ABC Family is giving a little more love to Kyle XY, which became the most-watched original series on the network last year. According to The Hollywood Reporter the science-fiction program, which was given a 13-episode pickup last August, has been picked up for 10 more episodes. That's 23 episodes, folks. Pretty decent for a cable series.

Why the extension? According to Paul Lee, president over at ABC Family, it's due to the quality of the new episode; executives have been so delighted with the shows for season two that the order for new episodes was released. In addition, Lee states that Kyle XY has defined the network. I can believe that because before Kyle the network was known more for repeats of Step by Step than for original programming.

For those of you unfamiliar with Kyle XY, it chronicles the adventures of a mysterious teenager with superhuman powers (yes, another one of those) who has no memory or history of his past life. In the second season, which begins on June 11th, viewers will be introduced to some of Kyle's past and how he gained his abilities. The new order of episodes will air sometime early in 2008.

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I was pokin' around NBC's YouTube channel the other day when I came across this video of Leno interviewing celebrity lookalikes on the street.

The bit isn't all that funny, but check out the first guy Jay interviews. That's right, it's Sammy Stephens, owner of Flea Market Montgomery in Montgomery, Alabama. Stephens' commercial, which features him both rapping and dancing has made him a minor celebrity both online and on TV (Ellen DeGeneres loved his commercial and invited him on to her show).

Continue reading Jesse Jackson lookalike owns a flea market - VIDEO

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Now here's an interesting idea: a line of food based on a TV show.

They're called Mayberry's Finest, and they are a line of "southern comfort food" based on the type of stuff The Andy Griffith Show's Aunt Bee used to cook for Andy and Opie (and anyone who was sick in town, like Clara): beef stew, mustard greens, and mixes for buttermilk biscuits and lemon icebox muffins. They're being launched at the Food Marketing Institute's convention in Chicago. Each package will be based on a character from the show and will include snippets of show scripts and episode info.

This could start a trend. How about a line of food based on Gilligan's Island (canned pineapple, coconut cream pie) or Survivor (bugs)?

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This Just In has a new video up featuring some hysterical outtakes from Dateline's "To Catch A Predator" series.

Okay, it's not really Dateline, and that's not really Chris Hansen, but it is really, really funny. The swearing is bleeped, but you might want to be careful about watching it at work or church anyway. Also, you shouldn't bring your wireless laptop to church, that's just rude. Jesus doesn't come to your house and play his banjo* while you're trying to watch TV, does he? That's right, they don't**.

Anyway, I placed the video after the jump.

[via CC Insider]

*I belong to a religious sect that believes Jesus was in an folk band

**This sect also believes Jesus was made of several smaller Jesuses, like Voltron

Continue reading To Catch A Predator: the outtakes - VIDEO

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Apparently that's the first thing a lot of folks think when they first walk into Richard Michelson's art gallery in Northampton, currently hosting the good doctor Spock's exhibition of obese lady fat-agraphs.

Mr. Nimoy, who shoots artsy portraits of overweight naked women in an effort to destabilize the skinny industry, would not confirm or deny the charge this weekend, telling Sunday Styles that while he does not "necessarily" find them sexually attractive, he does think they are "beautiful," "full-bodied, full-blooded human beings."
"People will think what they're going to think," Nimoy tells Styles. "I understand that."

Nimoy didn't care about obesity until he got pretty old. These days, he is a passionate critic of the fashion industry--so passionate, it seems, that he has trouble speaking without his breath getting thick:

The average American woman, according to articles I've read, weighs 25 percent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold," Mr. Nimoy said, his breathing slightly labored by allergies and a mild case of emphysema. "So, most women will not be able to look like those models. But they're being presented with clothes, cosmetics, surgery, diet pills, diet programs, therapy, with the idea that they can aspire to look like those people. It's a big, big industry. Billions of dollars. And the cruelest part of it is that these women are being told, 'You don't look right.'

