Project tablecloth

A new season of Project Runway started last week, and as much as I loathe "reality" TV, this is one program that has a good premise behind it. The difference between this and 99.9% of "reality" programming is that the contestants actually have to demonstrate some level of skill. The downside is the way the producers milk the "drama" aspect of the show. Seriously, they could cut it down to a 30-minute program if they got rid of the crap.

Anywho, I am just catching the first episode tonight, and Tim Gunn (the most awesome non-fiction person on TV) took the contestants to a grocery store to collect materials for their first competition. A ridiculous number of them picked up tablecloths, because apparently they completely missed the point of the competition, which is to be creative and innovative. It reminded me of the season 3 (I think) episode where the guy who used a bedsheet won - he DID make a very nice dress, but hello! It's a bedsheet - a big slab of fabric - and the guy who made the kickass dress out of coffee filters did not.

Food Network has officially crossed the line

Lately, Food Network has been getting on my nerves. For the longest time I enjoyed a number of their programs. Examples: on Good Eats, Alton Brown is brilliant - he makes every aspect of cooking entertaining and educational. Rachel Ray was cool when she was limited to 30-Minute Meals and $40 A Day. But then there was Paula Deen, whose accent alone is proof that evil incarnate can be embodied in sound. But hey, I don't need to watch what I don't like, right? Then they brought me the joy of Iron Chef America - corny, reasonably entertaining, and not too annoying (at first). If you're familiar with the program at all, you'll no doubt realize it's rapidly getting out of control, like a nuclear reactor sans inanimate carbon control rods. It's taking itself far too seriously. (And don't get me started on the new Iron Chef's Hibbertesque giggle.) And Rachel Ray appears to have been injected with huge quantities of "Yummo" (by Nabisco). I think she's trying to be like Martha Stewart, minus the stick up her ass.

One of their more recent "personalities" is this guy, whose appearance alone makes me change the channel. Seriously, step away from the peroxide, and no one gets hurt. During a commercial break, he helped out some poor schmuck whose cranberry sauce is apparently too tart. His prescription included the use of a Food Network skillet, available now at Kohl's. Did I mention that this "help the dork on the street" piece was interrupted by an ad for Food Network brand cookware, available only at Kohl's?

My Xmas wish list

It would be nice if people would take seriously the issue of consumption. Adbusters has been trying to publicize the issue for years, and one of their classic anti-events is coming up this Friday. Yes, it's Buy Nothing Day, the day you avoid crowded malls and hyped-up bullshit. Another proposed activity is Buy Nothing Christmas. The site tells us: "Buy Nothing Christmas is not really about refusing to spend a dime over the holiday season. It’s about taking a deep breath and deciding to opt out of the hype‚ the overcrowded malls‚ and the stressful to–do lists. It’s about reminding ourselves to really think about what we are buying‚ why we are buying it‚ and whether we really need it at all."

This is an idea that I completely support, for a couple of reasons. First, I hate the shopping. Second, I hate trying to come up with ideas for what other people should by for me. Third, I have so much stuff already. A lot of the stuff I have - whether received as a gift or purchased by myself, sits around and never is used. Yet at the time, I "needed" it. Hell, I still find myself "needing" stuff, or just wanting things enough to say, "Fuckit, I'm buyin' that."

Simultaneously, I'm a huge fan of the bounty that capitalism has produced in this country. Apparently, I contain multitudes.

Now, a lot of people out there will argue that anti-consumerism is akin to communism, or is illogical (if I literally consume nothing, I'll die, for example), or is it's own form of hyped-up bullshit and or hypocrisy. And I'm not going to engage that, because it would be pointless. I think the biggest argument I can make is that it's not about anti-consumerism, but rather mindful consumerism. Think about your consumption and its consequences. It's not easy, but if we start paying attention, and teaching our kids to pay attention, maybe in a couple of generations people will find it easier to consume less. Assuming they aren't too busy fighting each other over puddles of filthy water.

College newspapers are (still) funny

In the "Oxymoronic Idealism" section today, "600 fast for hunger relief." I never thought of not-eating as an effective means of relieving hunger, but I guess I'm not a college student who enjoys pointless acts intended to raise awareness. I'm more the type who'd like to DO something about my hunger, so I typically just pop down to the vend-o-mat and grab a candy bar & a soda.

In the "You tattooed your WHAT!?" department: "Students getting tattooed on the rise." I can only assume that the word "rise" is a newfangled slang reference to a body part, since I don't know of any areas of campus referred to by that term - though I imagine The Knoll comes close. Then too, I've never seen any tattooing going on there.

