America's Psychic Challenge

Oh man, are you ready for this?

Yeah. You're ready for this. "This" being "America's Psychic Challenge," a reality show on Lifetime, in which psychics compete in various challenges to win $100,000. In each episode, the two psychics that receive the highest scores go on to the quarterfinals, and the two that receive the lowest scores are eliminated. In the first challenge in the first episode, the contestants have to use their psychic energies to locate a person sitting in one of the rooms of an abandoned mental hospital. Let's meet the contestants!

Contestant #1 is Karyn, a former accountant.

She says, "I started seeing dead people at the age of two. It's something that runs in my mom's side of the family." You don't say! This is about as interesting as Karyn gets. Incidentally, she's not a very good psychic; her guess is way off on this first challenge.

Contestant #2 is Jamie, a radio psychic. He actually does pretty well on the first challenge; he selects the room adjacent to the room where the person is hiding.

Contestant #3 is Jackie, whose neurotic passive-aggressive qualities develop charmingly over the episode. "My specialty is working with DAs across the country, finding serial killers." God, I hope not. She also claims that people call her "The White Serpent" for her work with the spirits of the dead. Of course they do, dear. Like Karyn, Jackie is also guesses way off on the first challenge.

Contestant #4 is the awesomely named Zenobia, who also fails the first challenge pretty hard. Unlike her competitors, however, Zenobia is actually kind of endearing. Her voice is alternately squeaky and hoarse, and she tends to make vague yet truthful statements such as, "Pain, torment, it's not a good feeling." You said it, sister!

Oh, wait a minute! It's time to test YOUR psychic powers! Can you tell which card is the jack of diamonds??

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Did you get it right? If so, you may be psychic!

No? You didn't get it? Okay, let's try another one! Use your psychic abilities to tell which state Katie is from!

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YEAH! MINNESOTA REPRESENT!

The next challenge involves the contestants doing a psychic reading of a celebrity sitting behind a screen, who they cannot talk to. They are given a picture of said celebrity in a sealed envelope and also one personal item belonging to the celebrity, a watch. They can earn up to 25 points for describing the celebrity correctly, and more if they can identify her. The alleged celebrity in question is Lisa Williams, Lifetime psychic. Er, medium.

Hair and arrogant smirk aside, Lisa is kind of a fun bitch, silently laughing at the psychics from behind the screen. Check out her gleeful reaction to Karyn's statement, "I feel like this person really understands music." Lisa's nevertheless pretty generous with points, giving Karyn 21 out of 25, though Karyn feels like she deserved more. Hey Karyn? Take what you can get, you know?

Anyway, Karyn's bumbling is totally overshadowed by Jackie's neurotic display. While the other psychics sit at the table to do the reading, Jackie wanders all over the place, touching the screen and muttering things to herself. Her reading is as follows:

"Grandma had a big lesson for you, just knew you were going to do it. Upper respiratory, something was affected by the throat as well, um, with yourself. You've been something with [?], and thyroid. I keep getting the throat, like as if, uh, something with singing, something...The envelope means nothing to me, the watch means nothing. It's more of what I'm feeling from the oldest spirit coming through. I would say this is, uh, is is all I'm getting, some eyeglasses [?]. Nothing too impressive, not about the celebrity. Nothing too impressive is coming."

A rather miffed Lisa Williams awards Jackie 15 out of 25 points for not trying hard enough. Jackie is upset and complains to John, the host, that she can't do readings without seeing or talking to the person. She creeps around John, hovering over his shoulder, and mumbles something about him having problems with depression and high cholesterol, "but you know that already." An uncomfortable John asks, "Are you doing a reading of me?" When she says yes, he tells her to stop that. No, don't stop, Jackie! I want to hear more.

It turns out hovering is kind of a habit for Jackie:

In the final and not in the least bit tasteless or exploitative challenge, the contestants are introduced to the family of a murder victim and instructed to use their powers to figure out who was killed and how. It's really such a tactless Lifetime thing to do that I'm not going to relate the details, only that Zenobia and Jackie do well enough to advance to the quarterfinals, while the comparatively bland Jamie and Karyn are eliminated. And that's that.

Bonus psychic challenge! Which phone is about to ring?

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Can you handle this????

Are you psychic? Let Lifetime know! Also, feel free to share any personal tragedies, preferably lurid enough to land a brief spot on the next season of America's Psychic Challenge.

More Backstreet Boys!

New Backstreet Boys single, with the rather long name "Straight Through My Heart (Soldier Down)", is pretty awesome. Listen to it, love it.

Just for you

omg soooo fucking sexy y'all!!! <3 <3 <3

So I was listening to 107.5, and...

I heard a Pitbull song called "Hotel Room Service" that's absolutely terrible and hilarious. The chorus features the line "Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn" repeated four times, and the specificity of the Holiday Inn reference makes me wonder whether 1) Holiday Inn actually paid Pitbull to mention them in the song, or 2) Holiday Inn is actually Pitbull's hotel of choice. I'm hoping it's 2), because I really love the image of a famous rapper like Pitbull checking in at a Holiday Inn and getting his room key and being told about the continental breakfast and pool hours.

Chorus aside, I feel compelled to spell out the lyrics of the first verse in paragraph form. Read it out loud for added effect. As dictated by the Internet:

"She like that freaky stuff. Two in the oh! and one in the ah! That kinky stuff. You nasty, but I like your type and like T.I. it's whatever you like. Bring your girls, it's whatever tonight. Your man just left. I'm the plumber tonight, I'll check your pipes. Oh, you the healthy type. Well, here goes some egg whites. Now gimme that sweet, that nasty, that gushy stuff. Let me tell you what we gon' do. 2+2, I'm gon' undress you. Then we're gonna go 3 and 3, you gon' undress me. Then we're gon' go 4 and 4, we gon' freak some more."

