Holy cow, this has been an insanely exhausting week.  I network tested at CBS for a new FBI-centered pilot called Washington Field.  It was down to two people for a series regular role, and while the network test went fantastically, the role ultimately went to the other candidate.

The testing process was alternately exhilarating, exhausting, nerve-wracking, draining, triumphant, and ultimately heartbreaking.  I'll post more about what I went through with the Studio Test, Network Test, and more.  But right now, I just need to take this day to rest and recover.

watching the debate on television right now between Obama and McCain. I actually feel bad for McCain because Obama is so articulate, confident, and poised when he speaks. McCain sounds like a 72 year-old man, and there's nothing wrong with that when you're a 72 year-old man, but he just sounds kind of weak and doddering.

McCain also blinks an extraordinary amount when he thinks/talks. I'm going randomly count the number of blinks by each candidate in a 60-second period:

McCain: 103
Obama: 44

wow. forget "Walnuts," McCain's new nickname is Blinky.

so many times we go to google because we want to know the answer to something. and the world being really really big, if we're asking the question, likely somebody else is asking the same thing. unfortunately, some of those people ask that question on Yahoo Answers, where somebody really really stupid then answers it. incorrectly. and stupidly. and then rates up their answer so that it will sound smart.

and just like that you've wasted clicks and time and brainpower reading drivel. has there ever been a useful answer on Yahoo! Answers?

oh Yahoo! Answers how i loathe thee.

Hey Folks--

I'll be guest-starring on The Middleman on ABC Family (that's the cable channel, not the network) tonight (Monday, August 18) as Dr. Judd, Director for the Institute Of the Criminally Insane!

I'd include a picture from the set, but it's in my camera and it would take effort to pull that pic out of it. imagine me in a lab coat standing next to a suit of armor. there, it's just like you saw the picture.

Okay, big props to Usain Bolt for obliterating the competition and the world record en route to winning a 100m gold and once again, keeping me from earning the title that I so covet: Fastest Man Alive.

First of all though, I have to say that anybody with the last name of Bolt has a really unfair advantage in the world of sprinting. What the hell is a kid going to do with his life and free time when his name is Bolt, for Pete's sake? What are his competitors going to think when he lines up and they announce him as "Bolt"? It's as much of an unfair advantage for him as having a kid with the last name of Woods who grows up to become a golfer.

And this is why I'm going to name my firstborn son, "SuperDuper9GoldMedalWinningSwimmerBreakngMichaelPhelps'sRecordAndFastestManAliveAndAllAroundGymnasticsAndSumoWrestlingChampionOfTheWorldFromNowUntilTheEndOfTimeTicTacToeNoTradeBacks Chao."

Btw, my other child will be named, "RicherThanBillGatesTimesWarrenBuffettAndThatOneMiddleEasternSultanCombinedAndGivingItAllToHisDad Chao."

Okay, back to Bolt. Yeah, it's great that he broke the world record, but considering that the race lasts less than 10 seconds, couldn't he have waited maybe another 2 seconds for the race to end for him to start showboating and hotdogging? Really, it would have been just another 2 seconds of all-out effort, and he would have obliterated the record even more, maybe even breaking the 9.6 barrier, and after that, he could have flexed for the cameras, wagged his genitals at his competitors, and cabbage patched in front of the stadium to his heart's content, and I would have been just fine with that.

but since he had to start gloating and breaking stride and showing off through the last 20 meters of his run, I just have to call him a douchebag. granted, a very fast douchebag, but a douchebag nonetheless.

i will however, only be calling him that to his face when i'm in a car on a very empty street because the odds are 50/50 that he might catch me if i were on foot.



numbnut. and i'm not talking about the protective pad underneath the saddle that confused the Indian kid during the Scripps Spelling Bee.

in my previous blog about The Suckage Of Tim Daggett, some dumbass posted a comment that he'd prefer Bela Karolyi doing the commentary. I WOULD LOVE THAT! watch this clip of Bela Karolyi watching Nastia Liukin's All-Around clinching floor routine! He's not even commentating, he's just watching!

