In keeping with the Bill O’Reilly mash mixup that Southern Beale featured earlier, it seems that all the money I’ve been spending supporting educationo by buying lottery tickets is finally paying off. Go watch this video at Coed Magazine.

Lost is a love/hate thing. Those of us who love it, LOVE it. Those of you who don’t, here’s a picture of Amy Winehouse.

Twitter and blogs tend to focus on the mystery of the show. Katherine Coble has excellent recaps of the show and has a bittersweet relationship with it. She watches it and I tend to think she likes it, but she is also hard on some of the believability of some of the characters’ actions.

Of course, it is a television show but still, you get sucked in.

Jack Sheppard thinks he’s a leader–nice Christlike positioning of the bleeding wound in his side, don’t you think?–but I think he’s as flawed as leaders get.

I continue to find the mythology of the Island fascinating, while being bored by the cockadoody car action parts. The C4 in the ship was a big ol’ eyeroll for me. I generally hate the sight of C4 in any story outside of James Bond. It’s a visual shorthand for “big action sequence coming” and I am not a lover of big action sequences when they are misplaced.

Barry asked questions earlier this week on the mythology and some of the unsolved mysteries. (Update here: New post from him.) And I even throw in my two cents as does Reba.

One blog that has been following Lost breaks it down and brings on the funny.

And although he doesn’t have a recap up for last night’s episode up yet, Russ McBee, who came into the game late, is really enjoying it. His recaps are extremely intense.

“Lost” is the only TV show I’ve ever seen that required me to take notes in order to keep up.

That’s about right. If you have any observations because you are going to have to wait two weeks to see the finale, leave them in the comments.

In a picture taken in February, Chez Beziat’s daughter sits in the aftermath of a tornado that hit Hartsville.

From here.

And he commented on Newscoma’s blog!

No, I’m serious…go see for yourself!

Design your own Chuck Taylors.

Here’s how. 

From Former Nashvillian Brittney Gilbert. 

If you want to see country music reviews without a net or music row politicizing, head to Heartbreaktown.

H/T Mack Farmer 

The Nashville Feed reports how social networking programs have helped music sales.

Social networking Web sites, devoted to hosting interactions among members, were once like metaphorical lakes, each stocked with similar fish. Today, these sites have become virtual oceans, filled with millions of species, small recreational boats and massive supertankers.

The popularity of these sites has increased so quickly and dramatically that it’s impossible to say exactly how many total users they draw. The numbers are bigger than many people would suspect, though, and they grow every day.

It’s a comprehensive breakdown.

Check it out here.

That would be Starbuck if you have been watching the Sci Fi channel on Friday nights.

Enclave takes a bit of a break to talk about what I believe is one of the best shows on television, Battlestar Galactica. His sentiments about the show’s core is basically one of the reason’s I keep going back to it.

The religious imagery was much more rich than typically portrayed on TV. The mix of machine and living tissue on the ships of the Cylon battle fleet conveys incarnation in its most ambiguous sense. The scene where one of the dying Cylon “Sixes” “Eights”–shot by a centurion while trying to disconnect a “hybrid” from the basestar–bleeds into the hybrid’s immersion tank seemingly making the latter give a profound revelation to Starbuck (”the missing Three will give you the Five who come from the home of the Thirteenth”) reminds me of baptism and blood atonement. It also reminds me of the end of Pan’s Labyrinth where where a dying Ofelia bleeds onto the cave altar, which opens up either a portal to the underworld and her reunion with her family or her fantasy that she has done so.

It never ceases to amaze me that the “toasters” worship one God while the humans worship the Gods. You don’t see that kind of boldness in television. Ever.

If you haven’t seen BG, I cannot recommend it enough.

Found at Paul Nicholson’s Flickr stream.

Kate O, who has about a million things she’s always working on, discusses songwriting.

Smith talks about various elements in hit songs that make their lyrics and melodies memorable, universal, and instantly appealing. Certainly those are elements worth striving for, if pop hits are your goal — and they are ours.

But one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is the importance of writing for me. I’ve always done this, to a degree, but at times I’ve strayed a bit into unfamiliar territory in the hopes of writing something that more people would connect with. Imagine me writing, for example, a song with NASCAR allusions. I’ve tried it. It sucked. I won’t do it again (I promise).

Not Nascar!?! She goes on to talk about writing for universal appeal.

From the Tennessee Photographers Pool on Flickr from picgerl.

And he’s quite proud that he didn’t know.

It wasn’t until today that I learned “Hannah Montana” is not her real name.

Carry on.

From Silence

Damn. Sue Johanson of Oxygen’s “Talk Sex” is retiring, and the last episode will air on Sunday night (and will count down the year’s top 10 sex toys).