I feel like this may be a bit of a low shot--I suspect that most rappers don't expect the average listener to pay too much attention to the lyrics anyway. But between the T.I. reference, the plumbing analogy, the basic addition, and the mysterious egg whites (what the hell are they going to do with those??), my god. It's almost genius in its warped stupidity.

oh 107.5...

When I'm driving to and from work, I usually listen to JAMMiN 107.5 (yes, that is the actual capitalization), which plays hip hop and R&B. It's not a great radio station. The playlist is pretty repetitive, and lately it seems like they've only been playing Sean Kingston's "Fire Burning," which I probably would like if I hadn't heard it so many times now, and Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow," which I really kind of despise for being so aggressively vapid.*

The other issue with 107.5? The sheer number of commericals. And the commercials are weird. There's one commercial that claims you can get a new home for only $2. What they really mean is that if you go to their website, they will sell you a list of foreclosed homes in your area for $2. The commercial features a very happy woman telling another very happy woman about how she's only paying $100 a month for her new home, which she found off the foreclosure list. Because it's great to be able to save money over somebody else's shattered dreams.

Another commercial is for credityes.com, which tries to convince you that if you sign up at their website, car dealers will panting at your doorstep trying to sell you cars. Even if you're bankrupt, unemployed, in the middle of a divorce, have horrible credit, and you totaled your last two cars, apparently. Because you really need that new car.

Finally, there are occasional PSAs about STDs which are kind of hilarious. My favorite is the one in which a girl is gushing to her boyfriend about the STD he gave her for her birthday. "Gonorrhea? You shouldn't have!" "Well, I knew you didn't have it and I heard you talking to Sandy about hers, and I just wanted to be the one to give it to you..."

*Don't get me wrong, pop music doesn't need a serious (or even coherent) message to be good. That's not the point. But the more I hear it, the more I'm convinced that "Boom Boom Pow" just fucking sucks!

Joanie loves you

Joanie turned out to be the most unlikely star of The Black Donnellys. In the beginning, she didn't have much going for her: she was a heroin addict and she was dating Jimmy Donnelly. But Joanie, with her adorably hoarse little voice and stringy hair, had more energy and sass than any of the other female characters on the show. She wasn't self-conscious. She threw dishes at Whitey. She embarrassed Sean in front of his new girlfriend, but only because she was so darn affectionate. In short, she was fabulous. And unexpectedly, she gave us the sweetest moment of the entire series (apologies for the bad lighting):

In one brief, nearly wordless scene in "The Black Drop," Joanie demonstrated more compassion and maturity than probably all the other major characters combined. The Black Donnellys is supposed to be about the love between the four brothers, and when Dokey humiliates Jimmy in "The Black Drop" the other brothers beat Dokey up in retaliation--but Joanie is the one sitting on the floor with Jimmy, telling him everything is going to be all right. The fact that Joanie, despite being so monumentally fucked up herself, is capable of showing that much love for Jimmy, a guy who doesn't even treat her well most of the time (remember how he called her a crackwhore to her face?) and is even more fucked up than she is, is pretty amazing. Unhealthy? To a degree, yes. But the love was definitely there.

This wasn't the relationship the writers wanted viewers to care about. If anything, Jimmy and Joanie's relationship was meant to provide a comical contrast to Tommy and Jenny's "serious" relationship. Jimmy and Joanie had an established relationship; Tommy and Jenny never got off the ground as a couple. Jimmy and Joanie had effective, if crude, communication; Tommy and Jenny were utterly incapable of expressing their true desires. Jimmy and Joanie were irresponsible and (seemingly) interested only in instant gratification; Tommy and Jenny were responsible and always paralyzed by needless guilt. Tom Guiry and Betsy Beutler had chemistry, Jonathan Tucker and Olivia Wilde didn't.

The formula for Tommy and Jenny's relationship is a pretty normal one for television drama: there's sexual tension and a sense that the male and female lead are "meant to be", but the writers avoid making it explicit for as long as possible. The reasoning seems to be that if the characters are explicitly together, the audience will lose interest. Sometimes this formula works, and sometimes it's simply frustrating. In The Black Donnellys, Tommy and Jenny's non-relationship just didn't go anywhere. Meanwhile, Jimmy and Joanie's relationship, which appeared to only be about sex and drugs at the beginning, ended up being about love. Funny how these things turn out...

I miss California

("California Love," 2pac feat. Dr. Dre)

"Let me serenade the streets of L.A./From Oakland to Sactown/The Bay Area and back down/Cali is where they put the mack down/Give me love!"

Words I am tired of

"Appropriation" "discourse" "subversive" "transgressive" "consciousness" "problematic" "examine" "hegemony" "patriachy" "dominant culture" "the other" "postcolonial" "exploitation" "oppression" "ways of knowing" "representations" "objectification" "deviance" "binary" "intersectionality" "activism" "silencing" "hierarchy" "empowering" "internalization" "revitalization" "womyn" "epistemology" "controlling images" "privilege" "normative" "marginalization" "safe space" to name a few.

It's not that I have a problem with any of these words on their own (well, except maybe "womyn"). While I accept that most, if not all, academic departments use their own language, these words and phrases get tossed around so casually among ethnic and gender studies types that I begin to suspect that they're just being used to avoid actual thought. But hey, maybe that's just me.

I kind of want to design a point system that I can use whenever I'm reading a relevant article or book. One point for nouns from the above list. Two points for words ending in "-zation." Three points for anything deemed "problematic." Five points for alternative spellings of "woman," "women," etc.

Any more words you want to add to the list?