Actors Reading Yelp Reviews

Mashable had two videos of actors reading Yelp reviews, and it's hilarious.  The first is by Therese Plummer, who had guest starred on Law and Order: SVU and The Good Wife, and the second is by Chris Kipiniak, who also guest starred on Law and Order: SVU and The Good Wife.  According to his IMDB page, he also won $1,400 in Cash Cab with his sister, Anya.  Now that is cool.

Olympics Opening Ceremony

Last night was the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympics Games in London.

Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor did the opening voiceovers - their voices were very recognizable and the accents made it a little less cheesy.

I have a soft spot for London, having spent a semester there in college, so it's great to see it in the spotlight.  London gets a bad rap for its rain and bad food.  In reality the weather is part of its charm, and it makes the sun that much brighter when it comes out.  The food can also be really good if you know where to go.  Some of my favorite British dishes are typical pub food like bangers and mash and beef and ale pie, and also great Indian food.  The best umbrella I ever had was bought in London, and I was so crushed when I lost it two years later.  They really do know how to make their umbrellas there.

Danny Boyle, the Slumdog Millionaire director, is in charge of the Opening Ceremony tonight as the Artistic Director, and he said that he was not even going to try to outdo the sheer spectacle of Beijing's Opening Ceremony.  Instead, he was going for sentiment and national pride.  The Opening Ceremony was titled, "Isles of Wonder," referring to the four distinct areas of Great Britain - England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. .

Best moment:

Daniel Craig as James Bond fetching the Queen from Buckingham Palace to open the Olympic Games at the Olympic Stadium, and then the two of them sky-diving off the helicopter.  The corgis were very cute.  The Queen looked like she was about to laugh when she was escorted by James Bond out of Buckingham Palace, which lends credence to the story that she is very funny and has quite a sharp sense of humor.

Other Highlights:

- Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie performing (she had also shown up on Sesame Street playing with Oscar the Grouch)
- The five golden Olympic rings being forged and then rising and shooting sparks down from the sky
- J.K. Rowling reading from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan
- Rowan Atkinson playing a bored musician in the London Symphony Orchestra
- Hundreds of Mary Poppinses "fighting" villains from children's literature, including Voldermort, Queen of Hearts, Cruella DeVille, and Captain Hook
- LED pixels attached to the seats that basically turned the seats into giant LED screens
- The exuberance of the Independent Athletes from the Netherlands Antilles, who was competing under the Olympic flag
- David Beckham driving a boat to bring the Olympic torch to the Olympic Stadium.  Too bad he was fully clothed.
- Lighting of the Olympic cauldron by young British athletes - they put the flames to copper leaves that had been carried in front of each delegation, and over 200 copper leaves were then ignited and rose together to form the Olympic cauldron

Not-So Highlights:

- Kenneth Branagh dressed like Abraham Lincoln citing lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest and then standing around among people dressed in Victorian garb doing some sort of weird mix of kung fu and dance
- Taking such a long time moving the sods and other pastoral set pieces to indicate the end of the agragrian era and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
- Dancing nurses and doctors?
- Creepy giant baby
- The boring story of Frankie and June
- Mr. Y called Kobe Bryant LeBron.  I just died.

Fashion:

My favorite outfits were from Cameroon and Mexico, who wore very colorful and bright outfits, and a guy in the Solomon Islands contingent had dyed his beard blue yellow green to match the flag colors, and also put the flag on the back of his head in color.

The ugliest outfits included Germany's pastel blue and pink jackets, Malaysia's yellow pants with black animal stripes, and Sweden's Where's Waldo outfits in the Swedish colors of blue, yellow, and white stripes. Canada's outfits are also surprisingly ugly - very 80s.   By far the ugliest was actually the host country's outfits, white with gold accents.  No wonder Stella McCartney immediately tweeted that she was not the designer behind these clothes.

There has been a lot of controversy over the Opening Ceremony outfits of the United States contingent, from  how they look to European to the fact that they were made in China.  The outfits actually don't look that bad on the athletes, especially the tall basketball players.

