What Does TLC Stand for Again?

I admit, I have never really understood the appeal of “reality” television. These highly scripted skits have similar production value and believability of your high schooler’s production of “Avenue Q”. Yes, I did religiously watch the first seasons of Survivor and American Idol and when I am really desperate for entertainment late at night, you might catch me watching a random episode of Auction Hunters or Pawn Stars. And yes, I will be forced to check out Comic Book Men when it appears. But the moment the focus turns to Chumley’s latest scripted idiocy or contrived foul-up, I check out. At that point the very thin illusion of reality completely melts away and you are left watching regular old, really bad TV. If that is the case, why not watch the latest episode of Up All Night. At least it has a cute baby to distract you from the slowly encroaching darkness of death. Yet, even in the cesspool of reality TV, I think there is a special ring reserved for the shows that TLC puts on the air (and Lifetime, which is essentially the kid sitting at the next desk copying off TLC’s test). For some reason, this channel has decided that the best use of their broadcast time is to televise child abuse. No longer is it enough to sit back and laugh at the revolting actions of “adults” as they interact with other “adults”, TLC has decided to make stars out of people whose only defining characteristic is that they are evil to children. Whether it is by deciding they want to personify the baby-making machine of “A Brave New World” or borrowing all of their parenting techniques from the “How to Raise a Stripper” guidebook, the featured performers know that the secret to their success and fleeting fame is their irresponsible parenting and the more awful a parent they are, the more attention they get. And oh how they need that attention. Apparently though there is an audience for these things. I have heard all kinds of rationalizations for why people would want to revel in a child’s televised misery, but not one excuse has made any sense to me. Then again, I don’t understand the appeal of “reality” TV.

This blog post is sponsored by Dunder Mifflin.

There Is No Call For That Language

I  enjoyed this video.  Yes it is cliched and stereotypical.  But what do they say about stereotypes.  They become stereotypes because their is a nugget of truth to it that everyone recognizes.  I know for me, the first 15 seconds or so of this video are a common part of my everyday life.  And no, it is not endearing.

But here is the thing I don't get.  Never have.  The title of the video.  The completely unnecessary pejorative.  I know it may seem silly and maybe prudish.  Yet here I go into my grumpy old man routine.  

I personally stay well clear of working blue but I have no real problem with it in the right context.  Big fan of South Park.  Greatly enjoy the comic stylings of Daniel Tosh and Kevin Smith.  Let's not forget that fondness for always naked residents of True Blood.  Yes, this isn't exactly cutting edge stuff but still it is entertainment that can make one squirm when watching in the company of a parent.  So, even if I don't partake doesn't mean I can't take a little pleasure in a well placed profanity.  What I don't get is the totally unnecessary one, like in this title.  It adds not one extra giggle to the skit or a deeper meaning to the proceedings.  It is swearing just to swear.  Just as most swearing on the major networks.  Feeling pay cable envy, your routine procedural will now include a choice #$@?! or *$#&)!% in any given 40 minutes of time wasting.  Doesn't make the action more believable or the characters more credible.  In fact it is more the other way.  Growing up expecting a certain level of censorship on my TV, the precess of a network cuss immediately pulls me out of the show.  It is lazy writing.  By Grabthar's Hammer, can't they smarten up a bit and think of something more intelligent for their fraking screen avatars to spew from time to time?

This blog is sponsored by The Nerd Herd.

Anything They Can Do, I Can Do Better (or at Least Equally Poorly)

Predictions are cheap in every sense of the word. There is no risk to one's bank account or reputation because predictions are forgotten almost as quickly as they are thrown off. That is probably why we have become a culture of meaningless predictions. Entire networks have been built around talking heads with dubious credentials predicting the end of the world, the next Enron, or (most importantly) whether Chris Johnson's holdout will result in him rushing for 92 yards or 105 yards in the season opener. And yet, despite all of the super, secret insider knowledge possessed by TV's many Nostradamuses, the great insights spouted by the know-it-alls of the world are almost always wrong. Of course that fact doesn't stop them from being ultraconfident that there next forecast will be right on the money. And why should it stop me as well. I am almost guaranteed to as good as the best ex-jock on ESPN family of networks and if I actually do hit on anything I predict, I can immediately point back to it as evidence of my pure genius. If I am wrong, well no one will ever see this post anyway. So without further ado, here are my predictions for the 2011 NFL season. And yes, I picked Green Bay over New Orleans in the opener (trust me - I am always right).

