Simmering Hope

Oh boy! What a night yesterday was.
Maybe I should start with a recap of performances.

Adam
Started the show being his usual bubbling personality. He sang Zeppelin. All right I would rather say. He is the most obvious winner of American Idol ever.
Allison
Being the rock week I had high expectations from her. I could have bet that she would sing Janice Joplin and so she did. But unfortunately it was not a stellar performance. I still keep my fingers crossed for her. I really want to see her in final two.
Kris
He is so freaking boring. He is kind of cute, but not excessively and I don’t believe he has a big fan base, mostly because he is a newly wed and parading his not pretty wife unit almost on every show. And his ‘Come Together’ choice was NOT a smart one.
Danny
Time to go home Danny! His performance was absolutely, by far, the most ridiculous one. He picked up ‘Dream On’ and struggled with the song from the beginning to the awful scream at the end.
What a joke!!!

Duets: Adam and Allison: brilliant. And as per Simon’s comment: it may have saved Allison for another week.
Kris and Danny: unpleasant (that to be polite)

Predictions:
Safe: Adam
On the go: the rest of them
Danny has a huge fan base (I wonder why?? I guess all the pimping from the judges paid off) and he may be saved, although he does not deserve it. Based on that I would say that Allison and Kris are the candidates for elimination, with Kris going home.
I would like so much to see Danny go home. He gets on my nerves.

Update: Allison went home.
I hoped she would have been saved for another week, but her young age and the fact that Danny has that huge, undeserved fan base sealed the deal. I am surprised that Kris is still in the competition.
Oh well, let’s hope for the best to win. Namely Adam.

A recap from yesterday:

- Kris: the dark horse of the group was pretty good. I am still not sure if he has the material to be The Idol.
- Allison: she is my favorite. I like her voice and I keep my fingers crossed that Simon was wrong on his ‘horrible feeling’ that she may be in trouble. I would say that her performance could have been better, but on the other hand, she landed on the bottom three when she did sing very well. So… let’s hope for the best.
- Danny: now, this guy is really getting on my nerves. I liked him in the beginning up to the moment the judges started pimping him out. Geez! that was annoying. OK, so the guy lost his wife, let’s get over our sympathy and admit that he is boring. Sure, his voice is all right for a while, but after that it’s just a raspy voice. And don’t get me started on his smirk. Get rid of that ridiculous smirk Danny!!!!
- Matt: he was all right yesterday; not over the moon for his performance, but still much better than other nights. In all honesty, he should be eliminated today. He does not have a voice to remember or to make you buy his CD.
- Adam: I am on the fence regarding Adam. Sometimes I like his creativity, other times he gets on my nerves with his falsetto. I would like to hear a song without the screeching and the tongue hanging out. Not a nice image. He has talent but sometimes his arrangements are more to shock than to please. That being said, he is talented and creative, hands down.

About judges:
More often than not I am looking forward to hearing Simon’s comments. And so are the contestants. He is witty and most of the time down to earth. But yesterday he was a little bit off, especially with regards to Allison.
Paula- I love her. She is such a nice person but because she does not feel comfortable saying anything bad about a performance, she is not taken seriously.
Randy and Kara- they are whatever. Kara seems to be biased. Maybe all of them are.

In conclusion: tonight we should say farewell to Matt if we are to be objective.
As well, for the weeks to come I would like to see the guys leaving in the following order:
- Kris
- Danny

Adam and Allison top two.

I will be surprised to see Allison winning. Based on the info leaked on the net a few days ago, Adam has already the biggest number of downloads.

I just can’t stop thinking how stupid some people really are. Not necessarily because they swallow the whole ‘reality tv’ crap without chewing it but because they are so much involved in other people’s so-called romance.
Even more, they talk about the participants in that uber stupid show ‘The Bachelor’- add to this The Bachelorette, which is even more ridiculous… if possible- by nicknames. A quick reminder who’s who:
Jason Mesnick- a single dad from around Seattle who was rejected by DeAnna Pappas- and don’t even start me on this silly whiny bimbo- was picked up by ABC to be the next bachelor and was given a chance to find romance and a new life partner.
Melissa and Molly are the final candidates. Who they are or what they do is irrelevant; both seem to be shallow and more in search of their 15 minutes of fame. I mean saying that Melissa was cheerleader is sufficient.

Fans of this show – and you can find them either on ABC’s website or at Fans of Reality TV – call the participants ‘Jay’ and ‘Mel’… enough to see red in front of your eyes.
Why get so much invested in something so obviously fake?

Now the fans are angry at the thought that the producers of the show may have manipulated them and scripted the whole story. Hello!!! It’s a show, it’s supposed to get good rating and how can you get something like that? By creating conflict, controversy, illusions. Giving ‘clues’ and ‘screecaps’ to be dissected and analyzed by women obsessed with finding who is the chosen one, way before anybody else.

Geez! I tried watching the show, I admit that. But I managed to go through about 15 minutes of the first episode and then I switched the channel to CNN. Eventually I watched a few more minutes, here and there, enough to pick only ONE girl I liked: Jillian. Not because she is Canadian, but because she was not only smart and pretty, but she had substance. I was truly happy that she was let go by Jason, who deserves exactly the type of girls he picked as finalists.

