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Irrelevantly, except from the same site... http://www.holytaco.com/classic-taco-a-flowchart-to-deterine-what-religion-you-should-follow/

What is the source of that commentary? I am not a critic, I don't even play one on TV. I don't think a much of most critics. It is easy to throw stones. It is much harder trying to create entertainment or something else for that matter than it is to piss on it. I also don't give much weight to those who perennially piss and moan about the failed efforts of shows like this. By their very nature these shows are difficult to put on. They are an awards ceremony where people are recognized by the industry and who in turn recognize those who helped them achieve their success. The Oscars is full of stars that people like to ogle. So they televise it. Then people complain that it is not very entertaining, more like an awards ceremony. LOL So they try to fold some entertainment in to the show for audience appeal which appeals to the show sponsors. Most people are not in character so we get their real persona which may not be as sparking as the characters they play on the screen. The timing is off which is not surprising as real people are interacting in a mostly unscripted environment. Off stage is probably chaos fifteen minutes after the show start. Like battle plans in a skirmish, show plans don't last long once the show dynamics stray from the course. So to coordinate so many individuals and set-ups with show tunes and vocalists with orchestras, get the presenters to their marks where the hopefully encounter a working teleprompter etc., jokes and commentary are used to provide segways between acts/performances/presentations or just to fill space while unplanned disasters occurring off stage are overcome. No doubt some is ad-libed as the backstage catastrophies unfold. So not all the jokes and commentary work all of the time. Big deal. It is live unscripted TV. As for me. I liked McFarlane. I enjoyed the show. I'd like to see him back again but he said once was enough because of all the time it takes away from the rest of his life/work. I didn't know anything about him before this other than a week or so before the Oscars I heard he was a creator of one of the adult animation shows -- maybe Family Guy? He can sing, he can dance, he can tell jokes, has an edge, he's easy on the eyes. What's not to like? Yeah, not all the jokes worked. Yeah, some of them were a bit off color. He's trying his stuff out. It was hist FIRST time. HE's a multi-dimensional entertainer. They make the best emcees. I thought it was one of the better shows they have had.

Seth MacFarlane hosted a slow-motion catastrophe of an Oscars broadcast Sunday night. His terrible performance immediately sparked two internet conversations: one about what a terrible Oscars host Seth MacFarlane was, and a second about who had, if anyone, been an even more terrible Oscars host. Many people were insulted by MacFarlane's sexist hostility. And I was, too. But I was also insulted by MacFarlane's obvious laziness and lack of professionalism. MacFarlane's shtick is built on contempt, which is why he's so witlessly insulting. But it was his obvious lack of effort, his confidence that his bush-league material was good enough for the likes of us, that betrayed his total contempt for the audience. Many of MacFarlane's apologists bring up the awful James Franco/Anne Hathaway show of two years ago. But that's a different question. Franco and Hathaway failed because they are not comedians (which is no more an insult than it is to point out that they are not acrobats). They simply do not have the skill set that hosting such a program requires; they could not have succeeded no matter how hard they tried. MacFarlane does have the requisite skills. It's clear that he has sufficiently effective comic delivery and he has a long track record as a head comedy writer. He knew his job. He just didn't bother to do it. That is insulting. Don't get me wrong: hosting the Oscars is a nightmare gig. The host has to perform roughly 30 to 45 minutes of original and completely untested standup material, in front of both a national television audience and nearly every power broker in Hollywood. Most stand-up comedy that you see on TV has been tested and tweaked in dozens, or often hundreds, of live club performances. Any comedy bit that hasn't already been performed in front of a live crowd is at best a hit-or-miss proposition and at worst a bomb that can blow up in your face. (The few minutes of standup by the hosts on late-night shows are untested material of this kind, which is why those jokes are so uneven.) Doing half an hour or more of completely untested material in front of Steven Spielberg is terrifying. Add to that the problem that you have two very different audiences to please, neither of them easy, and each with very different tastes: the room full of Hollywood luminaries in front of you and the vast TV audience somewhere beyond. To succeed, you need to bond with both audiences. Playing exclusively to one instead of the other is automatic death. And worse yet, the last ten or fifteen years have set up an expectation that the Oscar-night host will fail, which can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Potential hosts know this: Queen Latifah was asked before the show if she would consider hosting, and replied that the organizers would have to both "back up the Brinks truck" and get her the world's best publicist to repair her image after the show.) So all in all, an ugly seven-headed monster of an assignment. But if you're going to accept that terrible gig, there's no excuse for giving less than your best effort. Sometime after 11 Eastern, MacFarlane was waving off his own bits with excuses like "It's late." But that's a lie. The material was not weak because MacFarlane was tired (at something like 8:15 local time). That could only be true if MacFarlane were making up the material as he went. The material was weak because MacFarlane, given months to prepare, had prepared a script full of weak and threadbare material. "It's late," is really MacFarlane saying, "I did not bother to put together enough quality material for an entire show. So you're just going to have to take whatever I give you from here on out." This particular expression of contempt for the audience went unnoticed among MacFarlane's more blatant expressions of disregard for women, gays, Jews, ethnic minorities and people with mild Spanish accents. But all of MacFarlane's contemptuous misbehavior is rooted in that basic act of contempt for the audience, his refusal to put in the effort required to create enough A-level material. The boorish "I saw your boobs" song actually might have been funny if it had taken only ten seconds. A lightning-quick snippet of MacFarlane singing "I saw your boobs," would be a perfectly good joke, and harmless because it would come at MacFarlane's expense. (The context for the I-saw-your-boobs song was a "warning from the future" that MacFarlane was going to be disastrously offensive. If the audience then saw and heard him singing the words "I saw your boobs," just once, they would get the point: MacFarlane is an ignorant churl. It didn't get funnier the second time.) Instead, MacFarlane stretched that single, weak joke into a couple of minutes of material, requiring him to actually be a boor and then double and triple down. He didn't need the routine to be so long; it was pre-taped, so he could show as much or as little as he liked. But MacFarlane was trying to fill time, getting three minutes from a premise that only had one joke. He did the same thing with his next bit, stretching out a sock-puppet re-enactment of Flight to excruciating lengths. MacFarlane consistently tried to milk single jokes into longer sequences, because otherwise he would have had to come up with more jokes. What he did write was lazy. The offensive lines weren't just politically incorrect. They were comically incorrect. Several of them were badly constructed. All of them were based on cliches. (A female CIA operative didn't get over 9/11 because "women never give up on anything?" Really? That's all you've got?) Saying that MacFarlane was too "edgy" is absurd. MacFarlane is not an edgy comic. That was not Pryor, Carlin, or Lenny Bruce up there. There are comedians who can get away with material far more transgressive, and subjects far more taboo, than anything MacFarlane dreamed about. MacFarlane wouldn't have the stomach to do any five minutes of Bill Hicks's act, or Sarah Silverman's. Even Robin Williams, who all-too-desperately wants the audience's love, is far more of a painful truth-teller than MacFarlane. But all of those comedians get around the audience's inhibitions by breaking down cliches. Listening to them is liberatory, not because the material is difficult but because the execution is original. MacFarlane, who is lazy, prefers to build his act on as many cliches as possible. Of course, that's easier. It just doesn't work. If someone tells you MacFarlane's detractors are being uptight, remember that MacFarlane got major blowback from a joke about John Wilkes Booth. That is not cutting-edge material. People have been telling jokes about the Lincoln assassination for many decades. ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln ....") But MacFarlane actually managed to offend people with that moldy chestnut of a premise, because the joke he told was constructed so poorly. The punch line wasn't set up strongly enough to feel natural, so MacFarlane sounded like he was straining to drag in Lincoln's murder. It's the strain that made the joke off-putting. That's a spectacular failure of technique. He could have gotten away with a Booth joke, easily, if he had taken the effort to write a better joke. But then, that would have required work. And MacFarlane had clearly decided that none of us were worth that much effort.

