Thursday, September 15, 2011

True confessions

So I'm watching X-Factor. I've never watched it, though I have in the past (long time ago) watched some Idols. I have indeed flirted with reality tv - couple of Big Brothers, some Apprentice, Survivor for quite a while. And of course we do watch Masterchef. Or have done thus far. It seems the foundations of my current marriage lie on some of that reality tv. Clokes is a tv man, and he only reads because I do. He'd be happy to never read another word in his life, unless it was some twit's tweet.

The reason, firstly, I decided to watch the first X-Factor was Scary Spice. I admit it. I also think Natalie Batthingthwaiteth is kinda cute and I did think Guy Sebastian was also a sweetie. Ronan Keating I had no idea about. Never listened to his music that I've been aware, no nothing about the man at all.
The first episode hooked me. For this is what they do. It's like opium? Crack? It was embarrassing when the two female judges asked a couple of the guys to take off their t-shirts. Really embarrassing.
And of course now I have some really strident opinions about who is good and who is shit (Master Ruffo, I'm looking at you, man) and we have our catch phrases such as NUT MAN!
And then last night, there was Beyonce with her A-Team telling us all why this one was so cute, and how that one slid into his notes and wow, she just loved that one's hair.

Here is the rundown on a couple of the contestants.



I reckon if a girl wins it's likely to be this one. Christina. 15. Cute as a button and so confident I just don't know how she can be that cool.




This guy reminds me of a young Tom Cruise (not such a good thing) but he is SO confident and the ladies love him (ie Natalie and Mel B.) I think he's a potential winner.



I call this guy Fluffy, he's different, has a good voice and isn't your typical pop star type. He's 15. Beyonce loved him.



This guy is a serious contender. His audition was amazeballs and he is very cute. Girls will love him. He has a good voice. He's got the look. Blah blah.

These are the twins. Ronan likes them even though they are pretty embarrassing. Their performance last night was totally crap, flat and embarrassing. They're gone.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a very rare thing that I watch anything outside news and current affairs type shows; but I remember how entertaining it was reading the delightfully snarky rundowns on TSSH. I think that is my favourite way to consume television.

Are you planning on doing something similar?

Unknown said...

I've become a bit addicted as well. I hate the twins. Hate hate hate. I don't understand what it is that Ronan likes about them. At. All.

I love that they keep referring to the old(er) dude as a nut salesman. I giggle like a 15 year old every time they do it.

Anonymous said...

I don't understand what it is that Ronan likes about them. At. All.

Just going on the photo, maybe he sees the potential of marketing the classic twin-sex-fantasy; y'know, 'cause pop-music's all about the sex-fantasy, right?

Perhaps that could work in favour of your NUT MAN as well*, I dunno.

*or perhaps I'm misconstruing something here

Melba said...

I know right EMS? I didn't hate the twins at first, I thought they were kind of funny; maybe I wanted them to be funnier than they are, but to me they didn't come across as sex bombs, rather as nincompoops but kind of endearing.

I don't think I'll be able to dedicate too much time to analysis and/or snark, Alex, but maybe from time to time I might put up a pic of NUT MAN and perhaps HUG MAN. In fact, I'll do it right now.

By the way, can someone please tell me what's happening to my formatting. I don't want such big spaces between my paras but whenever I insert a pic (after I've done the text) it fucks it all up.

Anonymous said...

Okay, so the reason you've got the big spaces is 'cause your code looks like this:

I reckon if a girl wins it's likely to be this one. Christina. 15. Cute as a button and so confident I just don't know how she can be that cool.</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><br />

Each of those <br /> tags means "new line".

The next thing is to work out why this is happening. Do you format in the HTML view or the compose (or whatever it's called) view? Do you do any special formatting, of is it just a basic "inset image"?

Anonymous said...

Question: Once you finish a paragraph, are you hitting the "enter" key a whole bunch of times to get down underneath the image before you start the next paragraph?

Melba said...

Probably am hitting the enter key; I write in the compose window not the html window.

The view I get, the layout looks okay; then when I hit publish it goes spazz.

Also, while we're on the topic: I can no longer embed url links, the button doesn't work. I'm wondering whether I need to update, blogger is telling me something about updating. I'm too scared to change anything much because I don't want to lose my stuff.

Anonymous said...

I set up a blog a while ago, just to help EMS with some stuff (there's nothing published there [yet]). I'm going to assume that most of the features are the same as yours.

Mine has a "preview" button at the bottom. If yours has this, I would be interested to know whether the formatting looks off in the preview, or whether it is being mangled specifically by the publishing procedure.

I'm not sure what the update messages are about (unless you tell me exactly what they say), but it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to go along with them. If you're worried about doing irretrievable damage, I suggest going into "settings" tab and selecting "export blog". This should copy your whole blog to an xml file on your computer. Then, you could start a new (unpublished) blog, import the xml file (giving you two identical blogs) and play around with the unpublished one to your heart's content.

Also, if something goes wrong with the upgrade procedure (whatever it is), you should be able to restore your blog using the file from your computer. Actually, I don't think it would be a bad idea to periodically back up your blog anyway. Just in case something happens with Google or something.

Anonymous said...

Wait, if you're talking about that thing that says "update to the new blogger interface" at the top of the screen, that is not you're problem. I just noticed that's on mine, too, and mine's working fine.

Anonymous said...

Or "try the updated blogger interface", I should say.

Anonymous said...

And to clarify, are you saying that when you click on the button that says "link", absolutely nothing at all happens? Is the button greyed out? Does it do the little clicking animation? Do you have some text highlighted and is it just random text or a fully formed URL?

Melba said...

Hi Alex, the link button is active but it doesn't work at all. I used to use it all the time.

Also just posted a diarama and was very careful to not put in carriage returns, kept paras really densely and tightly together yet once it published, it spread out like that.

Thanks for all your help. I might try the update, yes it is the suggested new blogger interface at the top.

Anonymous said...

Okay, Melbs, I've done two little videos of myself using the Blogger interface to make a "post":

The first one demonstrates that you can run into compatibility problems with certain browsers (in this case, Firefox), so there's something you might have to watch.

In the second one, I'm using Chrome (of course it would work properly with Google products -- you might have to consider giving it a whirl) and just running through some simple HTML editing that you can maybe use to help you keep your code clean.

You have to read the description to see what's going on in the first one. With the second, I got adventurous and used annotations. Also, you can view them in resolutions up to 1080, for a good look at what's going on.

If you see something in the second video that full-on isn't working as shown when you do it, let me know and we'll go from there.

Anonymous said...

I see you've done a bit of fiddling with the images on this page. They look better in the browser, but I should point out that they now look like this in my feed reader.

I reckon this is probably because you've removed all the <div> tags entirely from around the pictures. These are the things that had the the style="clear: both;" property attached to them. Now the images want to "float" next to each other, rather than underneath each other.

Anonymous said...

I mean this.

Melba said...

Oh man you are awesome. Flying out of the country in the morning but will give this some serious attention in a couple of weeks.

Thanks.