If I had more time, I'd actually open the paper and find more craziness to document. Regretfully, I have to get this report written for my 9:05 class tomorrow morning. (Yes, they offer a semester-long class on the subject of 9:05. Really!)

Suck it Jesus

SuckItJesus.com was set up as a petition to prevent the censorship of Kathy Griffin's Emmy acceptance speech.

In her speech, Griffin said that "a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus." She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, "Suck It, Jesus. This award is my god now!"

Needless to say, idiot Christians, unable to cope with the fact that not everyone agrees with them, are flipping out. This is the same type of bullshit that the Muslims pulled back when that Dutch newspaper printed cartoons they didn't like. While this event is unlikely to spark physical violence the way the cartoons did (face it, Islam, as practiced and as represented, is a more violent religion than Christianity - abortion clinic murders notwithstanding), the same sense of entitlement to respect drives both of these misguided systems (as they are currently practiced). Here's some advice for all you religious nutbags out there: GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELVES. First, "you" never seem to have trouble saying things that you know will annoy/frustrate/offend other people, and are eager to protect your freedom of religion and speech to say whatever you want about those people (the gays, for example - who, incidentally, constitute a large segment of Ms. Griffin's fanbase, and whom God hates, according to some). Second, your cows are "mighty good on a bun," and I'll eat them if I want to.

Pretense and affectation

Is there some point at which pretense and affectation will reach a critical mass that will cause an event to collapse under its own weight, tearing a hole in the fabric of time and space and creating a singularity from which no attention whore can escape? I certainly hope so, but the fact that it didn't happen at this event makes me wonder how high that threshold is.

Darwin Award, Emmy, or both?

While we're on the subject of " 'reality' 'programming' ".....

Every once in a while I hear about a new reality program and think, "Surely, this is the bottom of the barrel." I am always wrong. I would be this time too, I assume, so I'm not going to say it.

Ben told me about this new show on CBS called Kid Nation. (Apparently it's been all over the news lately, but I've completely missed out on it.)

The premise is simple: 40 kids, aged 8-15, are left to fend for themselves in a "New Mexico ghost town" for a month and a half. You know, so they can "creat[e] and [sustain] a (sic) 'idealized' society free from interference by meddling adults. Show creator Tom Forman said the goal is for 'kids to succeed where adults have failed.'" (I'm curious what Mr. Forman means by "success" and "failure," but I would be shocked if those terms were ever defined in even the vaguest sense.)

Are these people even remotely capable of anything resembling a thought? The 'noble savage' is not a new idea, but these children are hardly 'pure' - the real experiment would be to take them from their parents as infants - before they absorb any cultural programming - drop them in the Amazon with a box of Pampers and a paring knife, and see what happens.

Somehow, this experiment "went wrong" - several kids (allegedly) "accidentally" drank bleach (though not enough to kill them - I'll take "Carefully Placed Household Cleaners and Camera Crews" for $10 million, Alex), a girl was badly burned (allegedly), -- gosh, who could have foreseen such a thing!?

The waiver that parents had to sign is available for your perusal. I suppose one could make all manner of assumptions about the type of parent who would sign such a thing. Who leaves their kid in the care of a corporation, and agrees to "[waive] the network’s liability for emotional distress, HIV, pregnancy and death, among others" - all in exchange for $5,000 (the up-front compensation for participants)? Should such a person be considered responsible? With parents like that, who needs pedophiles? If these are the value systems those parents intend to pass on to their children, maybe the kids would be better off as part of an innovative solution to a potato famine.

Girl fashion

One of the writers over at Slate took her 11-year-old daughter shopping for clothes for the new school year. Read the hilarity! It reminds me of this scene from Family Guy (a bit risqué - turn speakers down if you're at work).

Choice quotes:
It's a comfort to know that if your child can't come up with her own insolent remarks, clothing manufacturers are there to help.

Down the corridor was Abercrombie itself, whose guiding fashion principle seemed to be to print or appliqué the word Abercrombie in the largest letters possible on as much of the clothing as possible.

On our way to our next destination, I tried to avert her eyes from the Victoria's Secret window, where their clothing was emblazoned with the words "University of Pink." (I don't want to know that school's most popular major.)

If I have to choose between Baby Phat and Juicy Couture, I choose mandatory school uniforms.

But when I tried to push some [Old Navy t-shirts] on my daughter, she shook her head. "How can they make a plain T-shirt look bad?"

(At Talbot's (WASP couture), looking for pants): My daughter shook her head. "They're like nautical pants. They're so ugly." Then I held up a pair of beige polyester pants that looked reasonable to me. "Mom, I'm 11!" she said. "I'm not Harriet Miers!"

