Rants, Remembrances, and Ruminations

German Reality Show: Sperm Race

I hated American Bandstand. I hated Star Search, Puttin on the hits, Solid Gold, and all the other dance shows, talent searches, and other pre-cursors to reality TV. So when "The Real World" slurped out of MTV like a re-purposed K-ration/Canned Dog Food, I didn't even slow down my channel surfing. During it's evolution, though, reality TV has spawned and re-spawned to the point of proliferation. It's amazing how something so "done 15 years ago" can be re-packaged, sold to the masses, and have it received like it's never been dreamed of before.

I hate reality TV because it has trapped friends and loved ones in its numbing web of substantive malnutrition and informational deprivation. I see people with master degrees, bachelors, hard, honest workers, sit down and laugh at the monontony like it's subliminally laced with crack. I know they're not lacking of intelligence or comprehension skills, but I still cannot generate a fully logical reason why good people rot their grey matter with the mess.

I want reality TV to die like American Bandstand, Solid Gold, and that game show where people played coin-ops for cash and prizes(I think..). I want to take the producers, TV execs that approved these fecal nuggets of media, their VC contributors, take all their money and buy the largest square acreage plot of land anywhere in the world that I could find. I will place them in the middle of it, miles from everyone. No TV, cameras, cell phones, assistants, Mrs., Mistresses, or Misters. Just them with a card table and chairs. Each would get the 96-side version of rubicks cube and a digital counter showing how much of their money they had left. After the cubes were more than sufficently randomized, the counters would start counting down. Every minute that went by, they lost $20,000, never to return. If and when they finished the puzzle, an audio multiple choice question about their home-state's or native point-of-origin would be played aloud with 6 possible answers, one for each side of the cube. If they get it wrong, they have to randomize the cube again and loste $50,000. If they get it right, they can go home, when they walk to the perimeter of the land plot, their people would talk to my people about his rendevous coordinates. After their congratulatory caning, they'd be allowed to go.

I hate reality TV, and this is why I'm writing about it today. I believe that reality TV has finally hit a point where even the most sedated of us would sit up and say, "Um... This is too dumb to watch."

Sperm Racing. Take a moment for that to sink in.

Yeah, that's right. Someone has made a show about what German has the most fertile sperm in Duetscheland. It was either this of Who could grow fingernails faster in Bangalore.

quote:

Endemol Germany's president, Boris Brandt, denied yesterday that Sperm Race represented a new low point in dumbed-down TV. He claimed that the show had a serious scientific purpose. 'Sperm Race is serious. Fertility is a big thing in Germany,' he told Germany's Bild newspaper.

'About 1.8 million German men are unable to have children because they suffer from poor sperm. And there are disappointed girlfriends and wives, as well as parents who wait in vain for grandchildren.'

Nein, mein fruend(I know no german). Just because fertility is a big issue in Germany and your show is about fertility, does not make it serious. It just means you've found a topic everyone would tune into on a show made with little money. But I'll let the future visuals speak for themselves. People, sitting in bars and homes, gathered around the TV, watching sperm under a microscope crowding around an egg. We've already watched people do yardwork, bitch, moan, and construct rope from their own mucous, I guess it was a matter of time before someone would come up with this. What's next? An african reality show about the search for a blood donor who doesn't have STD's or blood-borne pathogens? Perhaps a show about coal miners and who doesn't have black lung?

I have hope, though. Smarter shows are coming back in regular and recent media. Thanks to the ubiquitous DVD player, cancelled and badly-scheduled shows of promise find new life as a DVD collection and as a more real metric of the audience's response. I'm hoping that such numbers along with the ievitable demise of reality TV will spurn a new generation of smarter shows. But until that time, I'm keeping an ear out for when "Sperm Race" comes to the states, so I know that I can kick my TV to the curb.

Superbowl 2005: Go Patriots!

Being a coastal carolinian, I sometimes find my taste in sports to be a little dissimilar with my inland brothers and sisters. While I used to live for college basketball(schoolwork having curtailed my freetime for it), football was only exciting if it was NC State, Ga. Tech, or Maryland playing, and NASCAR just looks like rush hour on a closed circuit(I mean really! I used to drive like that daily! Why would anyone pay money to see someone else do it for hours, and not get anywhere! I digress, that's another blog entry). As for pro football, I really don't care for any of the southern teams.

I became interested in pro football when I was introduced to it properly by a Jason Mosby. He is a fan's fan of Pro football. You name any player in the league and he could tell you the position he played and how well he's been doing the past couple of years. He had solid theories on teams that I wasn't hearing on sportscenter and he could tell you the strengths and weaknesses of every team out there. He also introduced me to the patriots back in 1999, before they won a superbowl.

