At The Commercials: T-Mobile Girl and Fake Kim Kardashian

So lately, there have been two commercials with very fetching models in them. The first would be the woman from the T-Mobile commercial above. To me, she looks like a prettier, less angular (smaller nose) Anne Hathaway.

According to Teh Internetz, and the source of the above photo, the T-Mobile girl is a Canadian model and actress named Carly Foulkes. Outside of the T-Mobile spots, she's been in… Well, pretty much nothing. Still, I kind of like her acting ability too. She seems pleasant enough - She should ditch that dweeb guy in the commercials and just go solo.

(Also, every Carly I know is a pretty cool person. My real-life friend Carly? She's cool. Carly Googles? Again, she's awesome, and I haven't even met her. However, we are FB friends, so that counts for something.)

The other attractive woman in commercials lately has been the girl that E! News appropriately calls Kim Fauxdashian. I saw the Old Navy commercial a couple times and thought to myself, "Well, that's not surprising that Kim would take their paycheck…"

The fact that it is apparently NOT Kim is more surprising to me. It is a performer along similar lines though - It is Melissa Molinaro, a frequent Making The Band and Pussycat Dolls reality show competitor. The resemblance is pretty uncanny, although she hopefully hasn't been run through as many times as Kim K. The picture from the E! article is below:

A fall TV guide (with help from Carly Googles)

Hey, it's almost time for TV shows to get back on the air! :O It seems like just yesterday that they all ended in May. Where DOES the time go?

However, I'm psyched, since in just a few short weeks I will be able to devote massive amounts of my time (and this blog!) to new television. Some of these posts will take the place of The Baggage Game, which will disappoint some of you, but no doubt please Danielle and others who dislike it.

My friend Carly - and I can call her my friend, of course, because we're friends on Facebook - at Carly Googles already covered some of this ground. You can check out her awesome entry here. I'm going to focus on the shows I actually watch though, cribbing from her list and the Internet, like...

Archer - TBA 2011. The cartoon from Matt Reed, the guy who did Sealab 2021 and Frisky Dingo, was probably my favorite show from start to finish last year. The only bad thing was its short season length. I'm hoping they do a full 20-episode run this time, but since it is an FX show, I'm guessing that won't happen.

Community - Sept. 23 (Thurs.) Like the other NBC Thursday shows, we have another week to go for new episodes. SIGH. Given how the season ended, there are definitely a lot of different ways they can go with the start. It's definitely the tensest comedy from a character standpoint, given the minefield that awaits this year.

Family Guy - Sept. 26 (Sun.) I feel like each year, less and less of my friends watch. However, if you can accept that it's generally the same sort of formula for each episode, it's still pretty solid. Hey, it's only 22 minutes of your life, once you take away the commercials. There isn't enough funny in that short time to keep your interest? As "Funny" Dave Dameshek would say, SHAME!

Glee - Sept. 21 (Tues.) Sigh - It seems like so far away! Just one more week...

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Sept. 16 (Thurs.) This freakin' week! SCORE. I'm super excited.

Modern Family - Sept. 22 (Wed.) A week after Always Sunny, which seems appropriate to me. It's the best network sitcom going right now, even if I thought its last episode sucked. It really deserved all of the Emmys it won, though.

The Office - Sept. 23 (Thurs.) Much like Heroes last year, this is a make-or-break season of the show to me. If the first couple episodes are bad, I'm probably tapping out quickly. Even Dwight couldn't save some episodes last year, and he's normally the one go-to guy in terms of laughs.

Saturday Night Live - TBA (but if I had to guess, I'd say Sept. 25 or Oct. 2) This could be an interesting season, since they're (allegedly) replacing four or more cast members. Last season was pretty much sucky except for Betty White, which was surprising to me, because the previous year was pretty solid toward the end.

Shit My Dad Says - Sept. 23 (Thurs.) I really doubt that this show has any staying power. However, I'll at least give it a chance for a couple episodes. Shatner + Funny = Interest.

South Park - Oct. 6. Technically, this is a continuation of the season that began in March. I hate how South Park splits up their seasons into seven episode chunks, ugh. Just as you're getting into the show, it goes off the air for five months. It is still consistently 1) funny 2) socially relevant or 3) both.

The Venture Bros. - TONIGHT! My favorite cartoon on Adult Swim! I just wish they managed to produce more than an episode a month, seemingly. It is animated in an old school style that apparently takes effing forever. The wait is usually worth it, though.

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I'm positive I forgot some shows, but this is what's on my radar for now.

At The Commercials: Google just crushes it

Since I seem to be on a kick with somewhat-mushy posts, given my focus in the past couple days on romantic comedies and personal drama, it only makes sense to focus on a commercial that does emotion effectively.

Google is well-known for essentially being the crack of Internet search engines, with examples ranging from Carly Googles to how no one I know uses Bing to the fact that the site's name essentially serves as a verb now. Well, the commercial world should also watch out, as their Super Bowl spot (featured above) was so diabolically simple and effective.

I caught it a day after the fact on The TV Ad Guru, a neat site that I follow. I agree completely with him - The ad is devastatingly effective because of how simple it is. While I can question the need for the commercial, given Google's seemingly unassailable market position as the top dog search engine, a quality effort like this certainly doesn't hurt matters at all.

What Steve Reads: Brick Sexplode and Carly Googles

If any of you have ever spotted my blog roll, and I'm guessing you have because it is conveniently displayed on my profile and the right-hand side of the blog, you might have noticed that I follow a lot of them. As of this writing, this number has swollen to 85, with varying degrees of publishing frequency between them.

The purpose of this series of entries - What Steve Reads - is to shine the spotlight on the various crap I read. Obviously. I'll do two per segment, once a week or two weeks, depending on lots of different factors, such as the airspeed velocity of unladen swallows. Typically, the blogs will have something in common, such as the one I'm doing tonight. On to the actual blogs I read...

- Brick Sexplode. Well, actually, the name of the blog is Bricks Explode, but whenever I glance at the name, I think it is Brick Sexplode or Brick Sex Plode, so I am calling it that instead. Sorry.

The author of the blog is Josh, and I quite enjoy his writing, such as a list of things nobody in your office will ever want to hear about. I also have no idea what he looks like, so I hope he's cool with my using a picture of the fetching and vexing Katie White from The Ting Tings instead. (Sorry again Josh.)

However, to get sentimental for a second, when I was first starting this blog, Josh's was one that I randomly read a lot of the back entries for. To get very specific, I absolutely adored his listing the Mighty Ducks from The Mighty Ducks 2 as one of The Top Ten Selfish Sports Teams Since 1980. One, because they totally are, and two, because it was the sort of plucky pop culture analysis that I was hoping to do myself.

- Carly Googles. So, one of Josh's latest entries noted that Carly Googles had used him as a source for an entry. Intrigued, I checked out her blog, and immediately started following it. I mean, how else am I going to find out what the origin of the word seersucker is, how big the moon is, how close the characters in Archer and Frisky Dingo sync up, and other wonderful random information?

I suppose some of you are saying, "Well, you could just look up the information on Google yourself." To which I say... no. You go look it up. And Carly does in fact look it up for me! Listen, sometimes I don't know that I need to know what a cashew tree looks like. Carly does, and she shares it with me.

The Katie White photo is from here. Carly's photo is from her blog. And the picture at the top is from here, and solely used because I thought it was silly.