(i'm so sorry to have to link to stupid NBC, which will probably require you to download their stupid Silverlight player which will probably spam or spyware the hell out of your computer. but NBC's being a prissy little prig about their precious videos and thus is shutting down any non-NBC sites that show Olympic clips.)

How awesome would it be to have Bela's unrestrained emotion on your tv set for every routine? : "kahm on, you kahn do it...carry it, carry it, go go WAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!! SHE DID IT!!!!! HHHHOOOOOOOOO BOOOOOOYYYYY! WAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! DAS GOTTA BE! GOTTA BE!"

bela's got his fair share of haters in the gymnastics world, and some of it is well-deserved as some of his methods look as if they were learned from a Rumanian dictator (how'd that happen?). as the daily show put it, bela's "the strong-willed svengali who's been banishing weakness, self esteem, and menstruation since 1984." [actually, way longer than that]

but you gotta hand it to him. he is supremely confident in himself and his gymnasts, and it carries into the psyche of his gymnasts. it's no coincidence that he coached all of the biggies, like nadia, marylou, kristie, and a gajillion others. his infectious energy and confidence rockets his gymnasts into mental states where they can do anything, like sticking a 1 1/2-twisting yurchenko vault on one ankle because the other one just got sprained to high heaven, ala kerri strug in atlanta.

now that i think about it, i'd like to have bela karolyi just following me around during my entire day, just commentating on my actions and cheering me on. i think i'd be so motivated by him: "kahm on vic, YOU kahn do it...you know whaht ees stlong...write thaht blog. pohst it, pohst it, pohst it...YAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! PERFECT! LOOKIT DAHT BLOG! PERFECT! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! YOU DIHD IT!!! YOU DIHD IT!!! DAHST WAHS A GOOD ONE!!!!

damn, i'd be so motivated with bela karolyi providing the commentary to my life. this is why Dan H wanted to hire Art Lee for their company--they just figured that with him sitting around in their office, they'd be so motivated to work that he'd increase their productivity tenfold. that note doesn't mean much to anybody who's not a rabid stanford basketball fan, but believe me, if Art Lee was working in your office, you'd be motivated.

hmm...now i foresee an ESPN SportsCenter promo featuring Bela Karolyi commentating on all the mundane things taking place in the SportsCenter offices...okay, well when it shows up, just remember, i thought of it first. give me royalties.

jeeez, the gymnastics in these olympic games has been exhilarating and completely maddening all at once.

tim daggett is such a horrendous announcer. good golly, tim daggett is such a horrendous announcer. he's also an absolutely horrendous announcer.

it's killing me. he has an olympic gold medal, but you'd never guess it from the way he talks about gymnastics. he says NOTHING technical about the tricks that are going on. he doesn't lend insight about what moves are particularly difficult or well executed. instead, he focuses on Completely Obvious Stuff, namely landings, falls, and going out of bounds. he also loves the words "disaster" and "disastrous." EVERYTHING is a disaster to him.

"oh, she stepped out of bounds. that's a disaster!" no it's not tim, she stepped out of bounds.

i stopped keeping track of his moronic comments after the first day because they were just making me too angry, but i do remember this gem during Men's Team Preliminaries after Yang Wei fell on the parallel bars: "if you're completely out of balance, you're gonna fall!"

thanks, tim. it took a real gold medalist to explain to us the intricacies of balance and falling. never mind the fact that yang wei was doing a stutz to one bar and actually had started to fall in the opposite direction of what he intended, necessitating that he cover for it by taking a straddled glide kip on the side of the bars which he wound up falling on. no, the important insight is, "if you're completely out of balance, you're gonna fall!"

good golly tim daggett is absolutely awful. he has hardly ever named a single trick that any gymnast has done. instead, he talks about the most generic things on every event. on pommel horse, he talks about how hard it is to stay on. on high bar, he talks about how important it is to hold onto the high bar. on rings he talks about the strength needed. on vault and floor, he talks about how important the landings are and how disastrous it is to step out of bounds. you can basically play the audio of him commentating on one gymnast on an event and then play the same track for any other gymnast on the same event, and it will be entirely applicable because he says the same thing.

bart connor i miss you so much. somebody with laryngitis, please make out with tim daggett.