Overall the Opening Ceremony was just OK for me.  Many parts were pretty boring, with occasional burst of brilliance.  It's definitely not as good as Beijing's Opening Ceremony, which was amazing and spectacular. Thank God for the Queen and James Bond providing the best moment.

Remix of UP

Mr. Y told me about this great remix of the Pixar movie UP from Australian DJ Pogo, which sounds like a lounge track.

So You Think You Can Dance - Top 16

The top 16 put on a great show tonight on So You Think You Can Dance.  I really do think this group of 20 is one of the best this show has ever had.  Surprisingly, there is also not one dancer that I disliked immensely.  I did not like Amelia's shtick in the beginning, but so far she and Will have really clicked and I've enjoyed their dances.  The show is taking two weeks off because of the Olympics.

I immediately guessed the group routine was choreographed by Tyce, and I was right.  It was cheesy, staged-y, and showy - exactly Tyce's style.

Favorite routines

1) Witney and Chehon's contemporary from Stacey Tookey.  This was a gorgeous routine, set to Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You."  The story was about two people who loved each other but could not be together.  Chehon was so powerful and made all the lifts looked so easy, and Witney looked like a contemporary dancer.  Chehon referred to being able to relate to the story of impossible love and he looked so contemplative.  Now I really want to know what the story is.

2) Lindsay and Cole's jazz routine from Mandy Moore.  This was much better than last week's routine. Lindsay and Cole represented love and hate, and they really sold the routine.  Cole was intense as usual, and Lindsay actually brought the maturity needed for this routine.

3) Eliana and Cyrus's hip hop routine from NappyTabs.  This robot-and-ballerina routine clearly played to Cyrus's strength, and Eliana matched him step by step.  I do feel like Eliana hasn't been allowed to stretch to her full potential, yet, because she has Cyrus as her partner.  I like Cyrus, but he clearly has his limitations.  It reminds me of Jeanine and Phillip from Season 5 - Jeanine didn't truly soar until she made it to the top 10 and was able to dance with other partners.  If Eliana can survive to the top 10 here and get to dance with better dancers, she will be even more amazing.

Least favorite routines

1) Janelle and Dareian's cha-cha from Pasha (!).  This was terrible.  Pasha choreographed a good cha-cha, but Janelle and Dareian bombed in trying to dance it.  Dareian's ugly feet were really obvious when dancing ballroom, and Janelle looked confused instead of sexy.

2) Audrey and Matthew's salsa from Liz Lira.  Audrey and Matt tried, but this salsa was slow, plodding, and not sexy at all.  We know what it was supposed to look like from the rehearsal, and the dance was nothing like it.

Eliminations

I only picked one person correctly last week from among the girls - Lindsay.  The bottom three girls were Amber, Lindsay, and Eliana.  Amber and Eliana danced solos for the judges.  I was rooting for the judges to save Eliana and Lindsay, which they did.  I don't dislike Amber, but her attitude can be a turnoff and Lindsay and Eliana are much more interesting.

The bottom three boys were Dareian, George, and Brandon, so I got two out of three right.  I was really happy Cole was saved.  Dareian and Brandon danced solos.  I wanted Dareian to go, but the judges saved George and Dareian.  It's too bad that Brandon left - he was so entertaining and has shown that he can danced a lot of different styles.  I will miss him.

Predictions on who will be in trouble in three weeks

Girls: Janelle, Audrey, Tiffany (although I've been predicting Tiffany in the bottom 3 all three weeks, and I haven't been right so far)
Boys: Dareian, Matt, and George

Warehouse 13 - "A New Hope"

Warehouse 13 returned for its fourth season last night, and it was a great episode.  It was darker than a lot of their usual episodes, but there were still some of the show's trademark humor.

The episode picked up right where it left last season - the Warehouse in ruins around Artie, Myka, and Pete after Walter Sykes's bomb went off, and H.G. Wells saved them by trapping them in a bubble.  The team figured out that MacPherson's watch could lead them to a fail-safe that might prevent the bomb from going off, and set off in a race to get the artifact in France and at the Vatican.  The fail-safe turned out to be Magellan's astrolabe, which could be used to turn the time back 24 hours.

