I don’t know who’s off yet; part one of my voting strategy seems to have come off, as Rocco is saved and I’m positive it was my eleven votes that did it. Positive!

Okay, now the important stuff. This is the first time I’ve ever had to a) look at moving footage of Jessica Simpson as opposed to still photos; b) listen to her sing.

She is atrocious. Yes, I realize I’m figuring out what many other people knew several years ago, but this is what comes of being a 33-year-old mom who keeps up rather languidly with pop culture. Okay, fine, I never really kept up with the pop culture that supposedly, to watch the media cover it, enthralls 80 percent of the American population. I watch/listen to what I like and know the basic peripherals about people like Britney. Or ‘N Sync. Or Jessica.

She is atrocious. She sings flat–out of tune, for you nonmusic types. And it seems she’s trying to compensate for that blatant shortcoming by affecting a style that is just as hideous. French-kissing the mike, cracking her voice like the worst possible combination of a country wailer and an alt-pop edgything, and wearing a one-armed bat-gown that, if it doesn’t get fugged, I ought to know the reason why. Try watching a flat singer who is jerking her head and torso in wretchedly unnatural movements while opening her mouth as wide as possible and all the while inwardly shrieking, “Where is your ARM?!” and you’ll have some idea of the crazy that goes on in my TV room after The Bean is asleep.

I wouldn’t have watched at all, only Cheryl and Maks were dancing rumba and Oh-My-God.

So now I’m letting the TiVo buffer accumulate so that I can fast-forward through any more garbage, like the Macy’s Stars of “Dance” performance. Dancing with the Stars amazes me sometimes with the risks it is willing to take for what one would suppose is a family-friendly show. The Macy’s thing tonight was an homage to S&M that would have been so lewd if it weren’t just so tacky. The amazing part is that nobody on the set seems to notice; they suck it in like it’s a football game until I think that I’m watching something different from what the studio audience is watching. Bread and Circuses. I love DwtS, but occasionally they seem to be trying to sanitize some very crappy stuff. Or just showcasing crappy artists. Like the Jonas Brothers. The only thing that made their flat, over-stylized stylings bearable was … it wasn’t, really. Just the dancing. This is what comes of loving a show that caters to that supposed 80 percent.

Time to find out who’s goin’ home … Hallelujah, Kim’s gone. Don’t worry, Mark, your dad won’t be the only Ballas on the floor for long. I hope. Ding-dong, Kim’s gone, we didn’t suffer through The Simpson in vain.

Every week. Because they say you don’t get to bitch unless you voted, and I’ve got a lot of bitching to do about the Week 1 craziness I just watched on TiVo’d Dancing with the Stars. I usually don’t bother voting until it’s narrowed down to three or so couples, but it’s ridiculous, and even a bit revolting, that Ted McGinley went home while the ditzy and bitsy Susan Lucci, the wild but fragile and old Cloris Leachman, and the can’t-move-AT-ALL Kim Kardashian stay on. It pains me to watch any of the three of them, but Leachman needs to go home pronto; it borders on embarrassing that the show put her on at all. Ted was solid and capable of improvement; these three ladies aren’t. Susan Lucci is a low-budget Priscilla Presley–all the sluggish, tiny moves and less of the sexpot. Kim’s just annoying in her lack of grace or even effort–shades of Clyde Drexler. And Cloris, lest I repeat myself, is just old. She is gamely performing over the lack of capability, but it hurts to watch. I don’t know what the voters are thinking about.

What, you thought I’d have something about Congress and the finance bailout? You must be new here, eh?

PS, I find myself thinking, a little, that it’s a bit of a shame Lance Bass is gay. Don’t get me wrong, Joey Fatone is still way more my type, but I’m starting to see what girls saw in their little band a few years ago. He’s cute and charismatic, and his aw-shucks “I was the worst dancer in ‘N Sync” bit has cleverly lowered expectations until it’s a pleasant surprise to find how well he can dance and how well he comports himself. Keep it up, Lance.

Okay, now this is just naughty: Tonight Lance dances paso to “I Kissed a Girl.” Hahahah. Add “good sport” to the mix.

Time for vote strategy: Put it all in for Rocco DiSpirito. He’s cute, he makes Karina smile for a change, and his dance was not as bad as the judges made out tonight. Most importantly, aside from the three women who must go (KIM KARDASHIAN leading that pack–she is that girl you tried to do a group project with in high school and to any criticism always responded that she was doing her best until you want to point out that if that’s so, that’s a sad commentary on what the rest of her life will be like), he will be on the chopping block because a) the judges marked him down and b) he’s not a rock star. I want him to come out ahead of one of the Trio of Suck so that hopefully one of them will drop off the bottom of the scale. Vote Rocco!

