boxing.

We just finished watching this episode, and I can’t get over how totally stupid it was. Honestly, it might not be the lamest episode; I didn’t watch the filler turd that was churned out for over a year and a half between Naruto and Naruto Shippuuden. And there were some pretty bad episodes outside of that filler period (i.e. Kakashi’s Mask episode), but those were dumb on purpose.

While I guess this post technically has spoilers, the events in this episode are pretty minor compared to the main story. During this arc, there’s three battles going on concurrently, and the battle this episode focuses on is the least important. In fact, the entire battle is pretty much a waste of time, both in terms of what’s happening in the story and television airtime. If you’re concerned about spoilers, you’d be doing yourself a bigger disservice by watching the next-episode previews at the end of each episode (insanely spoiler-ific this season) than reading the rest of this post.

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These commercials are totally sexist. Despite that, I still love this series of commercials. My favorites:

“Mardi Gras“, “Yacht“, and “A Little Help” aren’t as funny, but the whole series overall I thought was pretty catchy. I was thinking of sharks, and I randomly remembered these commercials.

The iMac wouldn’t turn on during its usual hours the last couple days, so I was stuck doing non-internet related stuff. Mainly sorting Magic cards, since I didn’t feel like gaming. Time passes really, really slowly without internet. *sigh* Stupid first-gen iMac. I need a consistently functional computer… and a more interesting life.

New thing I learned today: Bacardi is the world’s largest privately-owned spirits company. It was founded in Cuba in 1862 and has strong roots there, but because of the Bacardi family’s opposition to Castro, Bacardi products are no longer produced or sold in Cuba. Bacardi bought the French vodka brand Grey Goose in 2004 for $2 billion.