Pushing Daisies Gets Full Season!

From SciFi Wire: "ABC Orders Full Daisies Season". ABC ordered an additional nine episodes, bringing the total to 22 for the show's first season. If you go to SciFi Wire and look at the ratings of network SF&F shows, Pushing Daisies is currently on top with a more-than-respectable 8.3!

For those of you who haven't caught it, start watching! It's sick humor (falling in my opinion somewhere between A Dog's Breakfast on the slightly tamer side and Shaun of the Dead on the even sicker side), but it has a real sweetness to it. It comes to us from Bryan Fuller, the genius behind the dear departed Wonderfalls (which we own on DVD, all thirteen or fourteen episodes) and stars Lee Pace (the neurotic religious-studies brother Aaron on Wonderfalls, though rather different in this role), Anna Friel (another Brit doing a flawless American accent), Chi McBride, and Kristen Chenoweth (who seems much skinnier than I remember her being in Music Man; assume my rant about Hollywood making actresses lose weight, and I'll post it another time. If I'm misremembering, forget the rant).

I loved Wonderfalls even more, but I still love Pushing Daisies.

The premise is that Ned ("The Piemaker," as the narrator almost always calls him) can bring dead beings back to life. ( Read more )

Pushing Daisies Gets Full Season!

From SciFi Wire: "ABC Orders Full Daisies Season". ABC ordered an additional nine episodes, bringing the total to 22 for the show's first season. If you go to SciFi Wire and look at the ratings of network SF&F shows, Pushing Daisies is currently on top with a more-than-respectable 8.3!

For those of you who haven't caught it, start watching! It's sick humor (falling in my opinion somewhere between A Dog's Breakfast on the slightly tamer side and Shaun of the Dead on the even sicker side), but it has a real sweetness to it. It comes to us from Bryan Fuller, the genius behind the dear departed Wonderfalls (which we own on DVD, all thirteen or fourteen episodes) and stars Lee Pace (the neurotic religious-studies brother Aaron on Wonderfalls, though rather different in this role), Anna Friel (another Brit doing a flawless American accent), Chi McBride, and Kristen Chenoweth (who seems much skinnier than I remember her being in Music Man; assume my rant about Hollywood making actresses lose weight, and I'll post it another time. If I'm misremembering, forget the rant).

I loved Wonderfalls even more, but I still love Pushing Daisies.

The premise is that Ned ("The Piemaker," as the narrator almost always calls him) can bring dead beings back to life. ( Read more )

Free Rice

I got this address from tejas: a website called Free Rice. They donate ten grains of rice for each vocabulary word you get right.

And because I'm supremely competitive, I'm gonna say I reached 190 grains of rice right off (and was at vocab level 44) before I got any wrong! (Of course, I am an English prof, so I had better do well.) How many grains can you give?

Free Rice

I got this address from tejas: a website called Free Rice. They donate ten grains of rice for each vocabulary word you get right.

And because I'm supremely competitive, I'm gonna say I reached 190 grains of rice right off (and was at vocab level 44) before I got any wrong! (Of course, I am an English prof, so I had better do well.) How many grains can you give?