I have no idea these days who is actually reading stuff I put out here, but I was bored and saw this over on’s journal, so I decided to use this as a post generator.
The last couple of weeks our tv-watching time has been mostly consumed with the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Despite NBC’s relatively awful coverage, I still greatly enjoyed the Games, because I love Olympic sports. Perhaps because I grew up in an area where snow has ever been a novelty, I love the Winter Games even more.
Now this year, much like in the last few games, we watched exclusively on the TiVo, often 24 hours behind the results (and after falling behind over the weekend, as much as 3-4 days behind), but it meant we could easily skip past sports that aren’t interesting (I’m looking at you, cross-country skiing), in favour of sports which are more exciting. Even if we failed to avoid spoilers, it’s usually fun to see HOW the results came about, so we oohed and ahhed over the snowboarding and the figure skating.
Aside from relatively un-telegenic sports, we also skipped most of the commercials. Honestly, I miss most commercials on television, because I simply never stop to watch them. (I had to go look up the “I’m on a horse” Old Spice commercial on YouTube, because I had no idea what aiela and davehogg were babbling about). But over the course of several breaks, it’s impossible not to see a few of them, and hence we were exposed to multiple promos for NBC’s new series, The Marriage Ref.
“That looks dreadful,” kitanzi said, and there was no reason to expect otherwise. Still, my curiosity was piqued. There were some talented people attached to this. How bad could it really be?
Having sampled an episode, I am here to report: It is very, very bad indeed. I’m reminded of Opus the Penguin’s film review in the old comic strip Bloom County: “George Phblat’s new film, ‘Benji Saves the Universe,’ has brought the word ‘BAD’ to new levels of badness. Bad acting. Bad effects. Bad everything. This film just oozed rottenness from every bad scene… Simply bad beyond all infinite dimensions of possible badness…Well maybe not that bad, but Lord, it wasn’t good.”
The premise of the show is fairly straightforward. A real married couple is having an argument over some absurd thing, Unable to resolve it, they present the facts of their argument to a celebrity panel, who make jokes about it, the host refers to a news researcher who presents some sort of statistical context for the disputed notion, the panel makes some more jokes, and then the host decides for one side or the other. The couple is brought onto a live monitor, the host informs them of the decision (with more jokes), they react predictably, and then it’s on to the next segment.
In the one episode I watched, (thanks to Hulu), there were two arguments to be settled. In the first, a man wanted to have his faithful canine companion stuffed by a taxidermist, in order to create a small shrine in the living room. In the second, the husband wanted to install a stripper pole in the house, which he imagined his wife would entertain him with. In both cases, the argument was so patently absurd that you really couldn’t figure out (absent evidence of severe brain damage) precisely why this was such an intractable issue. On the other hand, kitanzi and I once had a four-day long argument over the question “What, precisely, is poetry?”, so perhaps I shouldn’t throw stones too hard.
I could, if I were so inclined, complain about how the show perpetuates the “men are idiots” meme that has been a staple of sitcom humour for the last 30 years, but my heart isn’t really in it. Men, quite often, ARE idiots, and while I’m willing to defend them generally, I’m not really motivated to advocate for these two yahoos. They each had the hallmarks of a stubborn jackass who has made up his mind what he wants, and is so wrapped up in his desire that he isn’t listening to anything being said to him.
I could also make an argument that the very concept of this show represents a continuing dumbing down of television in the Reality Era, which makes a habit of putting ordinary people on screen for the purpose of making fun of them, but that doesn’t really have a lot of traction either, even by the notoriously low standards of reality television. Compared to pabulum such as The Bachelor and Rock of Love, The Marriage Ref is Shakespeare. Besides which, it replaces the unlamented Jay Leno Show disaster at 10pm, so it’s hard to say just how far the standards have really declined from what previously held the time slot. In truth, I’m reasonably confident that the primary reason that this show is on the air in the first place is that NBC suddenly needed to come up with an extra five hours of programming in a hurry, and it was quick to film and costs about $3.87 an episode to produce.
No, the real letdown of this show is simply that it isn’t really all that funny. I’m not really familiar with the previous work of Tom Papa, but Jerry Seinfeld is usually a funny, if somewhat annoying, comedian, and you would think he’d have better instincts than to be involved with this mess, let alone help create it. If this were being made by a bunch of unknowns in a basement studio for release on the web, it might be able to aspire to that “so bad it’s good” status, but this show is too polished, too promoted, and too well funded for that.
