The Guardian tracks down teachers to find out what today's celebrities were like as children. The one I found most hilarious (of course):

Simon Cowell
Dover college, Kent, 1973-1975. Lorenzo Smerillo, former assistant housemasterSimon was a very unhappy, nicotine-addicted, skinny, scruffy, dishevelled, pimply teen - rather like most boys at any ( Read more... )

Only Ryan Seacrest would get bitten by a shark on the day that Shark Week kicked off, because nothing happens in his life without a media tie-in. He's not even on the Discovery Channel ( Read more... )

So this is what I did:

Thursday night I watched SYTYCD with ali_wildgoose, honestys_easy, and sistermagpie as usual. I agreed with the eliminations this week, and jm_cats was totally right about the bottom three.

Friday sistermagpie and I saw Gonzo, the Hunter S. Thompson docu by the guy who did the Enron docu. The movie was fantastic and very appropriate to the holiday. However, SM was covered in ( Read more... )

Busier and more productive weekend than I'd thought I'd have, which was pretty awesome. Traipsed all the way out to the craft store with ali_wildgoose and then realized that the thing I thought I could get wasn't what people thought when I said it, and I actually needed something completely different, but I did still get floss and an awesome organizer for the ( Read more... )

Things that amused me this week:

• The new E! Network promo, which ran 245 times during this weekend's Top Chef marathon on Bravo. (If anyone can find it online, I will love you a dozen times.) It's set at a carnival and has everyone you want to see, plus a lot of Ryan-first shot, many transitions of him looking at other people, and the final shot ( Read more... )

Now I know what it means to be in a fandom that's just motoring along, until suddenly one of its ships becomes the Slash Pairing of the Moment ( Read more... )

One of the peculiarities of writing Ryan/Simon is that Simon, in all his grouchy, hairy, pushing-fifty ridiculousness, scares away the fangirls. It's a downside because it means the audience for Rymon is limited. This might seem odd from the outside-Ryan and Simon are back every season after all, and their interaction is the most overtly ( Read more... )

Usually I don't pay much attention to AI audition eps because let's face it, it's got bad singing and no Rymon and they're often kinda mean. But this year they seem to be showing more good singers than bad, and as lessthangreat says, Rymon doesn't know the meaning of ninja, because they were all over each other from the get-go this year. Monday night they ( Read more... )

So I just zoomed through those first two eps of Idol and seriously, what has happened here? Simon puts someone through because they're positive? This isn't just me; he seems awfully happy. And why, exactly, did he suddenly decide to eat better and work out? My favorite quote:You know what's amazing about this country, is that you're genuinely ( Read more... )

I am so excited about my Yuletide gift fic, Where There Is Peace! It's Anne of Green Gables (which I secretly thought it would be given the fandom counts) and is all about Leslie and Owen and their family during WWI, the time period of Rilla of Ingleside.

It's funny, I was talking to lillijulianne the other day about my childhood holidays, when I'd mostly ( Read more... )