He agreed, and she came to the studio at his Tahoe house. She arrived with all sorts of clothes and props, "as if she were playing a farmer's wife in a butter commercial," he said.

At first, the lady kept her clothes on, but Nimoy's wife Susan, who was on hand as an assistant, had other plans. "No, we want to shoot nude," she said. The model did as she was told, and after removing her clothes, laid down on a table.

At first Mr. Nimoy was very nervous, he said.

"The nudity wasn't the problem," he said, "but I'd never worked with that kind of a figure before. I didn't quite know how to treat her. I didn't want to do her some kind of injustice. I was concerned that I would present this person within the envelope of an art form."

But soon he relaxed into it, lulled by the clicking of the camera and the woman's comfort with her body.

Girth and Nudity: A Pictorial Mission [NYT]

The Lupita dress is sewn from "papery thin poplin in a corn-husk hue," and is currently available for $148. As for the lady: just ignore her. She is only crying like that because of the onions.

Žižek out at Abercrombie & Fitch, moving on to bigger and better things?

Via Mina Kimes at Elm Rock City.

"The big strategic challenge for a career like this is to remain interesting, and the easiest tactic for doing that is surprise," Kinsley writes. "If they are expecting X, you say minus X."

But how do you know when it's working? That's where Kinsley's counter-intuitiveness rating system—based, it seems, on simple punctuation games—comes in handy. Declaring you're against abortion, for instance, gets an "Interesting!" Revealing a Jewish mother tops that with "Interesting!!" Hating on Bill Clinton, "Interesting!!!" Supporting the Iraq war, "Interesting!!!!"

How to break the five exclamation point threshold, after the jump.

Trouble is, Hitchen's new book about why religion—er, "god-worship"—is bad is not 'minus X' at all. It is totally completely X. Isn't that... interesting!!!!!?

See, that's the trick. Kinsley writes:

Well, ladies and gentleman, Hitchens is either playing the contrarian at a very high level or possible he is even sincere. But just when he had us expecting minus X, he confounds us by reverting to X.

Sadly, all this "reason" might work on paper, but in the rough and tumble world of amazon.com sales rankings, it only gets you so far. Advance orders of the seventh Harry Potter book (!!!!!!!) are currently trouncing Hitchens' God Is Not Great for the number one spot. Interestingly (...?), Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, the book that explains how you can cure cancer by thinking special thoughts, is currently in third.

Now, under a new national campagin to enforce "Islamic norms," men, too, are becoming victims of Islamically correct fashion. Hair gel is OK—in modest dollops—but hair-dyes of odd colors are out, as are shaped and trimmed eyebrows, Mohawk cuts and conspicuous spikes. Men are not supposed to wear cosmetics, and they are not to wear ties.

Indeed, the Journal's findings dissolve any hope for a non-military solution; it now appears that Ahmadinejad and his cronies will go to any length to quell the voices of democratic cosmetology:

Tehran's Union of Men's Hairdressers is working to keep its members out of trouble. "It's not easy being a barber," sighs its chief, Mr. Eftekharifard, a jolly 47-year-old who began his hairdressing before the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Most Iranian men wear their hair short and avoid any unconventional flourishes, but a few youths, particularly in affluent areas, indulge in elaborate exercises of hair topiary.... Some fashion conscious young men have started shaping their eyebrows and even wearing makeup. Mr. Eftekharifard blames the trend on satellite television and the proliferation of unregistered, underground hair salons.

At a shopping arcade near the British embassy in central Tehran, police last week raided shops selling ties. The owner of one store says they forced him to strip clothing dummies of neckties and ordered him to take down an ad featuring an Italian in a suit and tie. He now hides his contraband neckwear in a plastic bag behind the counter.

Unless you want want the smoking gun to be a pleated trouser. —Jon

A Word to the Wise in Iran: Don't Ever Wear a Tie to Work [WSJ]