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How awesome is Rachel Maddow?! Great on Air America, and now kicking ass with her own show on MSNBC. Here’s one of my favorite clips from their website:

Tonight I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. This post is just a test to make sure everything looks OK. How boring and parochial of me!

It has taken me eight episodes of this Alan Ball’s (Six Feet Under) new series on HBO to admit that I am actually enjoying this show. Around episode six, I started thinking of it as a guilty pleasure, but last night I realized I actually like it and am willing to blog about it! Oh sure, the first few episodes were kind of disappointing. Sookie was annoying, Bill seemed cheesy, and Tara was a pain in the ass. And don’t get me started on the skeezy horn-dog brother and all his stupid sub-plots! But things are really coming together now, and I’m starting to get into it for real.

So let’s talk about last night’s episode, “Fourth Man in the Fire.” I won’t recap, you can find plenty of recaps and summaries all over the Internetz, on sites like Television Without Pity, The Onion’s AV Club, and HBO itself. Obviously, there will be spoilers ahead. There were some moments that really struck me in this episode:

- Bill playing nice for Arlene’s kids. Sometimes when he puts on this “mainstreaming vampire” act (and I call it an act only because he seems to be trying SO hard, not because I believe he isn’t sincere in his desire to mainstream), it comes off as kind of cheesy. He’s obviously trying really hard to fit in, and sometimes it wears thin around the edges. But then, Bill’s over 200 years old and has seen a lot of tragedy, both personal and worldwide. You can see that he’s an honorable man, despite his undead condition, and the kids at least were really enjoying their visit with him. The fake teeth thing was awesome, even if it was a little bit predictable.

- Bill and Sookie having sex in the graveyard: ick. Um, he was all dirty and stuff, having just been sleeping, you know, in the SOIL. Come on horny people, can’t you at least wait to get to one of your houses? And seriously, would they really be having sex out in the open like that, considering how many people are hating on vampires and those who accept them in general? Not safe, not safe at all.

- Lafayette continues to be one of my favorite characters, and we saw yet another side of him in this ep. On one hand, he was terribly snarky to his V-juice donor, Eddie (a hilariously and perfectly cast Stephen Root), but he also showed him tenderness. Poor Eddie is so meek, he was obviously a geek in life and continues that lifestyle as a vampire (I snorted when he mentioned looking forward to “Heroes” on Monday nights). Lafayette could get away with completely abusing Eddie, yet that’s not the kind of person that Lafayette is, and that’s one reason I love him. Eddie was quickly established as a sympathetic character, which made his abduction by Mr. Skeeze and his skanky new girlfiend all the more shocking.

- Sam annoys me, end of story. I don’t think I’ll ever like him. The way he has interacted with Sookie has ranged from pathetic to aggressively inappropriate, and I never sense that he has her best interests at heart in the least. I think he’s selfish and gross and shady, and I still think he might be the serial killer, besides obviously being a werewolf or weredog or just plain nuts.

- Sookie, as played by Anna Paquin, is still a bit annoying, but only when she’s doing her chipper, “I just had sex and I’m so hyper about it,” over-sharing act at Merlotte’s. Come on, would she really tell a gossip like Arlene that she just had sex with Bill? Would she really stand at a table chatting with two guys about how Bill hid in the ground to escape the danger of the vampire-killing rednecks, and now he’s just fine? If sex has this effect on her, maybe she should have a little less sex until she learns some more discretion.

I’ll save my meta-comparisons between “True Blood” and the other holy grails of vampire shows (Buffy and Angel) for another post. I will say, quickly, that it’s obviously a completely different kind of show, and I like the way that it seems intent on contrasting itself from the previous vampire canon.

“True Blood” is one of the only TV shows I make a point to watch right now. The other one is “Mad Men,” which sadly (for me) had its season finale last night, and won’t be back until next year at least. However, there is Battlestar Galactica to look forward to in January, and True Blood has a few episodes in the season left, which should carry us into the holidays.

Next week: Skeeze and Skeezette drain poor Eddie, Tara looks into an exorcism, and Sookie faces tragedy — again.

One of my favorite songs of theirs.

This video for “Rockstar” is pretty funny, especially the Randy Quaid cameo. I have to admit, as many times as I’ve heard this song, I never thought of it being set in a high school gym class. Probably because my first exposure to it was when it was the intro music for one of those “NFL 2K” football video games that my husband used to play NON-STOP on the Xbox.