Wow. Watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics. it's MAGNIFICENT. it's truly China's coming-out party.

i could wax rhapsodic on the beauty, symbolism, and pageantry of the ceremony, but that would take too long.

instead, i want to point out that Bob Costas and Matt Lauer have watched thousands of athletes and performers file past the cameras, and never once, not a single time, not even one solitary time did they ever exclaim, "HOLY CRAP, SHE IS SOOO HOT!!!"

I wouldn't have made it past the Chinese flag girl leading in Greece. Actually, I wouldn't have made it past the first flying dancer at the beginning of the ceremony.

and that's why these guys are professional, folks.

other stupid observations:

i'm going to move to tuvalu. 12,000 inhabitants. i'd be able to qualify for the Olympic team in something there. maybe even in my dream event: the 100 m dash. I have not given up my dream of being named Fastest Man Alive. Plus of course, inhabitants of tuvalu get the oh-so-nifty .tv email extension.

so happy to see the gymnast Li Ning lighting the Olympic torch. He dominated so much in the '84 LA Olympics and then had a disappointing '88 Seoul. I'm glad he's still a hero in China.

i almost wish that they hadn't had the wonderful spectacle of the dancers running and doing handsprings suspended around the latitudes of the makeshift globe. it took away just a little bit from the sight of li ning skywalking suspended around the birds nest stadium. yeah, zhang yimou, you shoulda checked with me first. I woulda showed you how to do it right.

that ceremony was just fantastic. my head is still spinning at some of the amazing images that i've just seen, like the unrolling giant scroll, the human birds nest, the giant printing press, the 9 year-old earthquake hero walking with 7'6" yao ming, and umm, yeah, the smokin' hot women.

speaking of which, how about that switzerland/sweden marchthrough? wow. those guys living in switzerland and sweden are lucky.

of course, none of them are even remotely as attractive as my girlfriend. i hope that statement lessens the trouble i'm in for gawking and blogging.

i'm currently reading Love In The Time Of Cholera, and it's a testament to my ADD and lack of discipline that it's taken me approximately 8 million years to get past the first 60 pages. but now we're into the good stuff--the overwhelming maddening, obsessive crush that Some Guy With A Foreign, Gender-Ambiguous Name That Has An F And a Z In It has on Some Girl With A Foreign Gender-Ambiguous Name That Has An F And a Z In It Which Caused Me To Mix Them Up For A While.

note to writers: give your characters really distinct names so that we people with poor attention spans can tell them apart, willya? Call one character Florentino Ariza and call the woman he loves SallyMae McPickleSnorter.

And while we're at it, when you're directing a movie, if characters look even remotely similar, make one of the actors dye his hair pink or something. thank you.

so anyway, i was going to write about my childhood crushes, but i'm sleepy. but i just had to write something tonight before i went to bed so i could continue with my vow to blog every day.

TOMORROW! OLYMPICS! AND A SPECIAL DAY FOR CHINESE CULTURE! 08-08-08! (the Chinese believe 8 is symbolic of success and riches. i am going to buy 8 (i'd kinda like to buy 88, but that seems like overkill) lottery tickets at 8:08:08 am on 08/08/08.

ha! it's 11:57pm. i'll have made my deadline. at least i will if i will stop writing non sequiturs that keep popping into my head.

last one: it's wild to know that when i wake up tomorrow morning, there likely be a headline that reads, "China wows the world with a gorgeous opening ceremony," but that there's a slim chance that the headlines may read, "Olympics ceremony marred by protests/terrorist attacks." let's hope for the former.

11:59pm. i win.

woke up today with energy feeling energetic, clear-headed, and most importantly, like there were now normal body fluids in my lungs and throat where previously i think there was tar. it must have been the Chinese herbs! not the guaifenesin expectorant i took last night, not that the cold ran its course, it must have been the work of my people.

viva la ancient Chinese secrets! we rule! i'm pretty sure we're favored to win the gold in the Olympic event of Herb-Preparation. After all, we do so well on the hit Chinese TV Show Iron Preparer Of Herbs.

ha! good to know that the herbs haven't affected my sense of humor. it's as sucky as it's always been.