Seriously, I love this show so much.

Tonight’s episode includes the “Surgeon and Ice Cream Taster” sketch which I relate to too much.

The former CourtTV has just announced an intriguing show, “Man vs. Cartoon” will reportedly dig into the Warner Bros cartoon library and see what is physically possible, like the idea of building a human slingshot. Hm, sounds interesting. Sounds a lot like Mythbusters with a limited scope — but that’s probably why it sounds interesting.

Mythbusters has tackled cartoons in the past, like when they tested if it was possible to make a gun explode on itself by sticking a finger to plug the barrel. It’ll be interesting to see if the show can duplicate the chemistry and spirit of Discovery’s hit show.

• Dave Carter wasn’t impressed with the Border Concept Store.
• Glen Greenwald looks at the media’s double standards when it comes to bigoted speech from religious leaders. Unsurprising.
• CBS’ Big Brother is inching closer to becoming a Bad Wolf production. Misogyny, racism, homophobia and now with health emergencies for your entertainment. When did CBS’ reality division start imitating Fox?
• Does the brand management at work in Barack Obama’s campaign reveal leadership qualities that shouldn’t be overlooked? I can empathize with his points.
• Cable networks benefited from the writers’ strike while broadcast networks lost more viewers.

Well, I told you earlier today about Fancast the website where you can go crazy rating things and picking out favorites. Well, I’ve already learned something interesting — apparently the Fay Weldon book Puffball has a film adaptation coming out. Interestingly, this adaptation is billed as an “erotic horror” film which is not how I remember the book but I could see that interpretation coming through without altering the book.

Honestly, Puffball was one of Weldon’s books that became less interesting once I read it. The story follows a pregnant woman who moves with her husband to the countryside. Her neighbor, a witch, (for reasons that have escaped my memory) tries to end the pregnancy through magic as the mother-to-be’s doctor tries to save it using medicine. Weldon commented that part of the point of the book was that the witch and the doctor’s methods were equally valid, though they used different approaches and, before I read it, I thought the novel might have some commentary about the debate over abortion since it involves the battle over continuing a pregnancy where the pregnant woman is rendered helpless in the decision. Unfortunately, as much as I love so many of Weldon’s novels, this was one that was so much better in my imagination than the actual novel.

So. I go into this one with a little bit of worry. Still, it’s got Miranda Richardson in it, which has to be some consolation. (Even better, it’s Miranda Richardson as a Fay Weldon villainess.) I think I’d rather see a remake of The Cloning of Joanna May.

So. There are more rumors about a new actor playing The Doctor. I get that Doctor Who is huge in the UK but, really people, you’re just making yourselves look stupid for publishing every damn rumor, 95% of which turns out to be untrue. At this point, everyone on the show has quit or been fired a few dozen times, including the showrunners, and nothing has significantly changed.

So, please, just stop. I find Who gossip less interesting than updates about Paris Hilton’s social life nowadays and I’m pretty obsessed with the show, just not the British media’s constant misses in getting the story first.

Unless, of course, you have a rumor about Gina Bellman becoming the first female Doctor. Because I’d like to live in that fantasy world for a little while, especially after seeing her steal James Nesbitt’s thunder on Jeckyll.

Thanks to Joe I’ve discovered Fancast which is the first time I’ve seen a TV website ambitious enough to actually be useful. The site comes from Comcast (which, honestly, does raise some warning lights considering the service I’ve gotten since moving) and seeks to mix TV listings with personalization, streaming video and, eventually, the ability to program your DVR over the internet (a feature I’d find very useful, even though I’m now usually at home and able to program my DVR by walking through a few rooms).

Fancast allows users to mark TV series, movies and people (yes, I quickly found Bryan Fuller and added him to my favorites) as favorites, with the added ability to go through episode listings and rate each one separately. (Supposedly there’s the ability to watch videos, as well, but I haven’t found those, yet.) Of course, I quickly found problems with the database since I headed towards lesser-known shows. For example, the main page for Doctor Who has a picture of Christopher Eccleson and Billie Piper and, apparently there were two episodes of Torchwood titled “Captain Jack Harkness”. (While Doctor Who had two episodes titled “Forty Two” and “The Family of Blood” was a two-parter interrupted by “Human Nature”.) Additionally, the site might have a bit of an English-language bias — curious about their coverage of Spanish-language TV I tried finding some of the Telemundo shows I’ve watched and couldn’t find the telenovela version of Zorro or the compelling-in-any-language Guerra de los Sexos.

I can see this one having the social network possibilities (much like Hey Nielsen) where people can meet up based on a shared love of… say, obscure made-for-British-TV movies. (Why, yes, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Oranges are not the only Fruit are in my favorites.)

Right now, I’m digging through their database and rating episodes of stuff to see what kind of recommendations I eventually get.

(Update: Okay, so I tried watching a Twilight Zone episode and I have my first complaint. I don’t mind the videos being ad supported but I do mind when they don’t give me the option to pause the ad — and what’s the harm in pausing an ad if I still have to watch it anyway? The video I tried to watch loaded very slowly and the ad was stuttering to the point of annoyance. If this were any other video site, I would have paused the ad for a couple minutes, let the file cache a bit and finish watching it. However, since I was forced to watch the ad in it’s jerky, stuttering glory, I just hit the ‘back’ button and skipped watching the video. Hopefully, the site speed issues will get fixed with time.)