Whodunnit? And more importantly, why?

Browsing the TV is a bad idea. I just stumbled across a "reality" show on Spike TV. It's called Murder, and one site describes it this way: "Each one-hour episode of Murder will give two groups of civilians the chance to solve a real-life homicide by working at an exact replica of a crime scene." Civilians include people like firefighters, teachers, business dudes, and "Tank, Law Student and Former Gang Member."

They include graphic "actual photos" flashed on the screen at intervals following no discernible pattern. Yay! Episodes have catchy titles like "The Bludgeoning." And your host, Detective Tommy Le Noir (seriously).

Why would they do this? Who comes up with these ideas?

Simpson's movie pre-post

We just saw an ad for Burger King, wherein the premise is the recording of an ad for Homer eating a Whopper(TM). Multiple takes are involved, and Homer botches them all, of course.

Ben looked over at me and said, "It's sad that originally the show was a satire of the American condition."

Oh my god.

I just saw the scariest thing I've seen in a loooong time. A thing so horrifying, I'm almost tempted to actually watch it. I'm looking through the cable tv listings, and I see channel 23, identified as TVGN (TV Guide Network, apparently), has a program called "Look-a-Like." Here is the description:

Look-a-Like
5-6p
"Celine Dion", In the third-season premiere, a woman gets a makeover to resemble Celine Dion. (Reality).

I can't even begin to tell you all the things that are wrong with that.

I really need to stop reading the newspaper

... and by "read" I mean "skim the headlines and maybe read a third of every other story."

Overweight children face widespread stigma, unhappy lives, new analysis concludes Overweight children are stigmatized by their peers as early as age 3 and even face bias from their parents and teachers, giving them a quality of life comparable to people with cancer, a new analysis concludes. [And now, let's play rumor-monger: Being fat = cancer.]

Eagan teen charged with running prostitution ring

Baby needs a new pair of SHOES [The phrase "Too much disposable income" comes to mind.]

Those record overdraft fees

World's tallest man marries a woman two-thirds his height The world's tallest man married a woman who's two-thirds his height and half his age.... [It doesn't mention the story of how they met, but I imagine they were on two trains, one leaving from Beijing at 8:40 am and traveling south at 97 km/h, and the other leaving Shanghai at 9:03 am and traveling north at 94 km/h.... Also, I like how the end of the story dissolves into random babbling about dolphins.]

Suburban Melting Pot (I'm not sure if this URL will stay put or not, so if you have problems with it, let me know.)
[My fave line from this article is "Coming to America was a good thing. Nigeria was home, familiar and dear in so many ways, but the West African country was in political and economic disarray." Whereas America, apparently, is not.]

Less than meets the eye

So, I was kind of interested in seeing Transformers: The Movie, and I thought Ben had expressed interest as well. Ben told me that he'd heard that it had little plot (no surprise there) but that it was fun to watch. It also received a relatively high rating from Rotten Tomatoes (57% among critics, and 84% among the rest of us).

(The following may contain spoilers. I mean, assuming a movie with so little plot can be spoiled.)
My expectations were suitably low. So low, that it ought to have been hard to not meet them. Somehow, this film failed to meet those low expectations. At about 2 and a quarter hours long, it was too long by an hour and a half. Portions of the film dragged by. When the kid and the girl go to his house to recover his great grandfather's glasses, upon which is etched the secret location of some cube thing that the Decepticons are after (to destroy the human race, of course), was it really necessary for us to spend 25 minutes while he looks for the backpack in his room, and the Autobots destroy his parents' yard? You know how most movies, when they are released on DVD, include deleted scenes? This one won't, because I don't think there were any. Every appallingly dull, sophomoric moment of cheese was crammed into this turd, and the action, while decent, didn't keep me interested. As for the the high quality CGI, ... seriously, who goes to see a movie based on how non-fake a robot-car looks when it pees on John Turturro?

[Interesting sidebar: I previously posted about the Transformers movie. That reference to the Ponies of the Apocalypse? Check this out, and try guessing who one of the producers is....]

