Pop Culture, I don't trust you: (The 8 Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows. (MiniBest!))

I know it's been six months since I mentioned this topic, but that's only because I'm don't pay any more attention to what I say here than you do. And also I'd have gotten back to this Minibest sooner except I try as hard as I can to avoid ever hearing anything about Mad Men whatsoever -- not because Jon Hamm's a liar but because when a television show (or anything) is superpopular it can only mean that it sucks.

Don't bother trying to correct me. In our modern era (post 2005), the more popular something is, the more terrible it is. It used to be that something being really popular meant it was good, but somewhere between Titanic and the last Harry Potter book, that ended. Now, as a general rule, with the exception of McDonald's cheeseburgers, superpopular generally means supersuckage.

I believe it's because it's no longer possible to distinguish genuine popularity from fake popularity. Popularity is, after all, determined by only a few factors: how much money something made and how highly it is rated and how much people are talking about it.

But money stopped being a measure when I (and you and we all) stopped being able to factor in inflation. Every movie is a record-setter; Shrek 2 made more money than E.T. So The Hunger Games made a jintillion dollars over the weekend; so what? Movie theater box office receipts are simply a Hollywood version of the Weimar Republic.

Then there's ratings -- which are so easily manipulated that Oprah could ask her viewers to rate her show higher.

Finally, there's how much people are talking about it. That used to be a reliable measure -- it's what got me to see Titanic and it's what two years ago proposed as a true measure of greatness. It seemed to me that was a good way to check things out, but I hadn't yet at that time worked out the logistics of the echo chamber that is the Internet and modern media -- where one paparazzi photo can show up on 50 celebrity blogs, where the Huffington Post will headline a story from another site which copied it from the New York Times, where, in essence, there are 33,000,000 Google results for even the most obscure topic.

For example: I just googled "robot who played checkers" and found nearly 6,000,000 sites.

So if it seems a lot of people are talking about something like Mad Men or The Hunger Games or that one show that George R.R. Martin made by taking all the boring parts of Lord Of The Rings and altering them to include more dwarves, it's as likely to be just the reverberations of a single original voice or a small contingent of voices as it is to really be a crowd at the water cooler, and that's fueled my natural suspicion of anything popular, a suspicion that was originally created by high school (where I was unpopular, as you've guessed/been told over and over.)

Which, in turn, is why it took me so long to realize that January Jones plays a mom on Mad Men,



but once I did learn that, I wasted no time in making her number three on this list.

Previously, On The Eight Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows:

1. Allana Harkin

2. Sophia Vergara

The 8 Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows... (MiniBest)

...and it only took me 1 1/2 months to get around to posting number two:


I'm on the record as saying it's not just looks that make you attractive. Yes, Gloria from Modern Family is hot in an obvious way*

*obvious beauty is the worst, as Friends pointed out.

... but that's not what makes someone hot. Just like with Allana Harkin (who was elevated to the number one position by being funny, because funny +pretty > pretty only*),

*that's math, and math doesn't lie except when it pretends that dark energy exists

Gloria, as Sofia Vergara is primarily known for playing, has plenty of other attributes, like

1. She can shoot a gun. Which, I am opposed to guns, but let's face it, that's hot.
2. She's sneaky.





3. And, well, that's it.
4. Well, those things, plus this:




I mean, it's not all about personality.

Previously, On The Eight Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows:

1. Allana Harkin





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The 8 Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows #1 (MiniBest!)

Hopefully I'll finish this one...

"Dino Dan" is a show about a schizophrenic little boy who spends most of his time ignoring other little children, and his family, while wandering through a world filled with terrible, horrifying monsters that often approach him and sometimes threaten him.

And it's a kid's show.

Not making any of that up. Here's the promo:



"I'm a regular kid...it helps that I can actually see dinosaurs, even though no one else can. Some people say I have an active imagination, but from where I see things, dinosaurs are everywhere."

Watching the show -- which Mr Bunches, our youngest, loves -- is an exercise in sadness, as "Dino" Dan contorts reality to account for the fact that only he sees the dinosaurs around him. I imagine that the final episode is going to find "Dino" Dan standing in a bloody room, the corpses of his family around him, as police look on in horror and "Dino" Dan says "I'm telling you, it was the Corythosaurus!" Then they'll play those tapes of his on Nancy Grace.

What Dino Dan does have going for it is Dan's mom, whose character is called "Mom." That's her off to the right, there.

Here's how Mom is described on the official Dino Dan site:

Dan's mom is one cool lady. She's a police officer who loves doing physical activities. Weekends, she likes to make sure Dan and Trek get outside for outings like hiking, bike riding, and horseback riding. Dan gets his irrepressible energy from his Mom and she's very proud of him. But she can be a disciplinarian when she needs to be. Dan's mom will occasionally stand in the way of his dino adventures but that's because she wants him to do his homework, eat his broccoli, and get ready to go to Grandma's.

I added the emphasis; Nickelodeon does not emphasize the sexiness of its show's moms.

Mom is played by Allana Harkin, who has a blog, "Things Yelled Out In Public," and who, before she was a mom trying hard not to notice that she's going to have to medicate her son, was in a variety of TV shows, a sketch comedian, and who appears to know me, because she's got this picture:



On her website (where she's very funny), and I couldn't help but notice that the astronaut there is the same one that graces my Eclipse book trailer:




So I can only assume that Allana Harkin is a fan of mine, which is going to make Sweetie pretty jealous.

Here's Allana in costume from the play "First Hand Woman":



She played "Acceptance."

And I really do recommend reading her blog, which features "Movie Reviews By My Kid" and other very funny stuff.

And then, maybe give a little to help out "Dino" Dan. Just twenty cents a day can save a little kid.



On another note: I've watched about 15 episodes of Dino Dan with Mr Bunches so far-- like I said, hot cop mom -- and that is a scientifically representative sample, so what I am about to say has the cold hard feel of fact. You know what's missing from "Dino" Dan's imagination?

Velociraptors.

Further proof that they're made up and never existed. Velociraptors are the biggest lie ever foisted on a dinosaur-loving public.