I’ve never actually met another living human being that had ever seen or heard of the show Tracker.  It was a low-budget sci-fi show starring Adrian Paul, Amy Price-Francis, Geraint Wyn Davies and Leanne Wilson (my reason for watching).  Around here, it was on back in 2001-2002 at 11PM immediately following MadTV.  Adrian Paul is an alien who comes to Earth to hunt down 218 escaped alien convicts from his home planet.  That’s basically the whole premise.  The show was totally awesome in a campy, late-night low-budget sci-fi sort of way.  Back then, I recorded every episode of the series onto VHS tapes.  This was a good idea, since the series has never been released to DVD and has no apparent hope for what would be such a great idea.

As such, nobody has really been able to see it for the past 9 years since it went off the air.  The closest we can come is the movie “Alien Tracker,” a terrible direct-to-DVD release which is essentially the pilot and two other episodes of the show edited together to make a fairly incoherent “movie.”  But do not distress – I just discovered someone’s YouTube channel where they have every single episode of the original Tracker series posted for you to watch online.  This was a great day for me.  I thought I’d share.

The link will take you straight to the first part of the pilot episode: http://www.youtube.com/gaiaquest#p/search/10/0WcCI1LOCYI

Go.  Enjoy.

Hey, America! What do you like? Black Presidents? Sure. Gay American Idols? Hell no!

I don’t like to talk about American Idol, but mama always said sometimes you’re going to have to do things you don’t want to do. Last night, Arkansas Jesus boy Kris Allen beat Mr. Fabulous, Adam Lambert. Both had been popular for the entire competition for entirely different reasons, though it had seemed all along like Lambert would take the victory. He should have, after all. Kris even thought Adam should win, which was obvious by his reaction and comments following the announcement. After 100 million votes, which is probably about 10 million people voting 10 times each (I saw one person on Twitter say they voted 189 times), Kris was the winner.

I say that while admitting that I didn’t want Adam to win, simply because if he had, the whole competition would have been essentially void. He had been in a class above everyone else the entire time, and Kris Allen’s win, if nothing else, proved that the show actually can surprise you.

If you didn’t root for Adam because his insane vocals and frequent shrieking annoyed you, then that’s fair enough; they occasionally annoyed me as well. Admittedly, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to buy his CD (you know, if I bought CDs) That said, I wouldn’t buy Kris’s either. I know for a fact Adam was just too much for some people, and that’s totally rad, because personal opinions are the strawberries we slice onto the morning cereal of our lives.

But, if you didn’t vote for Adam because his makeup frightened you or you hate gay people, then you are a douche. Certainly you’d never admit to that being your reason, but for some people, it was. It is a topic that has been discussed in magazines and on websites for months, and the media has been up in a tizzy about whether or not the country would back such an ostentatious individual.

I was hanging out among the Twitter populous during the show, and a huge number of people attributed Adam’s loss to his flamboyant sexuality as soon as they watched him lose. Whether or not people want to admit it, it’s definitely a variable for a large number of voters. For these individuals, it didn’t help Adam’s case that his competitor was a calm, humble southern family boy with a religious upbringing who spends most of his time doing church work. Polar opposite, much?

Apparently we’re fine with a black President, but not a gay Idol.

The second thing this year’s Idol proved is that the show is still a popularity contest and not a singing contest. Kris can sing, sure, but not as well as Adam. Every time they sang side-by-side during the finale, Adam took the more difficult parts of the songs while Kris took the easier ones. Adam sang with Kiss, some of the all-time legends of music. Kris sang a safe, easy tune with Keith Urban in a performance that I stopped watching due to boredom after 20 seconds. Adam sang again with (what’s left of) Queen, another of the most legendary bands ever. Obviously the artists were paired with those who match their style, but for real… there’s a reason Freddie Mercury’s vocals are something most singers shouldn’t attempt. There are only a handful of people who have the ability to pull them off.

But again, this isn’t really an argument about whether or not they can sing. Everyone in the top 10 can sing. It’s about popularity vs. singing. Because of Adam’s ability to be super dramatic with his performances and annoy people, and due to his being gay, he wasn’t as popular. What he can do with his voice, his range, his control, his dynamics, and his showmanship should have won him a singing competition.

These people won on popularity, too…

Ruben Studdard – He was fat, jolly, fun to watch, and oh yeah- had a gay opponent who is now 300x more successful than him.
Fantasia Barrino – This muppet was popular due to a lack of options. The only thing good about Diana DeGarmo rested below her chin and above her belt, and Fantasia had a better story and a funny voice. But ew, what a creature she’s turned into now…
Taylor Hicks – Elliott Yamin and Daughtry lost to him? Right. Enough said.

At least there were some other honorable mentions last night, like Steve Martin playing the banjo on a song he wrote for the gorgeous Megan to quickly destroy. And Kara, who I hate with the fire of a thousand suns, is an insane singer and knocked that skanky bikini girl to the floor. Good times. Sort of.

Thomas Dekker is a little strange. I have known this for a while. Any candid footage I’ve seen of him, he’s oddly flamboyant and very un-John Connor. This is no exception.

