Hot Extras: That Girl Who Heckled Louis CK.

Although I guess she's not really an extra anymore, or maybe she is?   I went looking for "that girl from that episode of Louie who heckles Louie in that one scene" and found

Megan Hilty,

who is, indeed, that girl from etc etc and who apparently is on Smash.

Has anyone watched Smash? 

I bet more people have seen her as the voice of Aunt Tiana in "Phineas & Ferb" in 2010 ("Just Passing Through/Candace's Big Day") than have seen her in Smash, which I don't think anyone watches.

I don't watch, it, anyway, and that's how I count things.

I also noted that Megan Hilty is going to be the voice of China Princess in "Dorothy of Oz," an upcoming animated film.  Megan Hilty does a lot of voice-over work, which just proves that Hollywood is stupid:

 

But really this is all just a way for me to point out that Dorothy of Oz is the second upcoming Oz feature in the next year or two, which just goes to show how influential I am, as 2 1/2 years ago I wrote about The Best Sequels That Haven't Been Made Yet, and number three on the list was an Oz sequel:

Oz! the movie picks up just after Dorothy left -- leaving the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man with the task of deciding what to do now that the Wizard is gone. They try to set up a democracy, electing representatives of each of the areas of Oz, but their efforts are halted when Ozma, the claimed heir to the throne, demands that all democratic efforts be stopped and that people accept her rule. Ozma's background is cloudy, though, and it's soon revealed that Ozma was actually born a girl, but then was transformed into a boy and raised as such, only to be transformed back later on. [Note: This actually happened in the books.] Now, with her fearsome associate, Jack Pumpkinhead, Ozma is determined to take over Oz on behalf of her true leaders - the fairies, as it turns out Ozma is one of those, too. [Note: That's actually in the books, also.] Eventually, Dorothy must return to Oz and use an enchanted belt to help free Ozma from the various people demanding her allegiance so that Ozma can choose her own path. [Note: That kind of happened in the books, too!]

The plot of "Dorothy of Oz?":

Back in Kansas, Dorothy Gale decides to return to Oz in order to help her friends. 

 So more or less exactly the same thing.

(Also in that post: I suggested Apocalypse Then!, a movie that would feature actual US Special Forces.  In 2012, Hollywood released this.)

Genius.  Me.  Those two things are the same thing.

Here's  Megan Hilty for you again:

Sitting and frowning at people is definitely within my skill set. (POP!Best!)

I dislike silence -- too much quiet and I start to listen to myself think, and nothing good ever comes of that.

So mostly I have the radio on in the background, but sometimes I'll put on Netflix and play TV shows that I liked -- focusing on TV shows that don't require that I watch them too closely, that rely on language more than visuals for their humor.

I've found that most TV can be listened to without losing much in the translation -- so much so that I probably would have liked living in the old days of radio, except then I wouldn't be able to occasionally stop working on suing banks and petting zoos (true story, in a way) and watch the shows as a break, and if I didn't do that I wouldn't have ended up watching the deposition scenes from the episode of Better Off Ted when the company gets sued for inventing a perfume that attracts angry wasps:

Veronica: Remember that perfume your team developed about a year ago? In 3 out of 5,000 women, it reacts with their body chemistry and attracts hornets who want to mate with them.

Ted: And when the hornets realize they've been deceived, do they just laugh it off?

Veronica: If by "laugh" you mean sting over and over again in endless waves of fury, then yes, they have a wonderful sense of humor.

And if I hadn't watched that part (which was work-related because if you think about it, watching a sitcom deposition is pretty much identical to what I actually do for a living) I wouldn't have noticed the Hot Extra, Janet Varney:

 Janet, in the Better Off Ted episode, plays a lawyer representing the wasp victims, and she has the better of the three lawyers who appear in that scene.  Credited just as lawyer, she has more lines than male lawyer, and the third lawyer, who in the show sits to the right of the Veridian witnesses, doesn't have any lines.

I wonder how much you get paid to sit at a conference table and frown at the show's stars in a lawyerly fashion? Because I feel like that's a career move I want to make.

My favorite roll Janet's ever played?  Attractive Woman Driver, in Drillbit Taylor.

Wherein I leave the world to defend itself against a newfound menace. (POP!Best!: Hot Extras)

Today's Hot Extra comes from the video for Fun.'s song We Are Young, which is only an okay song:




As an anthem, it doesn't have the same power as, say, Wavin' Flag or anything, but it's still better than Pumped Up Kicks, in the ranking of anthems/hot songs. If it matters to you, apparently the video is supposed to be an allegory of losing one's virginity, if comments on Youtube are correctly interpreting it.

As for the girl, I'm not exactly sure who she is. The question Who is the girl in the We Are Young video was asked on Yahoo! Answers, and the answers:

She's the image of porn star Lindsey Strutt.

Look at the video info. I LOVe fun. Omg im seeing them in march

Show why we are ranked about 375th in the world in terms of intelligence and productivity. Seriously, why log in to provide an answer if you don't know it?

Also: who knows what porn stars look like by heart?

So instead, I did a Google Image search of that picture up there to see what happens with that, but it was taking forever to load the image, so I gave up and instead watched this video of what happens when you do a Google Image search of a transparency, and then search that, and so on, recursiving yourself back to the dawn of time, or something:

Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1 from kingcosmonaut3000 on Vimeo.

Pretty cool stuff.

By that time, my image search had loaded and given me these results:


And if you look closely you'll see that some of those results are robots of some sort, and clicking that image led me to a site written entirely in a foreign language that featured pictures of robot action figures and umbrellas:



But they're scary foreign umbrellas, not good God-fearing American umbrellas, so I got really worried about what my search results might lead me to. Could I, by trying to figure out who this girl was, accidentally uncover some sort of Chinese plot to invade us with nonwaterproofed robots that require umbrellas to protect them from the rain, umbrellas which would (naturally) be equipped with pull-out swords?

I mean, if that's the case, don't I have a duty to try to figure out what that site says so that I can spread the word about the Swordfighting Chinese Robot Invasion, since Ron Paul's campaign literature doesn't mention that enough already?

So I was fully prepared to learn Mandarin Chinese and translate that page, but two things happened:

(v) I thought "What if that girl's not even 18? That makes this the creepiest possible way to spend a Saturday morning." and

(brown) Mr Bunches announced that he wanted to go play skee-ball, which sounded pretty fun to me.