Without a doubt, The Marriage Ref is the most dreary, unfunny, and mediocre half-hour of television I’ve sat through in quite some time. In the final results, you’ll find it down at the bottom of the standings, with the notation “DNF”.
Who Am I Foolin’?
by Cheryl Wheeler
I can go through the motions, sometimes I swear I’m ok.
Sure I miss you, but I’ve been really movin’, really turnin’ away.
But just when I thought the heartache was gone,
It’s tapping me on the shoulder.
Saying who are you foolin’?
Some things you just don’t get over.
I could write you a letter, and I always do in my head.
Just to tell you I’m better and this lonely didn’t kill me I guess.
But just when I know I’ve finally let go,
I dream you are so much closer.
Oh who am I foolin’?
Some things you just don’t get over.
I’m wearin’ a new face, a little insane,
And here in the old place nothin’s the same.
I’m waiting for winter, it always seems warmer somehow.
It’s the sun on the snowfall and the silence I am longing for now.
But with one backward glance, I won’t stand a chance,
So I’ll wave goodbye over my shoulder.
Yeah who am I foolin’?
Some things you just don’t get over.
Someone once said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” While this is almost certainly true, the universe is awesome in its vast complexity, and the more we understand of it, the more amazing and mysterious it is.
So, on that note, here’s some fun stuff from the world of science.
First up, from camwyn, an animated GIF file that illustrates the relative sizes of celestial bodies, starting with the Earth and moving outward. As she notes:
Turns out that when you are conscious of the size of the largest known astronomical object in existence- VY Canis Majoris, a star so huge that it literally takes eight days for light to get from one side to the other- you have a hard time taking “But you ruined my view!” as quite so relevant to the greater scheme of things.
If that wasn’t enough to confirm that we're all really puny , epi_lj points me to an article in New Scientist magazine which suggests that it’s entirely possible that the entire universe is, in fact, a giant hologram:
For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.
If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
The best part about this story is that it was discovered more or less by accident. Issac Asimov once said that the most exciting words in science were not “Eureka! I have it!”, but “Hmmmm. That’s funny.”:
So would they be able to detect a holographic projection of grainy space-time? Of the five gravitational wave detectors around the world, Hogan realised that the Anglo-German GEO600 experiment ought to be the most sensitive to what he had in mind. He predicted that if the experiment’s beam splitter is buffeted by the quantum convulsions of space-time, this will show up in its measurements (Physical Review D, vol 77, p 104031). “This random jitter would cause noise in the laser light signal,” says Hogan.
In June he sent his prediction to the GEO600 team. “Incredibly, I discovered that the experiment was picking up unexpected noise,” says Hogan. GEO600’s principal investigator Karsten Danzmann of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, and also the University of Hanover, admits that the excess noise, with frequencies of between 300 and 1500 hertz, had been bothering the team for a long time. He replied to Hogan and sent him a plot of the noise. “It looked exactly the same as my prediction,” says Hogan. “It was as if the beam splitter had an extra sideways jitter.”
I love the whole world. The world is just awesome.
I’ve seen an number of variations on this theme, but this is one of the better ones. What if Chess was a brand new game: how would it be received by the gamer press?
Chess casts you as king of a small country at war with a rival country of equivalent military power. There is little background story to speak of, and by and large the units in the game are utterly lacking any character whatsoever. The faceless, nondescript units are dubbed arbitrarily such labels as “Knight” and “Bishop while their appearance reveals nothing to suggest these roles. To make matters worse, the units on both playable sides are entirely identical aside from a simple color palette swap. The setting of the conflict is equally uninspiring and consists merely of a two-color grid so as to represent the two warring factions. Adding insult to injury, there is only one available map- and it’s pathetically small, an 8×8 matrix (Red Alert maps are up to 128×128 in size). The lack of more expansive battlefields makes Chess feel like little more than an over-glorified Minesweeper.
The entire article is well worth reading. Great pastiche!
I’ve done this one before, years ago. Wandering through old entires, I came across it, and thought I’d post it again.
Post a memory of me in the comments. It can be anything you want. Then, of course, post this to your journal and see what people remember of you.