Brent Spiner guest-starred as Brother Adrian, a priest who headed a secretive and scary brotherhood prepared to kill to protect the astrolabe, and almost succeeded.  They managed to kill Pete, but Pete also stabbed Brother Adrian before he died.  Before dying himself, Brother Adrian warned Artie that he would be releasing evil if he used the artifact.  Artie used it anyway in order to save the Warehouse and the world, which had fallen into chaos due to the release of Pandora's box from the Warehouse, but it was clear that by doing so there were going to be consequences.

I like how the show doesn't take the easy way out of resetting the Warehouse and then just moving on.  One of the clearest themes in the show is that using artifacts always has its consequences, and sometimes those are far worse than one can imagine.  In this case it looks like the evil mentioned by Brother Adrian is related to Claudia and her determination to bring Steve Jinks back to life using the metronome.  I thought Claudia was behaving like a brat in this episode, but in the first timeline she was forced to recognize that other people have lost loved ones as well.  In the new timeline, she never had this conversation, and her determination to bring Steve back to life appears to be a very bad idea.

History Detectives - 100th Episode

History Detectives returned for its 10th season last week with its 100th episode.  It was a great episode - all centering on music. Plus they finally showed the research interns!

The first investigation was over a Fender Stratocaster guitar.  The owner's father was a pilot who flew music acts in the 1960s, including Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary.  The pilot stated that Dylan left the guitar in the plane, and his efforts to return them were unsuccessful.  There was also a bunch of handwritten and typewritten lyrics in the guitar case.  Elyse Luray and Wes Cowan investigated the guitar, and was able to authenticate both the lyrics and the guitar as belonging to Bob Dylan.  In addition, they were able to determine that it was the same Stratocaster that Bob Dylan used during the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.  The crowd was expecting him to play acoustic folk songs, but he plugged in the guitar and went electric.  He got booed off the stage, although he returned later to play acoustic songs.  It was a momentous event in rock and roll history.

The second investigation was done by Tufuku Zuberi and it involved Beatles autographs.  Two brothers wanted to know if the autographs they got of Ringo Starr and John Lennon were real.  The Beatles first visited America in 1964, and were staying at the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach.  The two brothers wrote to Charles, the Maitre d' at the Deauville that they had met the year before when they stayed at the hotel, and asked him to get them the Beatles' autographs.  They got a package with a room service menu signed by John Lennon and a photo of the Beatles signed by Ringo Starr, along with autographs of Bob Hope, Cynthia Lennon (John's wife at the time), and a couple of other stars at the time.  Tufuku was able to authenticate the four autographs, but discovered that the Beatles' autographs were fake.  It looked like Charles signed the room service menu and the photograph in order not to disappoint the two brothers.

Finally, Gwen Wright investigated a collage that might have been created by Frank Zappa.  Gwen found out that Frank Zappa did dabble in visual arts when he was young, and created this collage in homage of the Professional Drum Shop. He visited the Professional Drum Shop a lot when he was young.  This investigation was particularly interesting because Gwen got to meet Frank's brother, friend who created a lot of his advertisements, and his widow, Gail Zappa.  Gail Zappa was the one who made the connection between the collage and the Professional Drum Shop, because she recognized the picture of the late owner of the shop.

All three stories were very compelling.  History Detectives definitely saved the best for its 100th episode.

Jonathan Groff and Zachary Quinto

If this is true, what a hot couple:

Jonathan Groff and Zachary Quinto

I really like both of them.  I saw Jonathan on Broadway in Spring Awakening, and he was fantastic.  I also like his role on Glee with his BFF Lea Michele.  I still maintain that Jesse St. James is going to show up next year in NYC to try to win Rachel back.

I liked Zachary in Heroes - one of the few good things about that show.  He was even better as Spock in the Star Trek reboot.  He joined the Ryan Murphy family by guest-starring in American Horror Story last season, and he's coming back for season 2.