- Are you ready for some…….high school football? Apparently America is clamoring for it, at least based on the sudden surge of TV time given to high school ballers. Once a week during the current football season, ESPN has carved out some air time to show a high-profile HS game that features two top teams in the country, usually spotlighting a highly recruited player or two who is headed to Ohio State, Notre Dame, USC, etc. MTV got into the act with Two-a-Days, its reality show about the storied Hoover High School football team from Alabama. While I’m sure these kids love the attention and notoriety, I am banking on the fact that most sports fans, even avid football fans, aren't desperate to see inside the lives or even the on-field accomplishments of some pimple-faced seventeen year old defensive back whose biggest decisions are who to ask to homecoming and how to get out of detention today.
- Is the country’s biggest problem really North Korea doing nuclear testing? Am I missing something, was it North Korean terrorists who crashed the planes on 9/11? Or did the North Koreans declare war on America recently? Have they been threatening to overrun our borders and overthrow our government? National security and international relations are more detailed and filled with more confidential, hush hush information than any civilian will ever fully know, but America sure does spend a lot of time worrying about things that are very unlikely to ever pose a direct threat to us. Odds are North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, nearly an octogenarian, dies before his country ever produces a functional nuclear weapon. Buy hey, if they do, based on our success of finding the WMD’s in Iraq, we should be able to hunt it down, no problem, right?
- Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weiss needs to shut up. He’s whining, whining, whining about why his team is dropping in the CFB polls even though they continue to scrape by with narrow wins against inferior opponents. I don’t despise the Domers like I used to, mostly because I ran a marathon in South Bend that finished at Notre Dame stadium and I ended up loving the place, but Weiss’ sob story is pathetic. Coaches need to not spend time on that sort of thing when they have five games left in the season, because unless you win them all, Charlie, what does it matter?
- Props to Kevin Federline for trying to, um, I have no idea what the hell he’s doing, but he’s trying to do it by appearing on WWE’s Monday Night RAW. I suppose you can surmise that he’s not trying to improve his image as white trash by appearing on a pro wrestling show, because that’s like Tom Cruise trying to improve his image by jumping on Oprah’s couch like a meth head on jacked up on steroids. Maybe Federline (I’m not using that uber-lame nickname dude has tried to give himself) is simply trying a little levity by pandering to that white trash persona in the most obvious way possible. Either way, he’s the latest in a long line of “celebrities” who are famous despite having no discernable talents (Paris Hilton, Nicole Ritchie, etc.).
- What’s less interesting and more predictable than the weeks leading up to the November elections? Every year it’s the same story, scandal after scandal, accusation after accusation, all from candidates that the vast majority of the public has never heard of and doesn’t care about. Political enthusiasts will scream their heads off about that being the problem, that people don’t care, don’t vote and don’t get involved. Well, when people are smart enough to realize that things aren’t going to change all that much regardless of who they elect, where’s the incentive?
- Hopefully I’m not the only one enjoying the current absence of American Karaoke/Idol on TV right now. That monstrosity of a show seems like it’s on year round, a never ending cycle of talent-less schmucks willing to embarrass themselves on TV and be eviscerated by a trio of wannabe celeb judges. Annd best of all, you just know that the “winners” (I’d argue that like in a nuclear war, there are no winners here) are going to contribute so greatly to the music world, just like Lennon, Cobain, Seger, Clapton, etc. The fact that millions of people contribute to Idol being on TV by watching and patronizing this menace to music is a great reason for the rest of the world to hate America even more.
- Props to Madonna for kidnapping/adopting a child from Africa, I’m sure that the kid will become a super well-adjusted individual in time. What with a mother who portrays a mock-crucifixion scene in her most recent concert tour, writes graphic sexual books and changes her identity more than a drag queen. I’m sure once that kid gets the chance to watch his adopted mom’s horrific videos showing her as a leotard wearing freak, a cowboy, a black lace wearing weirdo and hundred other personas and gets the chance to read her book, he’ll be so proud. And what’s not great about celebs plucking kids out of third world countries and adopting them as if it’s some badge of honor or a trendy act of charity? If you really want to do something for them, why not splurge a few of your millions on getting running water and sewers for their villages and keeping them with their actual families?
- Not sure that there’s a solution for this, but what’s better than the gawd-awful weather plaguing the World Series? I know you can't rig the season so that teams from SoCal, Florida or Texas will be in the Fall Classic, but surely there has to be some way to avoid playing games in 37-degree weather with rain falling and fans shivering like penguins at the South Pole. Having played ball in that kind of weather, I can attest to how miserable it is, and it’s turning this year’s Series into something to suffer through rather than enjoy.
- Maybe this is a regional story right now, but in Akron, the big news story of the moment is the alleged rape of a 17-year-old girl at a local bar by a Girls Gone Wild cameraman. There are all kinds of angles: the bar promoting the event by inviting local girls underage ones at that, to come and “get things going” by dancing on the bar all night and drinking, the shady camera operators who seem to make a habit of preying on drunk girls and luring them onto the GGW bus, the bar serving to blatantly underage girls, etc. The question is how do you not see that things are gonna go this way, when this is what GGW does? You know what they’re about, and yet they freely caravan around the country staging these kinds of events? Nothing bad about having fun and being crazy, but when you give sleazebags like Joe Francis and his GGW crew free reign in a bar or nightclub, how can the end result go any other way?
- Umm, do I have to ask how many kilos of weed the studio exec who approved the new Borat movie smoked before making his or her decision? Even the lowest common denominator of movie going audiences (i.e. guys ages 18-25 or so) can't look at the promos for this picture and think it looks funny. Maybe someone needs to explain that the concept of foreigner who comes to America and struggles to adapt isn't automatic comedic gold. In this case, it looks pathetically lame, unless you consider a guy riding a subway car with a chicken in his briefcase and accidentally letting it out of the case to be hysterical. You don’t? Hmm, shocker.
- For the past couple years, MTV has been mining teen-drama gold with Laguna Beach, which has become even more of a hit than the TV drama, The O.C., that it supposedly showed the “real reality” of. The first two seasons of Laguna were good TV candy, superficially interesting, easy to follow viewing that could hold your attention well enough. This season, though, it looks like either the MTV folks have bled all of the interest out of this idea or they simply got a giant dud of a cast for it. This year’s roster includes a collection of characters with the same level of charisma as a bucket of sawdust and nearly the same IQ. They’re the lite beer equivalent of the previous seasons - half the intrigue, have the personality, half the brain cells (and seeing as the previous seasons weren't exactly filled with Mensa members, that’s a real problem). I’m sure preparations for a fourth season are underway, and if they’re at all smart, the producers will learn some important lessons from this third incarnation of their show.
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