AFC East
New England       13-3
New York Jets    11-5
Miami                  4-12
Buffalo                 4-12

AFC North
Pittsburgh            14-2
Baltimore              9-7
Cleveland             7-9
Cincinnati             4-12

AFC South
Houston              9-7
Indianapolis         8-8
Tennessee           8-8
Jacksonville        3-13

AFC West
San Diego          13-3
Denver                7-9
Kansas City        6-10
Oakland             2-14

NFC East
Philadelphia             13-3
Dallas                      11-5
New York Giants    10-6
Washington              4-12



NFC North
Green Bay              14-2
Minnesota                8-8
Detroit                     7-9
Chicago                  3-13


NFC South
New Orleans          13-3         
Tampa Bay             10-6
Atlanta                     9-7
Carolina                  3-13

NFC West
St. Louis                 9-7
Seattle                    8-8
San Francisco         7-9
Arizona                  5-11

With a Super Bowl of San Diego over New Orleans.

This blog poster is sponsored by the Nucleic Exchange Research and Development.

The Big Bad

It is a well known rule of cinema that villains are much more interesting than the heroes. The actors like to play them and the audience loves to see them get their come uppence while secretly rooting for them.  Keyser Söze, Anton Chigurh, and the Joker won Oscars, Batman wasn't even considered and most people wouldn't recognize the names Llewelyn Moss and Dave Kujan even if they were tacked up on the bulletin board directly behind them.  The bad guys are just cooler.  For me, my favorite all-time (off the top of my head) bad dude is Agent Smith from the Matrix.  Sure he got a little less awesome as the trilogy progress but then so did the entire trilogy.  But the steely menace he exuded as he pursued the whiny/nancy Neo really drove the action of the movie.  In fact while I am at it, here are my top ten movie and television bad guys.  Again, this is completely off the top of my head so I expect to revisit this topic once I stop and expend a neuron or two on it.  There are no criteria or metrics for the order and make up of this list other than my own personal whim.

1. Agent Smith
2. Keyser Soze/Verbal Kent
3. The Thin Man
4. Hans Gruber
5. The Joker
6. Q
7. Ivan Drago
8. Ben Linus
9. Thomas Gabriel
10. Russell Edgington (Russell earned his spot on the list with this exceptional scene)

 With this said, is it really any surprise that this little girl bows down to one of the most iconic baddies in movie history (he didn't make my list because I am a Star Trek guy, not Star Wars - Yoda wants to bring balance to "the Force" when "the Force" was out of balance in his favor.  Yeah that makes a lot of sense).  I mean Darth Vader once slaughtered a whole school of little Jedi's in training.  Is it really smart for an untrained tyke to stand up to him? I think Mace Windu is the real villain in the video below.  Sending a child to certain death and then rudely escorting her off the stage when she won't be his willing sacrifice.  The girl was just being prudent in joining up with the dark side.

This blog poster is sponsored by the Drunken Clam Tavern.