It’s a shame. Sue Johanson’s show was one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen on the telly.

Rachel is right. She will be missed.

Eddy Arnold, whose mellow baritone on songs like “Make the World Go Away” made him one of the most successful country singers in history, died Thursday morning, days short of his 90th birthday.

Arnold died at a care facility near Nashville, said Don Cusic, a professor at Belmont University and author of the biography “Eddy Arnold: I’ll Hold You in My Heart.” His wife of 66 years, Sally, had died in March, and in the same month, Arnold fell outside his home, injuring his hip.

Arnold was an ambassador of Nashville in many ways.

Read the rest here.

Ginger also weighs in.

We get letters and this one might be something you would be interested in if you have ever wanted to be on reality television.

Hello.

I am a casting director for Mark Burnett Productions (Survivor, Apprentice)
in Los Angeles and am working on a new show for him called “Jingles.” It is
a new music competition show where teams of 2-3 will write, sing and perform
product jingles. We will be coming to Nashville at the end of May to
audition musicians, singers and improv performers for this show. Below is a
blurb about it as well you can google Mark Burnett and Jingles to find out
more. I am writing to you in hopes of getting the word out to your readers.
I would be happy to answer any questions.
Thanks,

Jonathan Tanzman
Casting Associate
Jingles

CBS and Mark Burnett Productions have teamed up to find the greatest
undiscovered marketing genius for a new show, “Jingles”! We are looking for
teams of (preferably) 2-4 people to write and perform product jingles. A
team could be anything from a brother/sister team to a singing comedy duo or
a barbershop quartet!

Please email Jonathan at jtanzman  at markburnettprod dot com for more information.
We will be casting in Nashville late May.

I have delivered the word to you, kind readers and here’s more on the show from Variety.

From Christy Frink and the Music City Bloggers Photo pool on Flickr in a shot from March.

From Chez Beziat

From Abaesel

Mondays and Wednesdays are crazy for me.

But, this is a good, very good I might add, scene from Nashville.

Credit: Afagen

Joe liked it (and if you haven’t seen the movie, his review doesn’t have spoilers):

Stark has always been a rather complex creation - smug, indifferent and rakish - until he decides to take his Iron Man creation into the world as a force for fighting “injustice”, a fight which almost casts him as an anti-war, anti-corporate kind of liberal hippie. But he isn’t. He loves technology, but he is also seeking a balance of power. As with Spiderman and the X-Men, Marvel’s heroes are touched with an anti-authoritarian streak which makes them far more interesting than most comic heroes.

Cathy also weighs in

The comic book geeks of yesterday are today’s movie audience. Instead of being the oddballs who wore pointy ears instead of playing sports, we are being wooed by movie studios. They pull us in with the nostalgia of familiar characters, but they capture us by making the stories about our mid-life anxieties. The fuzzy line between the good guys and the bad guys, the flawed and damaged characters and the absence of easy plot resolutions all make the fictional superheroes completely real. Comic book movies are a flight of fantasy and a visit to the therapist’s couch all at the same time. The previews were unmemorable except for one. I had goosebumps during the preview for The Dark Knight. I love summer movie season.

And Mike Hammock also says he dug it but he had a couple of issues with it (Spoilers galore here if you haven’t seen it. You have been warned.)

There were, however, a couple things that bothered me about Iron Man. I know, I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief in a film like this (I mean, the guy can apparently fly without any sort of chemical propulsion source–no rockets, no jets, just little white lights), but these things still irk me (they did not bother my fellow viewers)

Was Barbara Walters in La Vergne last week?

Did I see Barbara Walters today in LaVergne? Anyone? Anyone? Ferris?

Read the comments. I’m still not sure if it was Baba Wawa or a cunning impersonator but someone over at the La Verne blog said she was there.

Especially interesting is that she was big news last week.

From Chuck Bryant’s collection of photographs on Flickr.

I’m just going to step back from all the stories of what’s wrong with (insert issue here) and remind everyone of some good news.

Summer movie season starts today.

Special showings of Iron Man begin tonight and the movie kicks it up into high gear this weekend with a whole bunch of movies that look like a whole lot of fun.

So just for a few minutes, mute the inner movie-snob, grab some popcorn and just enjoy a few hours of escapist fun.  Surely with the plethora of films coming out this summer, there has to be something you’re looking forward to….

I saw Ben Stein’s Expelled last night and there’s one question that noone will answer for me . . . do you have to have bad teeth to be a PhD?  But seriously . . .

They’re discussing it (the movie) over at TennesseeFree.com.

The BearCreekLedger has seen the movie, too.

The movie’s thesis is that there are legitimate questions about Darwinism, but scientists are not allowed to ask those questions because some people are threatened by certain potential answers to the questions. Tsk, tsk.