Four new pictures have been added to the gallery.

One is another collage from the “Headland” TV show and can can be found in the new Headland gallery. Two are promotional shots from the show, and one is a picture of Yvonne at some red carpet affair.

I’ve also done a little bit of clean-up on the galleries. There’s now a TV Shows album which contains the new Headland gallery. There’s also now a gallery for The Canyon in the Films album (though it only has one lone promo shot).

Since the pictures got placed elsewhere in a logical manner, there is no longer a movie gallery in the miscellaneous album.

Whew. I know it’s only 4 pictures, but man was that a lot of work! I’ve got some new photos of her in a different television show that should be going up this week.

Also, check out the forums, register, and post!

Special thanks to Ludwig and latincandy78 for the new pics.

BuddyTV has an article up comparing Rachel Bilson to Yvonne Strahovski. No offense to Ms. Bilson, but I don’t think she really stands a chance here.

    VS    

It doesn’t look like Yvonne needs help, but if you want to add insult to injury you can check out the article and vote for Yvonne.

Thanks to reader Scott for tipping me off to the article.

As we’ve mentioned previously here at Strahotski.com, Yvonne stars in an upcoming Australian film called Persons of Interest.

If you missed that post, you can watch trailers for the film at its myspace page or go back and read our original post.

We’ve received special permission from the creator of the film to post up hi-res production photos from the film in our gallery, under a brand new album.

No watermarks from us on these because they all belong to the film and are watermarked with the appropriate copyrights.

The film is finishing post-production right now and Tristan tells us we can expect it to hit the US festivals sometime in 2008.

Special thanks to Tristan for the photos, and I’ll be sure keep everyone up to date on when (and how) we can see Yvonne starring in this movie.

Also, be sure to register and post on the forums! It’s starting to get pretty active.

In the never-ending effort to make Strahotski.com and one-stop shop for Yvonne Strahovski news and information, we are pleased to announce the launch of the Official Strahotski.com Forums!

We’ve gone a little bit unorthodox with our choice of forum software and chosen to go with Vanilla. It allows us to do away with categories entirely and lets us have only one — Yvonne Strahovski.

I’ve noticed that a lot of fansite forums will have lots of categories that tend to spread the posts out a little too thin, making the forums less active than they may otherwise be. Hopefully, we can increase participation by making sure every visitor sees every post.

It’s pretty basic forum software, but I think it will get the job done. You can sign up here, and once you’re approved to post you can upload an avatar to personalize your posting.

I’m not going to make a really long-winded rules and guidelines post about behavior on the forums unless it becomes necessary. Suffice it to say, I reserve the right to moderate at my will to ensure things stay clean, fun, and respectful.

Yvonne’s the topic of conversation and you can talk about her and anything related to her until you’re blue in the face. Please remember, however, that she should be treated with the utmost respect at all times.

So without further ado, get to posting!

For a change of pace, I thought I’d post some info about other projects Yvonne is working on. The next big thing from her seems to be a film coming up in 2008 called The Canyon.

The film is in post-production at this point, so Yvonne has done her part. Now we just have to wait for baited breath for the release next year.

In researching the film, I came into correspondence with Karina over at Karina’s Kitchen.What could a website full of awesome gluten-free recipes have to do with Yvonne Strahovski, you ask? Well, it turns out that Karina’s husband is Steve Allrich, screenwriter of The Canyon.

Karina is lucky enough to have visited the set during filming and she has this to say about Yvonne:

The female lead, Lori, is played by Yvonne Strzechowski - who is not only gracious and beautiful, Babycakes, she’s a smart, strong and capable actress.

It was very fun to meet Yvonne and get to know her. She is as lovely, gracious, funny and smart as you might imagine. Beautiful inside and out.

Stay tuned- because Yvonne is so amazing in The Canyon- she will blow you away!

It’s great to get a first-hand account of the real Yvonne. It sounds like she’s every bit as amazing as we’ve made her out to be here at Strahotski.com.

Karina also has a public Flickr gallery of on set photos from the movie. We can’t host them here, but I invite you all to check out the really awesome photos of Yvonne that she has in the gallery!

We’ve been talking and speculating about exactly how long Chuck has left in it with the writer’s strike going on.

Unfortunately, Chuck was never officially greenlit for an entire season and rumor is that it won’t be until the strikes are over. This could spell bad news for the fledgling series whose ratings have been described as ‘on the bubble.’

So what can we expect from Chuck?

TVGuide.com has this to impart:

Thirteen episodes will be produced. Eight episodes have aired, so there are five left.

From the announced air dates, that could mean 3 more episodes before the hiatus, and then 2 more when we return from the holidays.

After that? The future seems unclear. Freshman shows are reportedly usually greenlit for a full season around the December timeframe. With a writer’s strike in full force, though, this deadline may not be feasible.