Collateral Damage

I was watching Knight and Day, Tom Cruise's failed attempt to regain his standing at the top of the summer blockbuster hill, the other night and in between the wacky hi-jinks and intricately choreographed gun-play, a thought occurred to me. Even though Tom Cruise is our movie's hero (he's TOM CRUISE, could he be anything than our wise-cracking hero), the people he is killing, maiming, and generally laying waste to with a broad Tom Cruise smile on his face are actually good guys.  The plot of the movie hinges on a betrayal by Tom Cruise's CIA partner.  The always theatrically evil Peter Sarsgaard decides to go rogue and frame our good man Tom Cruise for his crime.  This sends Tom Cruise on the lamb as a gaggle of law enforcement and federal agents attempt to bring him to justice.  The problem is the evil conspiracy does not seem to extend beyond the always evil Sarsgaard.  So when Cruise takes out several agents, he is taking out good men just doing their job in defense of God and country.  Essentially, the subtext of this movie is that it is OK to be a mass murderer of our nation's law enforcers and espionage agents if you believe you have been treated unfairly by "the system".  Can't imagine that is what the film makers where going for but it is there none the less.  Not that this a completely novel element to the modern action movie.  James Bond commonly lays waste to random security guards and soldiers that just happen to have the bad luck of being assigned to work the night shift when Bond breaks in to steal the secret science project from the penthouse office of an evil mastermind.  A secret science project that no minimum wage security guard just trying to get a few bucks into his 401K would have any knowledge of.  They are just trying to see why the alarm is going off on the 16th floor and a man with a license to kill puts a bullet in their head.  Again, not much different from The Matrix that shed no tears for the mindless drones put out of their misery because they couldn't accept "the reality" that select few unplugged knew.  The heroes are not so heroic if thought of from another angle.

This whole diatribe does bring to mind one of my favorite scenes from Clerks (embedded below) where they discuss the morality of killing the contractors that were likely hard at work on the Death Star when the rebels blew it up for the second time.  I still argue that the Knight and Day federal agent isn't in the same category plumber on the Death Star or the roofer working for the mobster.  But it probably does work for the employees of the Rupert Murdock-analog in Tomorrow Never Dies and his Fox News-like organization.

This blog post is sponsored by Cybus Industries.

Your Tax Dollars

Question : "Would the state’s highest-paid employee consider taking a pay cut to help with the ballooning deficit?"

Jim Calhoun : "Not a dime back"

Congrats to an egomaniacal coach with a shady history and documented recruiting violations on winning the ugliest national championship in decades with a bit of basketball that looked like it was being played by

How about we all agree that we can make due with a state college basketball team that doesn't necessarily win national titles every now while still meeting the lofty standard of hitting 35% of your shots (and your best player is considered to have an outstanding game by going 5 for 19 shooting) and save us all a bit on our taxes by clearing the 1.6 million dollar salary of the untitled Mr. Calhoun and the additional dollars of his very costly coaching staff from the public rolls?

This blog post is sponsored by Acme Corporation.

Bad Medicine

In the wild, the natural enemy of the PhD student is the Med student.  Or even worse, the pre-med student.  The two species mix as well as a mongoose and cobra, or the Jets and the Sharks, or the Channel 4 news team and reporters from all of the other San Diego local stations.  Actually, the relationship between PhD students and Med students is much more like that between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.  The PhD students are completely annoyed and constantly hating on them while the Med students are so self-involved that they don't even notice that anyone else in the world exists, let alone the PhD students.  So it is not surprising then that a big smile came across my face when I rediscovered an old article on Wired's website that spelled out a few of the reason's why those training to be haughty, patronizing quacks are such a hate-able species.  After teaching a couple of laboratory courses filled with pre-meds, I can personally vouch for all of the Wired characterizations of pre-med students.  It also helped me understand why it is so hard to find a good doctor.

Top 5 Reasons to Dislike Pre-Med Students by Aaron Rowe

5. They haggle with their teachers for extra points.
4. They use questionable tactics to get good grades..
3. They horde leadership positions and then run organizations into the ground.
2. They game the system to get good grades.
1. They are not motivated by curiosity.

This blog post is sponsored by Veridian Dynamics.

Big ... Meh

You would think that if a show you watched every episode of a television show over the course of five years, you might actually care.  But when it comes to "Big Love", the best I can do is a big shoulder shrug.  It was a soapy sudsy tail of family.  A psuedo-Morman, polygamous family but still if fashioned itself as a story of family.  Unfortunately, it was an extremely hatable, stunted family that was almost impossible to route for.  In fact, it was the kind of family that could only exist on television, regardless of marital status.  The middle wife of the group, Nicolette Grant, is shrewish individual that noone would stand to have as a college roommate let alone a life partner.  Yet, the horrendous, self-centered, navel-gazing characters were not the worst part of the show.  The writing was.

