Reality

In an odd yet understandable marketing strategy, the folks behind E!'s new reality show "Mrs. Eastwood & Company" have spent a lot of pre-premiere publicity time explaining what the show isn't. Which is to say, Clint Eastwood. The legendary actor and director will appear in but a few episodes and then only briefly. He will not, for instance, be slamming doors or engaging in filmed therapy sessions with his wife, Dina, around whom the show revolves (see title.) That doesn't mean the show is not about Clint Eastwood; it is. If the principal characters -- Dina, her 15-year-old daughter Morgan and 19-year old stepdaughter Francesca -- were not related to him, there would be Absolutely No Reason to watch this, which, by reality show standards, promises to be tame to the point of sedation.

Reality TV has plenty to recommend it — even beyond Schadenfreude — but likable characters are not its long suit. “Nobody Loves You,” an original musical premiering at the Old Globe in San Diego, is about a fictional televised dating contest also called “Nobody Loves You,” a mash-up of “The Bachelor” and “Paradise Hotel” with some clever original twists. The risk of the premise is a parade of objectionable people mocking themselves in song.

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

Your boo-boo routine just got an upgrade. Thanks to a new augmented reality app from Johnson & Johnson, Muppet branded Band-Aids can now function essentially like QR codes, letting animated Muppet characters talk to you from wherever you've placed the Band-Aid. Here's how it works: Open the Band-Aid Magic Vision app on your phone, and point the phone at the Band-Aid.

The wait for tables is getting longer at Buck's, a popular breakfast spot for the tech elite and a weather vane for the Silicon Valley economy. Here, like everywhere else, Facebook is the talk of the town. "Charles Schwab was in the restaurant the other day, and I asked him to hook me up with some Facebook shares," said Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck's, in the wealthy suburban enclave of Woodside. "He told me even he can't get Facebook shares. " The new tech boom officially gets underway Friday when Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rings Nasdaq's opening bell remotely from the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, launching the largest initial public offering of stock in Silicon Valley history.

CINCINNATI - The Rev. Chris Beard is a theological conservative, make no mistake about it. He believes the Bible is the word of God. He believes the Holy Spirit speaks to him directly. He believes, as an article of faith, that abortion and same-sex marriage are wrong. Still, when a group of religious leaders in Ohio held two days of meetings in Cincinnati recently to talk about economic and racial justice, issues usually associated with the political left, there was Beard, a fourth-generation Pentecostal preacher with a disarming smile, a shaved head and a set of convictions that knock holes in the stereotypes about white evangelical Protestants.

"Selling L.A. " reality show viewers may wonder if any of the featured homes actually sell. Although perhaps not in time for the closing credits, some houses under consideration for the show do find a buyer outside the roving eye of the camera. One home that agent Rebekah Schwartz was promoting to HGTV for its 15 minutes of fame was the Marina del Rey pad that former Laker Lamar Odom rented a few years back. Listed at $1.995 million in January, it closed early this month at $1.825 million.

In television, the reality is reality works. Even so, the ever profitable genre is often regarded as the uncouth and self-involved relative who should never be invited to mingle with respectable company. But that's exactly what a handful of prestige basic cable networks are finally poised to do. After years of mostly defying the siren call of reality, networks like USA, TNT and AMC plan to launch a slate of reality programming in the coming months. Don Draper and Brenda Leigh Johnson, meet your new neighbors: Comic book geeks, treasure hunters and the U.S. Coast Guard, among others.

There is something in the evolution of many cable networks that echoes the beginnings of life on Earth, as from primordial ingredients something new begins to stir. The network begins with reruns or other acquired goods, clambers ashore with low-budget, low-commitment reality series, and finally, with original scripted material, stands erect and walks. TV Land, which began by presenting "classic" television series packaged with a kind of ironic curatorial air, has passed through the reality stage, and Wednesday night it airs its first original scripted series, a situation comedy, "Hot in Cleveland," whose title seems itself designed to echo shows that have gone before — "WKRP in Cincinnati," "Hot L Baltimore" (a play first but also a series)

The ultra-tan crew of "Jersey Shore" is already fist-pumping, Ben Flajnik has, by now, gotten back in the reality dating game as the newest "Bachelor. " And celebrities have been switching spouses on "Celebrity Wife Swap. " But if your DVR has not yet reached its reality show limit, here's a look at some new reality offerings networks are rolling out later in the season. Shipping Wars: A&E has already made us wish we had the patience to make a life out of scouring repossessed storage units for riches.

