A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

FREE TO BE DONE WITH TWEE: Sadly, I am swamped these days -- too swamped to do much imbibing of the popular culture beyond reading and occasionally commenting on my fellow bloggers' posts. But despite my inability to do my customary "watch the pilot of every new show and see what sticks" routine -- the routine that somehow got me hooked on Justice last year before it got cancelled and a much less spectacularly beautified Rebecca Mader was relegated to crying for Francie not-quite-Mrs. Coalhouse Walker, Jr. to help her steal her dead boyfriend's sperm on Private Practice -- I am quite pleased thus far with both of the shows with which I expected to be pleased and thus would like to take a brief moment to comment on them lest our Fearless Leader shut off my Blogger account for inactivity.

• Dirty Sexy Money. Thus far love it, and not just because of the resemblance between my husband and Peter Krause. (Although anyone looking to further the resemblance by paying my husband $10 million per annum to serve as lawyer-slash-nursemaid to his or her family should speak up.) The only character that really clanks for me -- and that's saying a lot, given the characters comprising the Darling family -- is the Reverend Brian Darling, whose whingey lack of anything vaguely resembling godliness is just a little beyond the believable. Even Tranny Hooker No. 1 of 2 on network TV this fall works for me so far. Sutherland the Elder reminds me just how unsubtle the Younger's work on 24 is, Samaire Armstrong is so wildly different from her role on The O.C. that I didn't even realize it was her until 15 minutes into the pilot, and then there's Krause, who is just pitch-perfect.

• Pushing Daisies. Everyone who wanted a moratorium on the word "seriously" last year should be summarily executed if they utter the word "twee" ever again. I'm sick of twee already -- apologies to our friends Alan Sepinwall and Matt Marcotte, among many many others -- but there are just so many other ways to describe this show. Like violently stylized. Or acutely precious. Or screamingly Sonnenfeld. (Like Alan, I am very curious to see what the show looks like once the budget-slashed episodes hit the screen.) I agree with everyone around here who loved it and thought it was gorgeous, but I do wonder whether the refusal to touch the audience (along with everyone else) personally will eventually annoy me. Put differently, I just don't see this as the kind of show that does 22 episodes per year for 5 years.

And as long as I'm here, I have a question. It's unrelated to television, but closely tied to the concept of phrasings that I both hate and fail to understand: can someone explain to me the origin of "dropping" as the technical term of art for the release of a new album? As in: "Better hurry up with those bendy straws, Justin, because Shakira's new album drops on October 21." I always thought it was just some sort of painfully trendy hipster-in-the-knowism, but I see it everywhere and just don't understand how this happened. Thanks.

Oh, and one other thing: this coming Tuesday night, Mr. Cosmopolitan and I are taking the heretofore unprecedented step of driving to the Nassau Coliseum to attend the So You Think You Can Dance tour. Hok better be getting his inner hummingbird on.