There so many nonsensical turns and unbelievable happenings on the show but instead of listing them all, let's just stick to escape from Mexico by dismemberment as the best of the worst.  Somehow a whole army of armed goons can't both shoot the people who just chopped up their prophet and make a phone call for an ambulance.  I guess crazy polygamous sects are multitaskers.  As bad as this was though, smaller but much more regular failures by the show runners were much more annoying.  The characters never grew during the entire five year period.  Despite everything that happened, they never changed.  Their character defects at the beginning of the show where the same at the end.  An episode would end with the wives reconciling, bonding, and vowing to be BBF's only to return to the exact same argument the very next episode.  Groundhog's day, everyday.

Well, it is over now.  Likely to quickly be forgotten and buried in the TV graveyard next to Evening Shade and Amen.  And how did it die.  Like it lived.  Illogical and irrational behavior on the part of the family members, the wives hurling insults at each other and doing things to deliberately get at each other, and a trying to hard to be shocking ending that somehow left the wives living happily ever after with no real income to speak of.   At least bug-eyes got to come back for a 5 second cameo before it ended.  And at least it wasn't the Lost finale.

This blog post is sponsored by Hendrickson's Home Plus.

Every Girls Wants to be a Princess (trademarked)

Royalty as viewed in modern culture is not based in reality. With the faux-excitement of the commemorative plate buying set for the William/Kate pairing excepted, the monarchy has lost all romanticism and exist only as a useless burden on the European tax payers. Instead, in today's world, there is only one royal title that has any real value and it is branded. Unless you wear the crown of a Disney Princess, your run of the mill king or queen can expect about the same level of respect from the general populace as guy who tries to predict the college basketball teams that will make the NCAA tournament for a living. But if you happened to spring from the loins of the Lord of Atlantis or utilize rodents as your clothing designers, you will have a good portion of the XX individuals in this country spending the first 10 years of their life ready to sacrifice their brother for the chance to be you. That's were the cache is. Forget Princess Grace. The only princesses that most generations from here on out will know by name are Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Cinderella, and Rapunzel. Most times I have a complete detachment from reality in favor of world view shaped by primary colored animations. Yet are these really the role models our daughters should have. Airheaded nymphs that believe what ever they are told. 16 year-olds ready to run off and marry the first man they meet in the woods. Disney does many things well but providing positive role models for young girls. Maybe not.

This blog post is sponsored by Vandelay Industries.

What's Your Damage, Elizabeth?

Yes, this particular news item is now about a month old but I am not what you would call trendsetter. But I repeat myself. Instead, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to stash this piece of video away in a convenient location for continued reviewing. Our dear Elizabeth Lambert exacted on the BYU soccer team what just about every high school girl imagines doing to her female classmates (but doesn't). Or so Hollywood tells me (that and actual life experience). To see this level of visceral girl-on-girl violence outside of the theaters or an episode of "Cheaters" is an uncommon a site as a well-acted ABC Family Channel Show. There were two parts of the video that I found the particularly interesting but were left relatively unmentioned in the resulting blanket TV reaction. The first was when a BYU player responded with the old "Scoreboard" rejoinder to the Lambert onslaught (very last scene of the below clip). Always a solid comeback to issue to a rampaging sore loser because it is sure to make them angrier. The second was a flailing slap-kick delivered after booting the ball away. Although the hair pull was the action that got most of the attention, for some reason it was the final exchange in the below video that really captured my attention. The hair pull was so quick while this seemed like a more prolonged, directed effort with intent to cause harm. Sure, the fact that this event involved pretty young women led the majority of the attention - anyone with a women in their life knows women can be everything a man can be including hypercompetative and physical. I just can't believe she didn't get kicked out of this game. In the end, though, I take my hat off to Elizabeth Lambert. You finally got people to care about a female sporting event.

This blog post is sponsored by Clampett Oil.