Meanwhile, back on the third rock from the sun the rest of us live on, the Dodgers lost. Lost big, lost like regular mortals and everything. The Dodgers fell 11-4 Wednesday to the Diamondbacks in Phoenix to snap their six-game winning streak. There was no pixie dust on this night, no wide-eyed comeback, just a good old-fashioned derriere kicking.

In an odd yet understandable marketing strategy, the folks behind E!'s new reality show "Mrs. Eastwood & Company" have spent a lot of pre-premiere publicity time explaining what the show isn't. Which is to say, Clint Eastwood. The legendary actor and director will appear in but a few episodes and then only briefly. He will not, for instance, be slamming doors or engaging in filmed therapy sessions with his wife, Dina, around whom the show revolves (see title.) That doesn't mean the show is not about Clint Eastwood; it is. If the principal characters -- Dina, her 15-year-old daughter Morgan and 19-year old stepdaughter Francesca -- were not related to him, there would be Absolutely No Reason to watch this, which, by reality show standards, promises to be tame to the point of sedation.

What happens if you start a political party and nobody comes? Six months ago, a newfangled third party burst onto the scene, full of hope and promise. It was called Americans Elect, and it sought to give voters a choice many said they were looking for: "centrist" candidates who could break the partisan gridlock paralyzing Washington. In its founders' heads danced visions of middle-of-the-road candidates who could transform American politics: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Colin Powell, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Huntsman Jr. Wealthy donors invested millions in a fancy website for an Internet primary, signed up 420,000 would-be "delegates" and got on the ballot in 29 states.

It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when a comprehensive rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians seemed not just possible but inevitable. In the mid-1990s, the two-state solution was gaining support on both sides. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were losing influence. Israel was handing over West Bank cities to Palestinian control. The 50-year-old conflict seemed to be nearing a resolution. Of course, that never came to pass. Peace fizzled in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the terrorist bombs of the Palestinian militants, among other things.

The reality TV show "Bait Car" is supposed to catch car thieves in the act. Undercover cops park a rigged car on the side of the road, conspicuously leaving the keys inside, while a television crew waits nearby for an unsuspecting passerby to take the bait and steal the car. But in one recent sting filmed in cooperation with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the lead detective on the case ended up getting busted instead....

HILLSBORO, Ore. - The small New England town of Blithe Hollow is more than a little odd; it's a wonderfully wonky world of Gremlin-like cars, wavy plaid shirts and irregular picket fences. It has also been cursed with "eternal damnation" after a witch trial 300 years ago, making it a prime target for a zombie attack. Such is life for Norman, a misunderstood boy called upon to help fight the invasion of walking dead because he has the ability to talk with them in "ParaNorman," a 3-D stop-motion animation feature opening Aug. 17 from the team behind 2009's "Coraline.

WikiLeaks, oil leaks, jobs forecasts, foreclosures, Chelsea Clinton, Lindsey Lohan — no shortage of grave subjects for the ink-under-our- nails crowd. But sometimes political cartoonists just stick to … politics! And the dog days of August aren't too early to speculate about the dog-eat- dogfights of November. Phil Hands sees the GOP hanging ten and the Dems wiping out. Jack Ohman's homespun double-entendre makes a real-(e)statement. And Dan Wasserman's reworked campaign poster serves up a slice of practical realism instead of pie-in-the-sky idealism.

In the future, what will our well-dressed, mean girl leaders have in common? A childhood filled with a lot of reality television. A revealing survey released this week from the Girl Scout Research Institute exposes the good, bad and ugly influences reality TV may be having on our impressionable female youth. The survey included 1,141 girls across the U.S. age 11 to 17 who were asked about their reality TV-watching habits as well as their opinions on relationships, self-confidence, self-image and success.

Here's something that could make some NFL fans feel old: Dan Marino is a new representative for the American Assn. of Retired Persons. The Hall of Fame quarterback who turned 50 last September has been appointed the AARP's “Men's Life Ambassador” and will share his thoughts on a variety of topics, including health, fitness, sports, lifestyle, entrepreneurship and community service. He'll use the organization's website, www.aarp.org , as his primary means of speaking to men ages 50 and older about those issues.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa came into office seven years ago with a remarkably ambitious agenda, proposing to solve many of L.A.'s most intractable problems: He would be the mayor who fixed the schools, cleaned up the gang problem and beefed up the Police Department. And, most important, he branded himself as the city's "transportation mayor. " Some of these promises have been fulfilled, yet progress in most areas has been incremental and not necessarily attributable to Villaraigosa.