Ox Notes: September 17, 2008

The daily flurry of Dancing with the Stars news includes ET's video of Cody Linley & Julianne Hough in rehearsal. Julianne and her brother, Derek, chatted with the website SheKnows. And Lance Bass & Lacey Schwimmer talked with E! about some of his insecurities, including his fear of being asked to dance shirtless.

E! has a photo from the set of Stephen Colbert's holiday special, called A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!.

Observers at New York Fashion Week noticed several former America's Next Top Model contestants on the catwalk last week, with some even modelling garments for the Project Runway 5 finale.

Ahead of tonight's new episode of PR 5, EW posted a handy glossary of Runway lingo. EW also has a slideshow of 18 Shameless Reality TV Stars, headlined by Survivor's Jonny Fairplay, of course.

Reality Blurred's Andy Dehnart wrote about his interview with Survivor: Gabon's Paloma Soto-Castillo.

Producers of MTV's The Island deny allegations that they wrecked a Panamanian rainforest.

Fans of Fringe might want to check out the game Heavenly Sword on the Playstation 3. The main character, Noriko, is modelled on Fringe star Anna Torv, who voiced the character. Andy Serkis (Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies) plays the game's villain and directed all of the voice acting, which is some of the best I've heard in a video game.

After only two weeks, I'm bailing on Fringe. I enjoyed the pilot episode but had some concerns about the dialog, which only got worse in last night's second episode. It's tough to make dialog in science-heavy shows flow (e.g. every episode of Star Trek), but dumping Agent Farnsworth into the mix just so that there's someone around to ask, "Hey, guys, what kind of sciency stuff are ya up to?" is lame.

The second episode of Fringe followed the "monster of the week" format, which has been done plenty of times before, particularly on The X-Files. It doesn't seem like anything new. Am I missing something, or is Fringe just an average sci-fi show?