Could this mean the end for Chuck? Only time will tell. Savor these next 5 episodes, though, because no one quite knows what happens afterward.

On the brighter note, Yvonne Strahovski has proven that she’s a great actress and I’m sure she has a long career ahead of her. That means that Strahotski.com will live on regardless, bringing you all of the latest news, pictures, and trivia about our favorite Australian hottie.

Thanks to reader Newberry for pointing me to the article.

There are few things hotter than a girl with a gun. And there are few things hotter than Yvonne Strahovski.

Put those together and what do you get? A new wallpaper of course!

This one is available in the same sizes as before. Let me know what you think.

So the ratings for this week’s excellent episode have been released. I’ll go ahead and post the whole chart here for comparison’s sake.

• Episode 1.01 - 9.28 Million
• Episode 1.02 - 8.22 Million
• Episode 1.03 - 7.12 Million
• Episode 1.04 - 8.23 Million
• Episode 1.05 - 7.14 Million
• Episode 1.06 - 7.03 Million
• Episode 1.07 - 7.70 Million
• Episode 1.08 - 7.56 Million

So despite the best episode of the season and Yvonne Strahovski in lingerie, the numbers dwindled.

This is especially weird since E! News reports:

NBC’s Chuck (52nd place, 7.6 million) got some love, 7 percent more than last week.

Now maybe I’m just really bad at math, but 7.56 is less than 7.70 right?

Editor’s Note: All of the above numbers courtesy of Chuck Online. Thanks to reader Scott for the tip on the E! News article.

Editor’s Note 2: Turns out the E! News article was talking about the spread between Episode 1.06 and 1.07 where there was an increase.

We’ve added a whopping 70 new screen captures to the gallery from “Chuck Versus the Truth.”

I usually try to keep it down to 40 or so images per episode, but this episode just had too much Yvonne Strahovski goodness to keep it that low. I settled for 70 and I think you’ll be happy with the results. I know I am!

In site related news, it turns out the plug-in we were using to post random images to the right was taking up an inordinate amount of processing power on our server. Unfortunately, this was threatening to exceed my limits and costing me money.

I’ve made changes to the bar such that it uses the cropped thumbnails instead of generated ones based on the aspect ratio of the source image.

What’s all that mumbo jumbo mean? Not a whole lot except that I hopefully won’t get charged extra, you get one more picture in the random images section, and my posts will have little square thumbnails now instead of widescreen ones.

Don’t worry, though. The screen captures are still the same hi-res as always. Enjoy the new pics and post comments about what your favorites are!

We all know that I like Chuck. I’ve liked it since the pilot.

If you go back and read my first review I pointed out that what it really had going for it was potential. It hadn’t started firing on all cylinders. It hadn’t yet clicked into place.

That all changed last night with Episode 1.08 - Chuck Versus the Truth.

Last night’s episode was the best episode of the series thus far for so many reasons.

The whole thing almost felt like it was the first episode they had produced since the show had aired. It was as if they were able to take all of the fan feedback and cram it into one yummy episode.

The most impressive feat for this episode was the writing. Rather than having two disjoint plotlines (usually one at Buy More and one with Chuck & Company), we get a tightly integrated plotline that explores all aspects of Chuck’s not-so-ordinary life.

Getting rid of Harry Tang made me shout for joy. Captain Awesome was awesome (is he ever not?) and Ellie finally fell into her character. I can’t fairly say she’s a bad actress anymore. It would seem that she just needed some time to grow.

Everything finally clicked together this episode. Sarah and Casey have finally accepted their relationship as partners. Chuck and Sarah have finally accepted their star-crossed love for each other. Now the show can move on.

As heartbreaking as it was, the show took the perfect direction with Chuck and Sarah staying apart. Unlike so many shows before it, Chuck has to resist the temptation to let the love work out. The longing is what makes the show work and it’s good that they realize that.

As for Yvonne Strahovski, she did a fabulous job as always. Not only did we get to see her with a brown-haired wig, but we also got to see her in purple lingerie. All without breaking character for a second as she walked that line between being just a vulnerable girl-in-love and being a super-secret spy.

She got her chance to do what she does so well when she tells Chuck that she has no feelings for him. Chuck may have believed her but the fans never do, because Ms. Strahovski does a remarkable job of barely suppressing the angst she has about the situation.

All of this is accentuated by a helping of genuine laughs and some nice action scenes. The truth serum made for some excellent quotes (Who’s there? NSA, CIA, and me. It’s complicated.).

If there was any doubt whether Chuck could find its footing and really bring it all together, this episode proved that it could do it. It was the best episode of the season and it was the fulfillment of the promise that Chuck made when the season started to be one of the best new shows on television.

As always, screen captures should be up this afternoon full of yummy goodness.