When I return, blogging shall return. You have been warned.

I mean, after all, Dancing with the Stars will be back.

Yes, I know I owe you sweet, devoted people a boatload of Sarah Palin content. I just haven’t been able to bring it yet. I’m floored by the last week in politics and its implications. When I’m floored I can’t write about it. So … wait. I’ll either have something or I won’t, and if you need Sarah Palin and somehow aren’t getting enough, just click through my blogroll, starting with Ace–I am so in love with him this week for ripping off the heads of people circulating lies about the Palins.

Meanwhile, I return to my regular beat, the oh-so-important, terribly critical Dancing with the Stars. Seriously. Wild stuff. I used to rail and rage against sports announcers and the stupid “interviews” they do with stars and coaches after the game. What do you MEAN, “How important was this win and how do you feel about that?” What a stupid question. Are you just a moron? till a boyfriend more versed in the sports world helpfully pointed out that the “interviews” are always boilerplate form, but they have to go through them anyway in case somebody says something out of line. Kind of like they always have to videotape the president taking off in Marine One in case he falls out, or a rotor blade flies off and decapitates the Rose Garden.

Sports interviewers wish they could interview my Maks. He talks about his partners as friends for life, and I guess he must really believe that, if he thinks he can say stuff about them in an interview while comparing them all unfavorably (however razor-thin the margin between them may be) to his new partner, volleyball queen Misty May-Treanor.

TVGuide.com: Misty is better than Mel B?
Chmerkovskiy: I was shocked, and I don’t throw that word around lightly. People are going to be very surprised by how well she’s going to dance. Laila (Ali, season four) had an incredible work ethic. But I could be too much for her. She’d say: You’ve gotta back off. And then Mel (season five) was just this incredible personality. But she had zero attention span. So here, in Misty, I have a combination of the best qualities of both. She’s like a perfect person to love. She has this aura of sweetness, and she’ll practice for as long as it takes. Let Cheryl [Burke] and Julianne [Hough] collect the trophies. I’ll collect friends for life.

Wow. I said he’d have to go far to find somebody better than Mel B. Apparently he thinks he went far enough. Now I’m stoked. Bring back the rest of my fall TV! Because I watched the Bones premiere last night and, gah. You know those writers I thought they must have hired last season when the shows were clicking right along with good plots and snappy dialogue? Yeah, they all must have quit again.

NBC picks up the back half of the upcoming second season of Chuck. I had no idea that was even a question. Best. Show. On. TV.

Blood-boiling industry jargon of the day:

NBC is giving an early vote of confidence to “Chuck,” picking up the back nine episodes of the sophomore skein.

Skein? Where did this even come from? Were they calling seasons “threads” and then needed a fresh word, so they went to “skein?” I hate this. It doesn’t make any sense. A “thread” might be borderline, since you can talk about plot threads, etc. A skein of television shows is just pure, unadulterated nonsense.

And yes, nonsense industry jargon really does make my blood boil. Yes, I know you raise your eyebrows in consternation because inappropriate word use makes my blood boil. That’s why I’m an editor and you’re not.

ABC has picked up five pilots, including Nathan Fillion’s (and director Rob Bowman’s) Castle and Rob Thomas’s Cupid.

That latter one sound familiar? It’s a remake of Rob Thomas’s one-season Cupid from 1998, with Bobby Cannavale and Sarah Paulson in the Jeremy Piven/Paula Marshall roles. I caught maybe all of one episode when it was on before, but I understand it had a reasonably rabid cult following. Will they like the new cast? If nothing else I’ll be able to compare the Sorkin/Thomas chops of Paulson to Marshall–Paula went from playing a porn actress on Sorkin’s Sports Night to playing a guidance counselor who falls for Veronica’s dad in Veronica Mars, and now Paulson goes from Sorkin’s West Wing right on to Cupid. I guess all we need now is for Paula Marshall to guest on a Whedon show, as Sarah Paulson had her bit as a doomed hologram in Serenity. Trifecta.

And if you are still so benighted as to never have seen Veronica Mars, get thee to a Netflix envelope. She is in serious running for my favorite show of all time, people. Does that make me a nostalgic nerd bemoaning my unbrilliant teenage years? Maybe! Do I care? No. For that matter, I know there are still some deprived souls among you who haven’t even watched my Fillion in Firefly. And to that I can only say, can the Veronica, shame on me, ditch the Firefly, shame on you.

And the number of the counting shall be 82 … Cloris Leachman, 82 years old. Yowza. Paired with Mark Ballas’s dad, Corky, which is just awesome.