Even Brett Favre Knows What a Putz He Is

If you are going to rot multiple professional football organizations from the inside while robbing them of millions of dollars, at least you will be given the opportunity to further pad your bank account by making light of the miserable circumstances that you created for fans and teammates with your out of control ego and fading football skills in the service of hawking flatscreens for a soon to be defunct retail outlet.

This blog post is sponsored by Yu Wan Mei.

Typical McCain Voter

That horrible elitist Muslim terrorist is going to take my guns and tax my food stamps.

Our long national nightmare is finally over.


This blog post is sponsored by Hope.
(Yes, yes, I know this is incredibly cheesy but come on. The Republicans are out of office. I had to say something and I have a complete lack of creativity and originality.)

Don't Let the Door Hit You on the.......

All I can say is it is about time. The town of Green Bay can finally celebrate their freedom from the tyranny of one Brett Favre. The man that single-handedly robbed the nation of the Superbowl matchup everyone wanted to witness has mercifully decided to hang it up. Sure, there is going to be a portion of the Cheeshead nation that will miss his errant lame duck bombs every Sunday but the Packer organization can finally have a game plan that doesn't involve the quarterback running around like a chicken with his head cut off before closing his eyes and throwing the ball up for grabs. Now, I recognize that the man was one of the best quarterbacks for a 3 to 5 year period but since then he has been little more than a juiced up Don "Magic Man" Majkowski riding on the good will of a single Super Bowl victory (same number as the immortal Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson). During that time he has built up numerous reasons to forget that period of above average-ness and come to see him as overrated and object of scorn. Here are my personal top 6 list of reasons I never want to see him mentioned as one of the game's best.

6. The last play of his career perfectly summarized his career.
5. John Madden's Man Crush
4. Making a mockery of Micheal Strahan's sack record by giving him a fake sack.
3. Addicted to drugs and an alcoholic but noone seems to care
2. His joke of a consecutive games streak record where he would sometimes play a single play and then come out (also hopped up on pain pills).
1. All-time leader in career interceptions just above luminaries like John Hadl and Vinny Testaverde

Update : The fine minds at ESPN see the truth about the overrated career of Brett Farve. At least those people at ESPN that weren't hosting a three hour retrospective/deification of the man.

The one good thing about Brett Favre...best wooden acting by an overrated Quarterback in a comedy classic. (The embedded video appears to be non-functional, so go here to view it)

Guns Don't Kill People, Free Access to Guns Kill People

Being that we are in the midst of an active political campaign that latches onto the latest headline in a desperate attempt to generate their own top of the fold notoriety, it is hard to believe there has been almost no conversation on gun control. Granted that the Democratic Party has become an impotent imitation of Republican opposition, but you would think the recent spate of mass shootings would be ceased upon for political capital. There is no defensible stance for the resistance to reasonable gun control. Sportsman can still have their guns but they don't need automatic weapons to kill Bambi's mom. Registering ballistics reports for every gun sold doesn't invade anyone's privacy, only makes catching criminals easier. Delaying the purchase of a gun months to do full background checks including declarations on mental history and use of psychoactive drugs doesn't negatively affect anyone other than looking to exact immediate vengeance on someone. If you want a gun, you need to prove you can handle it. I understand that the economy and Iraq should be center stage but how about some thought about getting our gun culture in check. Want to know how out of control it is, see the ad below.

What It Would be Like to be Married to an Entire Choir

In my ongoing series on oddball music comes the appearance of Complaint Choirs. All of your most petty gripes set to a musical accompaniment. Release your daily frustrations while entertaining others (and call me weird, I do find it entertaining). I am now waiting for the appearance of the "Airline Lost my Luggage" Aria and the "Comcast is an Evil Monopoly that Milks Me for Every Cent I have yet Constantly Drops my Internet Signal" Carol. There are a million of message boards out there waiting for a matching melody.

