Buckle Down With ‘Rory’s Required Reading’

There have been Twitter weddings and Twitter news bulletins and endless porings over every conceivable detail of Gilmore Girls.

Now one Gilmore Girls fan is tackling one of the more formidable aspects of all things Gilmore: Rory’s bookshelf.

Jen Heiser over at the Rory’s Required Reading Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/rorysreqreading) started this Herculean task this week with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Good luck, Jen, and also a good call not going after The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire!

Hmmm….

Usually it’s The New Horror Handbook blog that attracts the odd (OK, disturbing) search results, but I did get a kick out of this one from yesterday:

“gilmore girls fan fiction luke fire”

So Gilmore fanfic folks, anyone want to claim this one?

Happy Birthday, Alexis!

Wow! Take a moment to consider that Alexis was about 18 when she started on Gilmore Girls, and today she turns 27!

While on one hand, yes, we do all feel old now, I’m sure. But also take a look at how far she’s come in that time. Literally from no television experience at all to Rory Gilmore, and now she’s been in everything from Sin City to two installments of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and I’m Reed Fish and beyond. It’s kind of nice to think that we all saw it happen from the very beginning.

Update: TheWB.com has added new episodes to its free online viewer (and seemingly taken the earlier ones away, so I guess they’re going to be in rotation). Currently we have the latter half of Season 1, from “Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers” to “PS I Lo…”

While I think this is a great step in the right direction, I must admit I’m having a hard time throwing my arms around the Gilmore Girls promotion spot that plays on the site. I’m not the hippest fellow on the block, so please let me know if there’s another, less offensive meaning to the abbreviation they’re pairing with the phrase “…& Cookies.”

‘Gilmore Girls’ Episodes Online

It’s not that I didn’t know TheWB.com was launching around this time, I just wasn’t sure what it would all mean.

Usually television Web sites seem so vapid and clunky that I avoid them lest I get sucked into a 30-minute timesuck, only to emerge on the other side with nothing really worth crowing about.

But as soon as I heard you could watch Gilmore Girls episodes online, I knew that sooner or later I would have to check it out. (Which makes absolutely no sense considering the complete series set staring at me from the bookshelf right now. I know, go figure.)

It’s a pretty slick little system they’ve got there. Sure, they only have the first five episodes from Season 1 up right now, but there is one feature that I think Gilmore Girls fans are really going to latch onto in a hurry.

Before we get to that, let’s face it. If nothing else, Gilmore Girls is an extremely quotable show. Not since The Simpsons has there been a program that so deftly sums up so many aspects of human existence in increasingly clever ways. So what happens is people blog and blog, quoting lines from the series (the irony is not lost on me), but never really feeling like they’ve gotten the taste of a particularly witty line across to people.

Enter the clip-and-share function. By using a “beginning” slider and an “ending” slider similar to those used in film editing software such as iMovie, you can isolate specific clips from a given episode and post it to your Facebook profile. You can even send the clip to your Facebook friends. Granted, the bugs aren’t quite worked out on this yet as I posted a bit of “Cinnamon’s Wake” to my own profile by hitting the Close Window button, but it’s still pretty intriguing.

TheWB.com is definitely worth checking out. The Gilmore Girls photo gallery isn’t terribly exciting (with the exception of the photo above, which I though a pretty neat souvenir of Lauren Graham’s behind-the-camera time), and I’m not even going to pretend to understand the “wblender” app. Still, I think they might be on to something good here.