Where I grew up, those were the Pentecostals.

What if you are poor and insane? Does this preclude you from being a Jehovah's Witness, Morman or boring Christian (assuming you are among the naturally boring)? Aren't there any other choices? Best regards, RA1

I thought it was McDonald's that used particle board; maybe it only tastes like particle board. I can see you now wearing meatballs. Wait, you must mean a closet like enclosure and here I thought you were out of the closet. Best regards, RA1

Can we just call people "travoltas?"

I think it's very camp when Oz says it.

Aha. I think I see my mixup. When I got home, I must have eaten the laminated particleboard, then assembled a wardrobe out of the meatballs.

I think you can read this as Meg is done running for office, as a Republican anyway.

Very interesting summary of the host's performance. I watched it and was not impressed overall (but there were some things that I did laugh out loud at). Definitely a very tough spot for anyone that hosts the Oscars. With Seth as host, and his background in sophomoric humor, you pretty much got what one would expect. Nothing wrong with sophomoric humor (when done well) and I personally like it at times. However, I think his humor is more geared towards a younger audience and as such he missed the target with a significant portion of attendees and viewers. I did read somewhere that viewership in the key segment of 18 to 30something was up significantly. Not that he can take all credit but probably some. I suspect that is what the producers were aiming for but I think he alienated quite a few out of that segment so on balance it was a bust. And, in my opinion, he doesn't really have the credits for such a big gig. Being a producer/writer of Family Guy and one movie (that I am aware of), Ted, just doesn't give him enough standing to be a host of the Oscars. That takes a whole different skill set and experiences I would say. Having said that, with never having hosted a live awards show before or anything similar in scope, he does deserve some high marks for having the cajones to give it a try and probably did better than many others with similar background/experience would have done. And he does have versatility as far as talents as TY said. It is just that the material did not quite click with many people. I think also he is a relative unknown with many viewers (over a certain age) and as such there isn't much tolerance for anything that might be off the mark or less than stellar. People tend to be more forgiving to those that they are familiar with and have already built a liking for. All in all, not a good night for Seth and the Oscars.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/c0be736778/oscar-s-best-hand-job-award

Living kind of isolated does have its advantages. I had no clue that the CEDAE municipal water company wasn't functioning for more or less 60 hours. I went to the veggies market this morning and caught the headline on the front of O GLOBO. 9 million Cariocas were without water. Due to the incredible heat the electric company has been doing some rolling blackouts and one hit an unprepared water distribution plant in Guandu. Lucky for me(yes, Lucky. I sure was!)my cistern which contains about 4000 gallons of water was nearly full. Good for about a month. Things are going back to normal. The picture on the front page of the paper shows a CEDAE worker at one of there units near the old train station in Leopoldina(near Central and Sambodromo) sleeping/resting on the top of an empty water tanker truck. No water flowing through the pipes even to the water company. I am sure with 90, 95 and 100 degree temps the smells have to be just as bad as what the passengers on the Triuumph has to endure. http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/falta-dagua-atinge-toda-cidade-do-rio-municipios-da-baixada-7664631

I love Thai guys! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEx5C86VUCE

Well, I am back, but the images of the guys on stage at Circle Pub are still fresh in my mind. It's the classiest erotic show I have ever seen. Imagine that. The taxi card for the Pub features a reclined boy shirtless but wearing full Indian headdress. Not sure why, but I did meet him in person as he is um, available. I felt his tight bicep to compare it to the one pictured. He seemed to be a bit older than many of the guys, and made his availability clear. But, when the show was over he had found his customer and I was yesterday's news.