Bloody heck, some of BBC America’s programming choices irritate me silly. I’ve complained that keeping up with the network is way too much work for anyone but the most dedicated anglophile, with new series getting insufficient promotion, but their schedule is no help, either. Has Garth Ancier heard of repurposing? While some shows get made easily available to viewers, a good number of shows also get treated like a critically-praised drama on Fox.

Let’s take their current reality series, Last Restaurant Standing which sounds interesting but I missed the “preview” which got repeated two nights later as an encore showing (when my DVR was busy recording primary election coverage on MSNBC so I could fast forward to get to the parts with Rachel Maddow) so I missed it. Being a bit of a completionist, I didn’t want to start watching the show with the third episode, so I checked if I could catch up through on BBC America on Demand. The selection — The Office, Coupling, Torchwood and Top Gear.

At least there’s an encore showing of Last Restaurant Standing, however. Your only chance to catch an episode of the new sketch comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look comes when the episode airs on friday nights. Earlier episodes haven’t gotten repeated, despite being the type of show that makes for good repeat viewing.

(And then there’s that annoying bug that appears during the show, saying “If you like That Mitchell and Webb Look you should check out The Office on DVD!” So BBC Video doesn’t have something made in the past five years that it can sell me? I’ve already seen all of The Office.)

It’s great to see Torchwood get the kind of promotion it deserves but why is BBC America throwing away opportunities to create new franchises? Shows like The Catherine Tate Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look should be hard to escape on the network, creating a market for the DVDs. Y’know, kinda like how there’s a market for Coupling and The Office DVDs. Is it that much more profitable to air the extremely tired Four Weddings and a Funeral?

And let’s not get into the mess that their airing of Hollyoaks was. The way Hollyoaks was mishandled makes MyNetworkTV’s marketing of its telenovelas look shrewed in comparison.

• Out is the latest gay media outlet to chat with Degrassi’s Adamo Ruggiero. With all the out actors and actors best known for gay roles appearing on Doctor Who I’m tempted to send a Degrassi DVD to Russel T Davies.
• Here we go again. Congressman Jack Kingston was being a hypocritical twit again on Real Time. This time he was repeating that stupid criticism questioning Barack Obama’s patriotism for not wearing a flag pin on his lapel… while not wearing a flag pin himself. Florida voters need to be embarrassed into voting him out of office like Alaska voters with Ted Stevens.
• An Oscars rep says that Brad Renfro’s omission form the memorial montage was deliberate due to space. I’m surprised someone would dare say that the year they started adding agents to the segment. (Not that I have any opinion about whether or not agents deserve the inclusion, just that saying “We didn’t have time to include everybody.” regarding one person while you added a group to the montage seems a rather mixed message.)
• Today in sadly unsurprising, Republican focus groups are testing how racist, sexist and homophobic they can get without turning off voters. It’s going to be an ugly election.
• In my own fantasies, it’s the writers’ strike and the resulting flood or reality programming that’s killing the ratings for the latest Flavor of Love. I’d probably be over optimistic if I believed it was a matter of taste winning out.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, buffoon or disingenuous jerk?

PERRY: I am pretty clear about this one. Scouting ought to be about building character, not about sex. Period. Precious few parents enroll their boys in the Scouts to get a crash course in sexual orientation.

SOLOMON: Why do you think a homosexual would be more likely to bring the subject of sex into a conversation than a heterosexual?

PERRY: Well, the ban in scouting applies to scout leaders. When you have a clearly open homosexual scout leader, the scouts are going to talk about it. And they’re not there to learn about that. They’re there to learn about what it means to be loyal and trustworthy and thrifty.

SOLOMON: But don’t you think that homosexuals might also be interested in being loyal and thrifty?

PERRY: The argument that gets made is that homosexuality is about sex. Do you agree?

SOLOMON: No.

PERRY: Well, then why don’t they call it something else?

Er, yeah, maybe Perry doesn’t realize that if you do a Google News search for “gay” you get stories from unbiased media and from gay advocates but if you enter “homosexual” into Google News you get plenty of anti-gay screeds… or that one anti-gay group regularly switches the two words in wire articles.

Gah.

iF magazine has an interview with Torchwood’s Naoko Mori and this part is just too cute not to share:

I remember hearing about Doctor Who but I had never seen it, so when I got the first script when I was on Doctor Who I came across words I didn’t understand. I looked up the word Tardis in the dictionary and it wasn’t there, which apparently is really pathetic of me. I didn’t know what it was so I phoned my agent and told them that there was a word in the script that I didn’t understand and it wasn’t in the dictionary and I wanted to know what was a Tardis. He laughed at me so hard that he put the phone down, but I still got the job.

Nowadays, I use Mariam-Webster’s online dictionary a lot so part of me wonders why she didn’t hit Google next (killing the nerd cred of looking up a word in the dictionary) but I do get a laugh out of the idea of asking her agent what a Tardis is.