Before we get started, here are our quick thoughts on our two favorite topics of the moment, American Idol and Lost:

IDOL: We were disappointed that Amanda the scary rock nurse got voted off this week. We think there’s a fix. The Idol producers wanted to save money and were spending, literally, thousands weekly on Marlboro Reds and cans of Aquanet.



We thought she was, at least, interesting. That’s more than we can say about Kristy Lee Cook and, our personal nemesis, David, who we thought was positively horrible this week and yet got stellar reviews. We just don’t get it. It make us sort of sad. And then we think about being sad about something on American Idol, and THAT makes us sad. We really need a break from Idol, we think.

And, like we said before, and we will continue to say, country music fans will listening to anything. This was reinforced this week when the abysmal Kelly Pickler sang her horrible song (We get it! Pickler is a bug dum dum. She's a stupid hick. Way to make fun of Southerners Idol! Thanks Kelly, as a region, we haven't had enough people embarrass us already, you dolt), and Kristy Lee Horrible made it through another week. You just KNOW she already has a country music career in the future, even though she's painfully bad. She probably already has a hit on country music radio. We're just disgusted with ourselves.

LOST: We liked “Meet Kevin Johnson,” like we’ve really liked every episode of Lost ever. But after it was over, and we thought about it, we were disappointed.

Here’s the thing, and here’s what people who get frustrated by Lost get frustrated by, the episode APPEARED to answer some things, but it only confirmed what most of already thought, and it raised more questions and left more gaps than it filled.

And while we can take that usually, it really sort of bugged us last night. Because this is PRECISELY the type of episode that should provide answers.

Come on! We’ve waited two years to see what happened to Michael and Walt when they left, and all we get are some vague hints and some innuendo. You can’t give us ONE shot of the two on the boat after they left the island?



Here’s what it answered: The others think Widmore is the bad guy. Tom is gay. The island “might” have some ability to control your actions after you leave the island. Michael is upset about killing those people on the island. He told Walt. Neither he or Walt are, evidently, allowed to tell anyone who they really are. That's it. That's the list.

Here’s what it didn’t answer or questions it raised: WHY can’t he and Walt tell anyone who they are, and WHY can’t they go back to the island to try and rescue the other Losties? WHY can’t Michael kill himself? WHY can some others leave the island and others can’t? HOW did Walt appear to Locke, and WHY was he taller as a ghost? WHAT was the point of the Farraday experiment a few weeks back when he proved time works differently outside of the island than it does on the island? (Michael had only been away from NY for two months, which makes sense, because he left the island about that time. Which means times moves the same in NY as it does the island. So, again, why lead us to believe a few weeks back you’re giving us insight into something and then, apparently, completely discount that theory?)

The time thing is the most glaring What The?!?! We haven’t done the math, but the castaways have been on the island for around four months. Let’s assume Mike and Walt left two months in. And let’s assume it took them a month to get back to NYC (although, last night, Mike’s mom said he was gone for two months, but that can’t be right, unless it took him a few days to sail back to the U.S. ACROSS THE OCEAN in a dinky little boat), that gets them back to the U.S. around the end of November. The tanker has been trying to find the island since the beginning of December, and we know that, thanks to Mike’s flashback (you could see the Xmas decorations), that he was in NY around Christmas. Which means his entire flashback, and what we didn’t see — what happened before he tried to kill himself — all happened over the course of about a week.

And, OK, we could say, well, they’ll explain it, but we also can’t expect them to explain EVERY SINGLE THING. How many more Michael flashbacks can we expect? One? Two? We also think Mike’s in the coffin, which means at least one flashforward involves him dying, so any future Mike stories might deal with that. We also, you know, NEVER GOT ANY ANSWERS ABOUT CREEPY WALT AND WHY HE HAS MAGICAL POWERS!!!! Which they’ll probably never explain. And if they did, it will be yet another episode in which we get no answers to the questions we just posed.

And, yes, we’re grumpy because we have to wait another month for another Lost. So there’s that. What did you think?

Yo Joe

We were giddy seeing Snake Eyes from the new GI Joe movie for the first time.



Really, we should be way too old to get happy to see something like this. But we’re not. That makes us sort of happy but mostly not.

PopPulse recommends

This runs in the Guide every Friday:

We’re usually anti big corporations when it comes to the internet and pop culture. While we don’t advocate stealing mp3s, we think Web sites like YouTube actually HELP networks and movies more than they hurt them. Just look at the impact these web posting sites have had on “Saturday Night Live” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

However, we have to hand it to NBC and Fox for stealing an idea from the little guy and actually making it cool. Their joint video on demand site, www.hulu.com, launched last week, and it’s pretty sweet. You can catch full episodes of a lot of popular present shows from both networks and archives of a lot of older shows. They also have streaming movies for free and tons of clips from movies and TV. We spent an hour “listening” the “The Big Lebowski” last week as we worked. There are ads, of course, but they are minimal and pretty unintrusive.



There’s room for improvement, though. For instance, you can never have enough content — they’re trying to get the other two big networks to join up, and there’s no “American Idol” — and it would be nice to have complete show runs — why only four episodes of “The Addams Family”? Only 11 of “The Incredible Hulk.” Zero “Manimal.” Who randomly decided these totals?
But still, you have roughly 1,356-straight hours of entertainment on call for free. And who doesn’t want to catch up with reruns of “Tequila & Bonetti”?

For once, we don’t hate Dax

Dax Shepard is an actor we can’t stand. You probably don’t know him. He appears in a lot of comedies that make little money. He usually plays a dumb guy or a smarmy guy or a dumb, smarmy guy. He was the dude in “Without a Paddle” that you didn’t recognize. Plus, he got his start on “Punk’d,” which is, like, strike one.



But, we have to admit, he’s pretty great in the Dane Cook slacker comedy “Employee of the Month.” Granted, that’s like saying, “the grown man is pretty great on his t-ball team,” but we mean that as a compliment.



“Employee” is basically “Police Academy” in Sam’s Club. Or “Van Wilder” in Wal-Mart. Or “Moving Violations” in Costco. OK, we’re done. Shepard plays the greatest cashier ever. He’s smarmy and a little anal and very Arian, what with his Nazi-like blonde looks. He makes a great bad guy, and he’s actually funny.

In this one, lone, solitary, isolated, fluke-like movie, at least.

“Employee of the Month” is airing in March on Showtime.