I'm a Genius, Trust Me

Personal privacy has never been a priority of the internet. The right search string can find just about anything and anyone. Now there are a couple of websites that make the job of being a digital voyeur much easier. These personal information conglomeraters take all of the data about you scattered around the internet and gather it together into one stalker-ready resource. Personal and professional data bumping into each other to produce a mutant offspring that was never meant to see the light of day. Of course, in the Web 2.o world, embarrassing people with facts of their own life is not enough. Sites like Spock.com, allow you to not only adjust your own profile but to classify others by whatever derogatory term you wish. Slander and libel disguised as accurate description. Others have already made comment on how these sites have been used to mislabel people as despicable criminals. Imagine if these sites became popular enough that they produced the top Google hit every time you searched your name. The first thing most people would see of your internet presence would be malicious terms pranksters planted on you (or all the wonderful fictitious tags you add to yourself - Nobel Prize here I come).

By the way Spock.com, if you are reading over my shoulder, my name is Sage Tyler, a 38 year old lumberjack from Walla Walla, Washington.

How Can I Get This Job - Seriously

South Florida politics are murkier than the polluted swamps that cover the state. As Carl Hiaasen has said,

The Sunshine State is a paradise of scandals teeming with drifters, deadbeats, and misfits drawn here by some dark primordial calling like demented trout. And you'd be surprised how many of them decide to run for public office.

It is home to Mark Foley and the original non-gay gay Republican politician, Bob Allen, head of John McCain's Florida Campaign. Nothing is more representative of this phenomenon than the Palm Beach County Commission (let's not talk about the 2000 presidential election - it will just make me sad). These guys make an outrageous $92,000 a year for a local government position. The state senators of Florida are only considered part time and make a salary of about $30,000 (before kick backs). Despite the obvious generosity of the tax-payers, Palm Beach residents have lost two of their seven commissioners in 2007 due to indictment. That's is nearly 30% of the commissioners that committed crimes while in office. Warren Newell and ex-chairman Tony Masilotti were both sentenced to 5 years in jail for using there votes to make money. Seems kind of unfair since Masilotti got to temporarily enjoy 10 million dollars in ill-gotten gains while Newell only stole 500k. But then Masilotti had a drug habit to support and we all know that isn't cheap. In the end though, Palm Beach County Commissioners have only one power that is worth anything and that is determining zoning on real estate and apparently these two knew how to use it (just not how to use it without getting caught). If that wasn't bad enough, a third commissioner, Mary McCarty, appears to be a very mean lady who picks on her poor, defenseless fellow commissioners. So, I go back to my original question. How do I get this job? A do nothing job that pays almost 100k and a person that limits their misdeeds to drowning puppies looks like a choir boy. Elect me. Just tell me how.

Brothers by Other Mothers

Militant actor George Clooney and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. Separated at birth or really the same person? Ask yourself this - have you ever seen them in the same place at the same time?

Eight is Enough, Nine is Enough, Ten is Enough....

The news is out that the Dugger litter has added another puppy (the 17th) on their personal crusade to overpopulate the world. The baby factory says they are not done. I can see why, one more and they can field two full baseball teams. Until then, the kids have to include children that aren't their siblings in their 9 on 9 scrimmages. And who wants to be exposed to the outside world?

Actually, this story and the attention it gets disgusts me. Especially because it feeds right into the raging egomania of the parents that drives this nonstop reproduction. They may feel really special about having a constantly knocked-up woman of the house but what about the children. Don't they deserve a real mom, not one that is constantly incapacitated. The unbelievable selfishness of these people. They readily admit that the only way the household can run is if each of the older kids parent that younger ones. I know, how about the parents parent their kids? Oh yeah, they are too busy enjoying their appearances on the Today show and the Discovery Channel to worry about that. When do their kids get to be kids? To top it all off and to make sure the kids are shielded from the realization that their family is profoundly screwed up, they "home-school" them. This is, of course, a euphemism for keeping them dumb and indoctrinated. Plus they would lose the free day care for the young ones if they sent the old ones to school. Just the idea of successful "home-schooling" with this number of kids, with this wide an age range, and a teacher that is always on maternity leave makes no sense. I am guessing graduation requires them to successfully fake being literate. Now that the mom is getting up there in age, I imagine that this families mission to populate an entire city from a single uterus won't seem like so much fun when the first Downs kid shows up. Some one needs to stop these fame whores before they damage more kids lives for their own glory.