Here’s the full lineup. The other big news seems to be that 1) Mercifully, Lance Bass will be paired with a woman. It’s not about homosexuality, it’s about dancing, which in a ballroom pairing requires the complementary movements of man v. woman. Period. and 2) Misty May-Treanor and Maksim Chmerkovskiy! He’s back! I’m dubious as to how many moves she’s got, and Maks will have to go far to find a partner more likely to win than Mel B, but Misty May has earned a lot of goodwill from me by the sheer awesomeness of inviting the President of the United States to slap her rump. She and Kerri Walsh were class all the way.

Cheers: Anna Trebunskaya is not back. Jeers: Karina Sneeroff is. But she’s paired with a celebrity chef I know nothing about, so here’s hoping she’ll dance her way off fairly early.

I have a new show. The time has come to write about it. I watched another episode of it last night and it’s just fun. It’s not terribly witty. It’s not terribly fresh. It’s not heavy on a good love story. It’s not clever and very proud of itself for being clever. It’s just a straight-ahead action/drama hourlong with cute actors, stories that drive fast and sharp through the whole hour, and fun. It’s Burn Notice, on USA, and it’s like a combination of Magnum, P.I., a laid-back Miami version of Mission Impossible, and a tiny touch of Veronica Mars thrown in, in the sense that nothing ever seems to throw these characters.

Jeffrey Donovan (who should definitely play my brother-in-law in the family life story) plays Michael Westen, “a spy” (I didn’t watch first season, so I don’t know if it was ever made clear what agency he was with, but they don’t bother tagging it specifically this season) who was “burned”–somebody blew his cover and reported as much to his bosses, which is the “burn notice” that means they will not protect or acknowledge him. He’s on his own in Miami with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar–much, much more on her in a minute), a buddy named Sam (Bruce Campbell), and his mother, Madeleine (the Cagney half of Cagney and Lacey). The plots are dual: On one side, he’s being recruited for questionable jobs by the people who burned him. He goes along and tries to gather as much information as possible about them while reluctantly working for them. On the other side, he’s doing jobs for people in trouble–a loan shark here, an embezzling frame-up there.

It’s the focus on the Magnum-like plots that makes it work–we’re not supposed to worry too much about what agency Michael was with, what his always-available, always-competent friends do for day jobs. Westen narrates, detailing choice bits of M.I.-style maneuvers and high-tech equipment here and there, and Fiona is his all-around no-need-to-hire-a gun. Guns of every make, shape and size that she doesn’t hesitate to whip out on the least provocation.

Okay, I’ve always loved Gabrielle Anwar, had a soft spot for her ever since Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken. I keep going back and forth as to whether she was miscast in this show. She is long and lean, a little too thin and spray-tanned for comfort (the Fug Girls would call her orange), and her accent (she’s English) is wobbly, to say the least, while Donovan (he was born in New England; I already know he does a creditable Southern) takes on and puts off the patois of every area of the country in his dealings with baddies. She’s supposed to be the firecracker siren, but she really strikes me as just cute under all her bad-ass cool. Maybe that’s my aforementioned soft spot for her talking, but whatever–she works in this line-up. In a show that took itself more seriously, she simply would not have enough weight, and I’m hoping they do a little more with her as time goes on. Of the four primary characters, we know hers the least–but of course I’ve come in at the second season and maybe they probed her a bit more in the first. She’s a little brittle right now–the strain of playing a vixen is showing a bit. More Gabrielle!

It’s a fun show, cute and cool, and somebody at USA is smart to run it in the summer.

From the Firefly pilot, the current stitch-while-I-watch material of choice:

Mal: “Wheel never stops turnin’, Badger.”

Badger: “That only matters to the people on the rim.”

Firefly is on sale today at Amazon for $17.99. Get it before it goes back up.

Relax, I’m not talking about anything in the real world. I’m talking about Doctor Who … again … and how the idiot moral and political beliefs of its writers are turning the doctor into a more buffoonish figure than I would like to see him be.

**SPOILERS** for the season finale, “Journey’s End,” below. (more…)

Autograph seekers outside the theater where David Tennant is playing Hamlet and Patrick Stewart is playing Claudius are limited to asking them to sign Hamlet-related memorabilia, as opposed to “bags” … bags!!! … of Doctor Who stuff, and presumably Star Trek stuff as well.

I am so embarrassed for these people. If I ever meet David Tennant I will be finding something better to say than begging him to write on Who stuff, I can tell you.

H/t Daddyman.

For example, I never knew that the Mad Men everybody’s raving about is on a channel I actually get, namely AMC, as opposed to HBO or Showtime. Duh. Guess it’s time to set the TiVo, though I hate coming in a season late.