I mainly became interested in them because they were a team that were greater than the sum of their players. You didn't have any one person like Vick of the Falcons whose talent dominated the team, nor did you have any particular team(defense, offense, or special) that dominated in its talents more than the other. It was a well-rounded program that actually played, won, and lost as a team. This kind of setup and mentality struck a chord with me and caused me to keep track of them. Since then, they have gone on to win the Superbowl numerous times and set a league record for most consecutive wins(21).

I can't say that I've watched every game of theirs, but that doesn't make me any less excited for Feb. 6. I'm hoping for an exciting game.

PostgreSQL 8.0 released

PostgreSQL GDG has just released v8.0.0 of their RDMS software. Some of its new tricks include native running on Win2k, XP, and 03(no mention of NT itself, so I'm guessing not), savepoints (very, very handy in complex stored procedures), Tablespaces(think partitioning for DB systems), better buffer managment, can now change column types with ALTER TABLE, and others. They have a couple of other interesting downloads as well(GUI's, SSPL's, API's, etc.)

Potpurri

Sometimes I just have more than one thing to report on, and knowing that me and the two or three other folks won't read back through past blog posts, I decided to condense them and put them into one, odiferous post.

-Spanglish: 3.33 stars.
-I shall call him: Mini-mac
-The P4 drama continues.
-Class begins! BIO-111: your class is mine!

Spanglish
Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Paz Vega, Thomas Hayden Church
Directed by: James L. Brooks (As Good As It Gets)
Score: 3.33

Spanglish is a rather cute film that explores the challenges facing a single mexican mother(Paz Vega) raising her child as well as the issues of a "Post-90's" man dealing with his restaurant business and a rather unstable wife(the scrumptious Téa Leoni), and the child, who serves as an early conduit of communication between her mom and the rest of the family.

Spanglish was different in that while the husband may have been easy going and somewhat whipped. He wasn't whipped enough not to stand up for himself when push came to shove with his family. I appreciate movies that don't make the father out to be a grown up child, but also has serious flaws as well.

Definate Chick Flick movie, but not chick-centric. Not as funny as what everyone makes it out to be(definately not an Adam Sandler movie), but it's worth seeing on video or a V-day movie. Adam is making a name of himself playing the type of self-doubting, troubled male role, and while this role doesn't really let him expand much, maybe he'll land something more experiemental for him, or Happy Gilmore 2.

Mini-Mac: the bite-sized Mac

Measuring 6.5"^2 and 2" tall, this has to be the tiniest mac desktop ever with the possible exception of the i-cube. While the specs are not as impressive as its larger brethren, the Mac Mini makes a case for PC users to ask for Apple. The video card is the second biggest limiter in pack: the ATI 9200 32MB. My desktop from 2000 had 32MB of ram, which is fine for 99% of your desktop activities, but don't expect it to be a game demon. My primary concern is with cooling. The only venting I see on the machine is the rear vents behind what looks to be the optical drive. Perhaps where apple can make the biggest dent with this is the market for micro-PCs. Many of the micro-PC systems out today are not of the highest quality workmanship(with the exception of some from dell which I found to be pretty slick). The Mac Mini's, if designed and built well, could put a dent in the segment for those who want a tiny computer in the house and are adept to handle something non-MS. I would certainly be interested in buying one if the cooling and workmanship questions are resolved favorablly. More on this later, perhaps?

P4 Drama
I don't know what it is about this machine I put together this past August, other than to say that either I or it is cursed. I've ran memtest so many times on it using so many memory timings with errors coming up, I've decided to RMA both the board and the RAM and just try again. The RAM is rare and will have to be replaced with something slightly less l33t, but I prefer stability over clock cycles. Maybe I'm just not as l33t as Jay when it comes to memory/board tuning, and maybe my admission will drop this curse! In the meantime, this Mac Mini...

BIO-111: or how I learned to stop worrying and love the microbes
I've got nothing. But my first class was today, and I am pretty excited about BIO-111. I'm hoping once I'll get the science out of the way, I'll just have my language and math requirements left to deal with before I can just sit down and just code each semester. UNCG has already started taunting me with "According to our records, you're a rising Senior, which should mean you graduate next spring. Better start planning to apply to graduate now. Won't it be great to have that off your mind? P.S., if you're not planning to graduate this year, please disregard."

CNN to nix "Crossfire"

According to several sources, CNN will be cancelling "Crossfire" after the departure of co-host Tucker Carlson, who wants to makes "interesting television".

Psst. Hey Tucker, come here.... Let me let you in on a secret here... If you're doing news, the stories should be interesting unto themselves, nothing to add!.... If you want to make interesting television, host something on Discovery, Animal Planet, or Speedvision. Do a game show, reality show, sports commentary... Leave the news commentary to someone more qualified. Dennis Miller did the same thing for years and was hilarious.