Here we see him in a hotel room, smoking a cigarette, wearing no shirt, swearing at his cell phone, not knowing how to operate simple electronics, and boasting a few very weird tattoos. He phones up FOX’s customer comment line to tell them they need to renew Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for a third season.

Apparently it didn’t work, as the show was officially canceled over the weekend. Bummer. No more Summer Glau…

Anyway, as disturbing, abnormal, ambiguous and alcoholic this video may be, I thank Thomas Dekker for appreciating his fans. Well done, my good sir. Well done. Terminator was a fine bit of television, but because it didn’t have 20 minutes of Lauren Conrad drinking iced tea and blabbering about the wind, nobody cared.

Everyone knows that Japanese television has some of the zaniest programming in the world. This is particularly true when it comes to their game shows. They are continually coming up with more and more ideas for shows that are completely insane, but utterly brilliant for getting people to watch. You don’t need a big budget, Pat Sajak, or a large rotating wheel of any kind. In fact, it helps if you don’t…

Case in point: Whatever this show is called. The goal is to lie down on this plank and project yourself towards the giggling jiggling lady humps without actually touching them. If you get real close but don’t touch, I guess you get points or something. If you ram them, of course you win in one sense of the word, but you also receive an electric shock. You also get to prance away like a doofus. Worth it.

For real, can you think of a better premise for a game show? No, you can not.

He’s a crazy fellow, and you never know what you’re going to get from his performances. He can butcher Johnny Cash songs and still make them enjoyable, or be totally rockawesome singing the classic Tears For Fears hit “Mad World.” He described himself on Idol as someone who always wanted to play dress up instead of soccer. Obviously. But enough about all that! This fellow used to be a Biblical slave.

That’s right – if he reaches the American Idol finals, it won’t be his first time on stage at the Kodak Theatre. In 2004, he was in a vastly expensive musical production of “The Ten Commandments,” produced by clothing guy Max Azria and starring Val Kilmer as Moses. If that brief description sounds like a slowly spinning lazy susan of crap, you’d apparently be right. The show got junk reviews. The huge cast was no good, the choreography and songs were awful… I just wish I could have seen it!

There was one bright spot, however. Guess who.

Lambert was the slave Joshua. In the video below, you can watch his solo number. It’s a horrible song, but he sings it like crazy. I can’t imagine he’d be this good at soccer, so I guess he picked the right route wanting to play dress up and sing songs.

The mixed opinions stem not only from the fact that Derek was killed, but how he was killed – cinematically speaking. The camera shot had just jumped to him, he rounded a corner in the house, and bang – bullet to the forehead. He fell down, the necessary blood puddle formed, and it cut back to something else. It was an extremely non-dramatic method for capturing the death of a main character. It was like any random henchman or cronie’s death. And that’s why I liked it.

People have been saying it was Joss Whedon-y the way it happened, killing off a main character abruptly only to say “hey look, main characters can die, too!” Just last week on Terminator, Charlie met his demise. While he wasn’t a main character, he was a recurring one and a father figure to John. This week it goes up one notch, taking out John’s uncle and eliminating one of the two remaining family members he has.

I read a lot of “Derek’s dead. The show is cancelled” type BS this morning. I read a lot of “why would they do that?” BS this morning. It’s really not all that complicated…

The purpose of The Sarah Connor Chronicles since its beginning is to show the evolution and transformation of John Connor. In season one, he was reserved, timid, relying on Sarah and terrified of the future that has been laid out for him his whole life. He was constantly holding back and scared. In season two, he’s faced deception from people he thought he loved, the loss of some of the only people who knew who he really is, even issues with Cameron, who is supposed to be there to protect him. All the while, Catherine Weaver is threatening him in ways he doesn’t realize. He has spent the entire season learning about trust, loss and survival. We all know that eventually John Connor ends up alone, as leader of the free world. Characters like Charlie, Derek and Sarah have to die for him to end up alone. He won’t be able to evolve into the future John Connor that the entire Terminator lineage revolves around without it – and so, here we are.

As for the quickness of Derek’s death, I thought it was perfect. It did show main characters can die, whether that’s Whedon-y or not. Big deal if it is – main characters can die. The fact he didn’t go out in some super long, blown out Bon Jovi blaze of glory was great. That’s not how people really die. Besides, Derek has always been the one who said that if a Terminator wants you dead, you’re dead. He has always been there to remind everyone of what they can do – it’s perfect that his death proved the claim. A big dramatic death would only have let you know that he will die in 30 seconds. With this one, it was just a slap in the face, and ten times more shocking than something built up.

Now we’re left with the finale – Weaver is being uncovered, Sarah is arrested, Derek is dead, and John and Cameron are left alone to handle John Henry and ZeiraCorp. John may have to be John for the first real time. We’ll see.

“They flow from street to street at a particular speed and in a particular direction. Walk the block, wait for the signal, cross at the light. Over and over. So orderly. All day I can watch them and know with a great deal of certainty what they’ll do in any given moment. But they’re not orderly, are they? Up close, any individual, who knows what they’re going to do? Any one of them might dash across the street at the wrong time and get hit by a car. When you get up close, we never follow the rules.”