I did learn a couple of things, though:
1. If you want a hot blonde to pass for smart, give her a foreign accent.
2. Every mechanical device on earth is just waiting to be turned into a Transformer so it can beat the crap out of humans.
3. Trite lines like, "Bumblebee is a brave soldier" don't sound at all ridiculous when (a) delivered by a talking semi and (b) the character has a stupid-ass name like "Bumblebee."
4. For maximum impact, a film ought to have a strong philosophical underpinning, and close with a voice-over monologue by Optimus Prime in which he states that "humans, like us, are more than meets the eye."
5. Nobody found a way to fit the phrase "robots in disguise" into the script. Come on people. You've got over two hours of screen time, and nothing is happening. Try harder in the sequel. (And oh yes, there will be a sequel. One of the Decepticons escapes, and will no doubt return in the summer of 2009 with more evil robuts, and Optimus Prime has broadcast a message out into space, telling any remaining Autobots that they are welcome on Earth.)
[**Update: just looked at Michael Bay's entry on IMDB, and Transformers 2 is slated for 2009. Interestingly, he is also directing a remake of The Birds. Yes, the Hitchcock film. If you want a bit of hilarity, check out this thread on the IMDB forums.]
6. A hot slutty chick with a criminal record will dump her jock boyfriend the instant he makes a denigrating comment.
7. How do you tell a good Transformer from a bad one? The good ones are American made vehicles, and the bad ones are military assault vehicles.
8. Comic relief will only get you so far.

[Redacted]

We just [redacted] [redacted]. It was [redacted].

Spoiler warning
[redacted] becomes [redacted], and [redacted]. [redacted] [redacted] looking for [redacted]. And [redacted] [redacted] [redacted], left to [redacted]. The [redacted] [redacted], and [redacted]. [redacted] become [redacted] on [redacted], and [redacted] is [redacted] [redacted].

[redacted] returns, and [redacted] [redacted]. Of course, [redacted]. [redacted] [redacted] the [redacted], [redacted].

[redacted] is revealed to be [redacted] (Yeah, I [redacted] too). [redacted] decides [redacted], and [redacted], but [redacted] [redacted].
End spoilers

Now we just have to wait for [redacted].

A gay man's ideal job?

Check out the guy on the right.

Seriously good TV

The latest installment in [redacted] was the first of [redacted]. All I can say is Wow. It was among the best things I've ever seen on television. Ben & I have also been watching some of the old [redacted] stories, and while they are enjoyable and interesting to watch, they suffer in quality when compared to the current incarnation of the program. I think, primarily, there are subtle aspects of character development, and the relationships among the characters, that weren't there in the older stories (at least the ones that I've seen). The escapades of [redacted] are very much plot-driven, and while the story itself is key in any series, the new series does a better job of character development.

It's showtime!

Ben and I went to see Spiderman 3 this afternoon. Based on the first two of the series, my expectations were fairly high.

==== SPOILER WARNING (highlight to view) ====
We paid the matinee price of $6 a piece, and I still feel ripped off. For a movie that runs nearly 2 and a half hours, it lacked a lot. I was looking at my watch shortly after the first hour elapsed. I'm no film critic, but I can be critical of a film, and I sure am in this case. It was moderately entertaining, but had no clear focus. I haven't read any reviews, but my understanding is that one of the main criticisms from the pros is that there were too many villains. I can't argue there: three separate nemeses in one movie? Also, what kind of movie was it? At a personal level, Peter Parker had to deal with his romance with Mary Jane, his friendship with Henry, his ongoing drama over his uncle's death, and a competitor for his job at the Daily Bugle. In the final analysis, all of these threads were necessary to the ultimate "moral" of the film, about friendship and responsibility for one's actions, but without Peter's voice-over pounding that lesson in near the end, it gets a bit lost in the shuffle.
==== END SPOILER ====

Do I want my $6 back? Yeah, I do. If your community is lucky enough to have a cheap cinema where you can see a film for a buck or two, you could go see it then. Or you could rent it. Or, really, you could just skip it. There wasn't anything particularly compelling about it.

Next stop: Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer. My expectations: Very Low.

Too funny not to be shared

MySpace Outage Leaves Millions Friendless
Yeah, I's got lazy agin.

Maybe I should have a limit of one links-only post per (time period). Or I could add a section over there on the right for transient links like these?

An afternoon at the movies

This afternoon Ben & I went to see Hot Fuzz at the local cinema. We were literally the only two people in the audience for the 4:25 show. It was kind of nice - not having to worry about yelling out "He's right behind you!" or something. That happened to us once before - we were up in the Twin Cities, and went to see Spirited Away, and nobody else was there. Kind of nice, feeling like they're playing a movie just for you.

Hot Fuzz was hilarious. A definite 9.5/10 stars. It loses half a star for running a bit long. At around the 90 minute mark, it was starting to feel like it was time to wrap things up - but the remaining 30 or so minutes were totally worth it. If you haven't seen it yet, either go to it, or plan to rent it when it hits the rental market.

Berries and cream

For those of you unfamiliar with the "berries & cream" reference (which sounds kind of dirty out of context), I offer to share the joy.