Arcg!! I have just remembered another ridiculous season: the one with Matt- the London based ex-banker or whatever- working- at- a- bank and the blonde bimbo, the daughter of Lorenzo Lamas. What a bunch of crap that one was. Anybody with a pea-sized brain could have figured out pretty much right off the bat how phoney the story was.

As a conclusion ‘The Bachelor/Bachelorette’ is the most lame reality show on tv and I hope it would get axed and replaced with something more intelligent.

Update: After a pretty boring show, the winners-as I remember right now- are:
Kate Winslet- best actress
Penelope Cruz- best supporting actress
Sean Penn- best actor
Heath Ledger- best supporting actor
Slumdog Millionaire- best movie
Departure- foreign language film

Forget all about recession. At least for one evening of glamorous dresses, flawless make-ups and heavy exposure. Today is the Oscar night.
Actually it will start early in the afternoon with a ‘Red Carpet’ preview. Celebrities are going to be shown descending from limousines, with a big smile on their faces and ready to be grabbed by reporters and asked questions such as ‘What are you wearing’ and the lucky designer’s name will be captured by our perked ears.

Who is going to win this year? Would it be Kate Winslet? I root for her, so I definitely would like to hear her acceptance speech.

According to a list leaked by the net and showed by Daily Mail, she is going to win.
But check the list for yourself.
It seems to be real.

The first piece of news is about … the Olympics. What else?

I am not going to talk about the lavish opening ceremony, other than to mention that it took seven years to master the choreography and it cost about $40 billion.

Interesting are the other aspects surrounding this year Summer Olympic Games. After the terrorist attack happened last week, an extra 100,000 security and police troops have been deployed to Beijing and Tiananmen Square was closed off.
An Air China flight bound for Beijing from Tokyo was forced to turn back after an Olympic-related bomb threat was received.
Buddhist monks continue to protest wherever they can along with exiled Tibetans. It’s an understatement to say that they are unhappy with the Chinese ruling.
Pollution remains a key concern for the Games and on the morning of the opening ceremony, fog obscured the Beijing skyline. Naturally, the official point of view is that people confuse ‘haze’ with ‘pollution’ Yeah, right.
I wonder if the food prepared for athletes is coming from irradiated seeds or not.
Some time ago, Chinese scientists boasted about the huge size of the crops made with seeds irradiated in space, assuring at the same time that they are not going to be used to feed the Olympians. But what about the rest of the people?

In any way, the Olympic Games are very important to the Chinese officials. They are to show that China emerged from being a poor country, occupied in the past by Western power players and Japan and morphed into a power to be taken into account.
The idealistic image has been unfortunately tarnished by some events, like the resignation of Steven Spielberg as artistic director of the Olympic Games in February, over Chinese relation with Sudan.
Following month, March, has been plagued by riots and demonstrations in Tibetan areas culminating with angry reception of the Olympic torch in many international capitals.

The oil control proxy war
While China is busy hosting the Olympic Games, Russia is busy staging a war with Georgia.

What if the problem actually is related to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline? The pipeline feeds Caspian oil to the West, without passing into Russian territory (hence no Russian control… at least not directly; some terrorist acts only)

It looks like there are some forces trying to control the oil reserve in Central Asia. Russia wants the pipeline to go through Russia (duh!), the USA wants to go through Georgia and Turkey and Iran wants to see it go through … Iran (where else??)
Coincidentally or not, the Americans have sent a huge naval task-force to the Persian Gulf to blockade Iran. Throw into the equation another player: Israel, and remember the recent reports of a massive IAF exercise over the Mediterranean.

For some time now, Georgia has been fighting separatists with ties to Russia in order to regain control of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which voted for independence in 2006, in unofficial referendum. The separatist administration in South Ossetia has been trying to gain formal independence since breaking away in a civil war in the 1990s.
The majority of its 70,000 population are ethnically distinct from Georgians, speaking a dialect related to Farsi. The Ossetians claim that they have been forcibly absorbed into Georgia under Soviet Rule.
Now, South Ossetians want to join up with their ethnic cousins in North Ossetia, which is an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation.

In April 2008, Russia steps up ties with the other Georgian’s breakaway republic, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in retaliation to NATO’s position of allowing Georgia to join the alliance at some point.

In July Russia admitted flying jets over South Ossetia to ‘cool hot heads in Tbilisi’ and at the same time Georgia and Russia accused each other of military build-up.

August 8, 2008 marks the start of heavy fighting between Georgia and Russia.
Photo of Georgian shells fired at separatist rebels in South Ossetia, August 8, 2008

Hundreds of fighters from Russia and Abkhazia were reportedly heading to aid the separatist troops.
Some people believe that Georgia’s president tries to draw NATO into the conflict, but chances are that it’s not going to happen. After trying to avoid a military conflict with Russia for so many years, would NATO be foolish to get into one at this point?

Let’s move on to a more serious and much anticipated issue: Angelina Jolie’s newborns
Here are some pictures of the happy family. Shiloh is a sweetheart and I must admit that the twins are beautiful. Considering that Hello! Magazine paid $11 million for the first pictures, they should have better been gorgeous.
Jolie Pitt Twins

Shiloh and one baby

Jolie Pitt family

Angelina, Shiloh and the newborns

What a slap on Jennifer Lopez’s face! Her twins were worth only half the money.

Now if you want to see a picture of Nicole Kidman’s baby… there is only a very fuzzy one not worth uploading. I guess it’s just a typical baby, looking like her father (as per Nicole’s statements) with a reddish blond hair.