What caught my eye today on the InterToobZ.
• GLEE-FREE —Can’t wait until the spring for Glee to return on FOX? NBC is happy to provide your show choir fix in the meantime, courtesy of their week-long a capella singing contest, The Sing-Off. Judged by down-to-earth Boyz2Men member Shawn Stockman, ditzy Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger and the wonderful Ben Folds, Sing-Off presents some great showmanship from a diverse set of a capella groups from around the country. Some of the performances aren’t fantastic but all show a lot of heart. And, inevitably, the song each losing team chooses to sing as they exit the auditorium comes off better than the one they chose for the actual competition. Irony’s a bitch. My favorite group so far is Tufts University’s Beelzebubs (“the ’Bubs,” for short, pictured here singing the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour.”). Oh, and host Nick Lachey should get a less tight-fitting suit so he can take off that girdle he’s wearing and enjoy the show. Jus’ sayin’.
• MY KINGDOM FOR A STICK — Popular, smart and sassy Web comic xkcd led the way: Stick figures are now the go-to art form for tutorials, replacing the “[blank] for Dummies” regime after a decade of substituting self-loathing for sincere intellectual curiosity. Today’s example: A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a witty and cute guide to modern cryptography by the geeky-cute Jon Moser.
• MY KINGDOM FOR HIS SHIRT — So the bet around the house was how many times Taylor Lautner (Twilight, New Moon) was gonna take off his shirt during his stint guest-hosting Saturday Night Live this past weekend. Junkie1 bet three times, zRose25 bet two and I just one, because they had to build up to something. As it turned out, we were all wrong — absent his abs, nary a nipple did we spy. What we should have bet on was the number of wigs poor Taylor Lautner (or as my pal J.T. calls him, “Jacob HOT-ner”) was going to have suffer through wearing throughout the show. I lost count. Possibly six. The highlight: A bewigged Taylor plays a Team Edward high school girl who refuses to pair up with a science class lab partner who’s on Team Jacob.
In a rare appearance on Saturday Night Live in his own hair, Taylor Lautner hosted last week’s show in wig after wig after wig…
• IN THE HEIGHTS — Kenny Ortega (Michael Jackson’s This is It) has reportedly been tapped to direct the big-screen version of this Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. My recent Twitter review:
Saw “In the Heights” at Minneapolis’ Orpheum Theatre. While the story aims low, the music soars.
I’ve been an Ortega fan since his directorial debut, 1992′s Newsies, a Disney musical starring Christian Bale about the turn-of-the-[last] century newsboys’ strike against Joseph Pulitzer. You dang kidz probably know Ortega better as the director of the High School Musical movies. Newsies is one of those movies that didn’t do so well at the box office but sold very well on VHS and DVDs ever since.