That annual celebration of gladiatorial conquest and capitalist art known as the Superbowl was last night. During the hours-long telecast, I’m told, the New Orleans Saints defeated the much-favoured Indianapolis Colts, providing a sense of civic pride and joie de verve to a city that hasn’t had much cause to celebrate in recent years. Well done, and congratulations to the winning team for their accomplishments.
But that’s not really what I wanted to talk about.
Today, as I scroll through various blogs and journals, interspersed between the reactions to the game by fans of all stripes are the messages from the cynically aloof, who write paragraphs to inform us about how they did not watch That Game at all, nor did they check to see who won, because they, you see, could not care less about (spit) football.
I find this an interesting phenomenon which is not restricted to sport. If you look at any pursuit which inspires a passionate following, you’ll find a group who defines their superiority to the hoi polloi in terms of The Sort Of Thing I Don’t Care For.
I admit, I can be as prone to it as anyone. Yesterday, my friend Joey asked on Facebook: “Wasn’t there some sort of big football game today?”, and with a sly wink and straight face, I replied, “Yes, there was. Chelsea beat Arsenal, 2-0 :)”
There’s a certain sort of tribe recognition at work there, a signal to one another that we’re in that set of people who isn’t invested in the Big Thing Everyone Else Is Doing. When I see articles about the Twilight craze, I wrinkle my nose a bit and shake my head, having a firm and considered distaste for a series of books and movies I have not actually read or seen, nor do I have any particular inclination to do so.
In some ways, this is a very natural thing for us to do. No matter how much we desperately wish it was otherwise, we are shaped inevitably by our culture, often in ways that we don’t immediately comprehend or even notice. When we do see a shaping force we dislike, we take a forthrightly opposing position to it (and thus, are indirectly influenced by it, if only by creating our sense of opposition.)
But like most behaviours, some people take it too far. A sly wink and a quip insufficient to show they are not part of the maddening crowd, they write bitter essays about their studied indifference to the entire thing and how they never could see what anyone sees in it anyway. This both annoys and fascinates me. It fascinates me because what’s strikingly obvious about these little screeds is not that the writer doesn’t care about the subject in question, but rather it is very important to the writer that you know he doesn’t care. Someone who honestly doesn’t care about something would simply go on about their day, not caring.
It annoys me because while it’s ok for one to be archly solipsistic in one’s own blog; that is, after all, what blogs are for, it’s positively obnoxious when it’s done in actual conversation. If two people are having an excitable conversation about a topic of great interest to them, and you walk up and say, ‘Oh, you’re talking about $TOPIC. I never really understood what people see in that. It just doesn’t interest me.”, you have effectively a) derailed the original conversation, which was presumably being enjoyed by the original participants, and b) focused the conversation on yourself. The people you’ve now interrupted may feel the need to defend their love of $TOPIC, or they may feel they must change the topic, because someone has inserted themselves uninvited into their chat and declared the current subject not only uninteresting, but unworthy of the attention of anyone with more than a marginal level of sophistication.
There is a name for this sort of person: a killjoy. Killjoy is a great word, because it requires no explanation. A killjoy is someone who kills joy. It is someone who manages to make themselves feel better by holding themselves above whatever it is that anyone else enjoys, and makes wry and cutting remarks about the sort of people who like *that* sort of thing. (One manifestation of this particular personality is the Cool Hipster, whose primary criteria for declaring something art is whether or not anyone other than himself has ever heard of the artist. Many brilliant artists cease to be brilliant, in the Hipster’s world, the moment they actually achieve recognition outside the small and insular circle of the Hipster and his friends.)
Now, one can certainly have any sort of opinion on any sort of topic that one wants. It is, as they say, a free country. But the next time you feel the need to insert yourself into a conversation just to express your alleged indifference to the topic at hand, ask yourself: “What am I trying to accomplish here?” If you are genuinely curious as to what someone else sees in it, perhaps you can have a useful conversation and walk away with some new understanding about the subject you didn’t have before. If, only the other hand, all you’re really wanting to do is demonstrate how insufferably superior you are to the unwashed masses, do everyone a favour and just walk away and wallow quietly in your smug grandiosity. No one wants to hear it, and there’s little enough joy in this world already without someone coming along and draining it from the room.
Wow, what a cool little video.
Vanishing Point from Bonsajo on Vimeo.
(tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic)