Teaching Science To Dumb Kids

I used to love this show:

Awesome!

Thanks to CaptiousNut for this one.

Full Episodes Online?

The cheap 'old coots' that own the condo we are renting down here in Naples have neither an internet connection nor a cable color TV one.

Well they have some *basic cable* that comes for free from the development....but it only has about 7 channels. Now THAT is basic!

On Saturday I did manage to get Comcast to hook up a broadband internet connection for us. Last night, with my wife still here, a raging headache (not related), and while sulking over that horrible American football Superbowl result (also unrelated) we felt like vegetating a bit.

So instead of plugging the TV back in (been replaced by my PC) in the bedroom, I was happy to discover that we could stream NBC's The Firm on the 22 inch monitor of my PC. It came in HD and was crystal clear on a 'full screen' too.

While most of us are not cheap 'old coots' and have cable....I do wonder how many people out there are simply watching their shows (and apparently there are many available) online these days. I mean I no longer endure SportsCenter just to see Celtics highlights (my team) - instead I just watch them instantly on ESPN.com (part of the GO network!).

I would venture to say that most of the networks DO NOT really promote the online viewing option. Probably because of the delicate relationship they THINK they have with advertisers and cable companies.

Whatever. Screw cable and screw commercials! We're trending inexorably towards an online, pay-per-view media landscape.

All this freakin' *bundling* - landlines (who needs one?), cable, and internet is bull$hit. It's just a scam by Verizon, Comcast, and friends to keep consumers paying more than they should, longer than they should have to.

Better Than 24?

I taped it on my DVR....then after not watching for many weeks I deleted them and turned off the series-record.

But then I caught a bit of an episode and got hooked.

Thankfully Showtime has the whole season on on-demand. (The wife loves it too.)

Personal Luddite Problems

A local friend, that filmmaker dude who is going to get me cast in a romantic scene with Reese Witherspoon, on account of his industry has access to and possession of just about every motion picture DVD there is out there.

What a terrific resource to have nearby, right?

Recently he lent my first wife a few flicks: A Harry Potter movie for my son, True Grit, and something else.

The only problem was - as we found out the other day leaving our kids with their babysitting aunt - that the Harry Potter movie wouldn't play in our DVD player?

Why was that? I investigated when I got home to my disappointed brood/sitter.

There was no label on the disk but I think I figured out that my circa 1998 DVD player won't play what appears to be a Blu-Ray DVD.

Crap.

No problem. I think I saw $85 Blu-Ray players at the Sony Store around Christmas. And I have about 150,000 Sony Points on my credit card so I can upgrade our DVD player for free.

Oh wait, there is a problem.

It seems, after some Googling, that my fat-screen, circa 1998 32-inch color television (not a Zenith!) isn't able to display or perhaps even connect to a Blu-Ray player.

So now I'm going to have to buy a new freakin' TV too if I want to take advantage of this new friend of ours' motion picture collection. Double crap!

Oh well. I'm trying to construct a completely TV-free household. At best I think I'll be able to give up watching major sporting events, get rid of the cable box, and get by with one of those newfangled web-enabled TVs - perhaps with a $8 Netflix subscription.  Once I can pay for The Masters and Celtics/Patriots games a la carte I'm done with old-fangled cable - as I suspect many other people will be.

See also - Goal = Motion Pictures

Another Presidential Moron?

From Wikipedia:

In 1981, the MUSE system was demonstrated for the first time in the United States, using the same 5:3 aspect ratio as the Japanese system.[4] Upon visiting a demonstration of MUSE in Washington, US President Ronald Reagan was most impressed and officially declared it "a matter of national interest" to introduce HDTV to the USA.

Clearer color TV programming....a *matter of national interest*???

I'm starting to kick my anti-TV agenda into high gear these days.

Seriously, the argument can easily be made that watching TV is far more unhealthy than smoking. After all, sitting on the couch all day, everyday, is both a mental and physical onslaught. So why shouldn't our nanny statists add *sin taxes* to cable bills as they do with cigarettes and whatnot?

Mind-Poison Consumption, Fading?

That's a heartwarming news story if I ever saw one!

I do wonder what it is that's making the lumpen masses tune out.

Might it be the ever-diminishing quality of color TV programming? The ubiquity of offensive, inverted TV characters?

How about the escalating cost? Especially in this imploding economy...

The substitution effect in favor of Netflix, Headbook.com, Marginalizing Morons, and web-programming like Hulu.com?

Might it be that within our aging population, the 'old coots' are now soooo old that their increasing inability to *get the cable box and the TV both 'ON' at the same time* has made them fed up with Cablevision, Comcast, Charter, and Time Warner? Plus, a lot of them are literally dying off from the pig flu pandemic!

OR, could it possibly be that Americans are finally realizing that television is unadulterated *mind poison*?

My guess is the decline is due to all of the above - save perhaps the last one.

I'll tell you what....a funny thing happens when one terminates a lifetime of color TV ingestion.

You know how since public cigarette smoking has been essentially banned and taxed out of existence....you know how now when someone lights up 50 feet away you can instantly smell it on account of a newfound, conditioned hypersensitivity?

Well that's how my wife and I are now with the cacophony of a blaring television - it pollutes a room like a pack of burning Camels....or a juicy drive-by flatulation.

I can't stand CNN blasting in airport lounges and take immediate evasive action. Nor can I stand hearing that little TV blast away in the back of NYC taxis, in the barbershop, in doctors' waiting rooms, etc.

Shoot, a dozen years ago I could and did often sit at a table of 10 smokers and not care an iota.

And back then I would regularly enjoy watching lo-def color TV for hours on end...

Caught By Mantracker!

Lately I've been watching a great new(?) color TV show on the Science Channel - Mantracker.

The premise of each episode is that two random people are dropped into the wilderness (or desert or mountains) and have 36 hours to elude Mantracker and make it to their goal destination.

But this guy is amazing, a ninja-cowboy or something. And I'm sure he gets his fair share of broads - at least in his demographic!

He tracks these giddy nimrods by LOOKING FOR TRACKS, watching spooked animals, wielding deception and logic, and sundry other ways.

Essentially, there's just no way this guy can't find you!

Check it out. Here's a YouTube link.

It's hard to believe this cool show is in its fifth season already and I hadn't heard of it before.

Color TV Rec - Scrappers

This might be my new favorite show - Scrappers.

Spike TV follows around a bunch of cavemen in Brooklyn as they scour the borough for scrap metal that they can sell at the junkyard. They are positively overflowing with *personality* - reminiscent of my South Philly golf buddy jabronis.



One boob, Darren, is so freakin' funny that he's become an instant cult hero:



Watch the show on Spike, Tuesdays at 10pm or...

You can watch full episodes on their website.

The Colony

I caught the first two episodes of this Discovery show last night.

It's not bad - not bad at all. The Colony is a fusion of reality TV and apocalyptic fiction. It simulates the fallout from a global disaster (like *public schools*!) and its narrative is spiced up with marauding *others* a la Lost.

It appears to be the second season now. Some of the complaints about the first season were that it was *too contrived*. So I take it that those critics avoid the other gazillion contrived color TV programs like 24, Law & Order, Desperate Housewives, and the evening news!

A Window Into The Empty Lives Of Wealthy People

I caught some new(?) show on HGTV the other day.

Selling New York is a unique series for that channel in that it really only focuses on high-end real estate. What else is there now in NYC? In fact my wife can't stand watching its *My First House* programs - mostly on account of how dumb the buyers are, with their *it has to be good for the dogs* and their maxed out borrowing.

But the voyeur in me really enjoys Selling New York.

I couldn't find a decent short clip, so here's a *full episode*. You might want to skip ahead a bit:



I actually thought $12 million for that 5th Avenue penthouse was cheap. But what do I know about that world?

Who Wants To Be An Exterminator?

My back has been aching so I did a rare thing and laid down in front of the color television this afternoon.

And I came across a great new show:



Since I've been battling rodents in my rental house I have somewhat of an interest in this subject now. Heck, one of my buddies found a mouse and the first thing he did was call me, an incipient expert, for infestation advice!

But this show was stomach-turning awesome. They're based in semi-tropical Louisiana so they have a wide variety of critters crawling through the cracks: snakes, beavers, bats, roaches, armadillos, alligators, etc.

They ran three shows in a row so I got a nice taste of the vermin. In the first one, Billy trapped a skunk and got sprayed trying to collect the trap!

In that same episode, some young girl living in a trailer on a zoo complained about mice. Billy went out and found evidence of mice everywhere and set traps. She has also reported having a mouse problem in her *lingerie drawer*! Can you imagine that?

So Billy set a trap in there too.

He came back and found dead mice in all his traps. Up in her bedroom he reached under a dresser to check a trap when he GOT BIT BY A DECENT SIZED SNAKE! It's fangs went right through his glove and his brother had to grab the snake and de-fang him. The chick? She ran so far out of the room they had to go looking for her. Can you imagine a young lady that not only had to grab her panties each morning out of a *shared* drawer, but she also now has to go to sleep knowing there was a king snake in her bedroom? (Apparently, it followed the mice up through the hole in the floor they made.)

Billy also hit two *shacks* that were overrun by thousands of cockroaches. People were actually living in these houses at the time. There was trash everywhere and dead rats whose corpses were picked down to the bone by roaches.

I set up my DVR to grab the upcoming shows.

See also where my adventure began - Rodents.

Feeding Rich Jerks

I randomly caught this show, the premiere in fact, on color television last night. Let's just say it was so ridiculous as to be *watchable*.

In this episode they had to cater three typically Beverly Hills events:

• A "Doggy Debutante Ball" in which dogs were served Kobe beef burgers and drank out of glasses!


• A "Glamping", i.e. glamorous camping, affair where a bunch of *networking* millionaires roughed it under the stars (notwithstanding the private chefs, of course)


• And a "Botox" party where ugly vain people downed appetizers in between facial injections!

It looks like the first episode is re-airing tomorrow. Check it out if you're swimming in free time.

Armor Chinks

I'm not the most Captious person on Earth for nothing...

After reading anyone a bit, I can spot their weakness fairly easily.

Since John Stossel went live and I've been following him closely, I'm pretty sure I've discovered one particular area where I disagree with him.

He's TOO OPTIMISTIC!

Look at these charts he posted last week on his blog and on his "Everything is Getting Better" show:




But John,....what about inflation???

The first chart uses the ridiculously low measure propagated by Big Government currency debasers. In other words, the chart would be much flatter if deflated by an accurately priced basket of goods and services.

And the second one doesn't even account for said inflation! So what if your income is up a few percent when food, energy, housing, taxes, education, and medical costs are exploding, no? BTW, inflation of those sorts really only affects the *poorest*.

He also, in that show, put forth arguments that our *culture* is not worsening mostly with short-term charts on teen pregnancy, teen violence, and the like.

Now I fully understand that *adults* in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s most certainly also decried what they perceived as a *cultural descent*, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been a straight roll downhill. Yeah, girls are getting pregnant a bit less, but that doesn't mean they aren't dressing more like tramps, *servicing* guys in the 7th grade now, brawling more than ever, etc. (Men have always been dogs!)

It just looked like a pretty flimsy argument Stossel put forth.

Stossel also suggested that we, as a nation, were getting *healthier* just because life expectancy was rising. But, if I can ask the obvious question, what about *quality of life*? I don't know that artificially sustaining 'old coots', for an extra decade, by modern drugs, in an asylum ought to be counted positively in this regard.

Then he did a follow-up blog post which he titled - Everything Getting Better...Except Gov't Spending

In that he linked to a WSJ piece and highlighted this unsurprising chart:



Here's the problem with this line of reasoning:

Stossel just put up a bunch of upward sloping charts, and upward sloping arguments that *proved* our nation was getting safer, healthier, cleaner, more moral, and wealthier.

Okay.

Except that a statist can turn around and say that the last chart he touted, the one highlighting steady growth in national debt and Washington, proves that the benefits of Big Government!!!

And that's precisely the type of slapping retort he'd deserve for wielding such weak arguments of his own.

Putting this one show aside, I'm loving his weekly program.

See also:

More Stossel!

Stossel - Highly Recommended!

The Exiled John Stossel

The Southern Gordon Ramsey!

I just discovered this great show on color TV - BBQ Pitmasters.

One of the guys featured on it is Myron Mixon - though that clip doesn't do him justice.

All he does, all day long, is cuss, growl, and break balls. Not only is he hilarious, he's apparently the Tiger Woods of barbecue competition.

I would love, JUST LOVE, to see him altercate with say Gordon Ramsey, or Simon Cowell!

The guy seems to make some serious coin too. He's won 600k in competitions; he's got a restaurant; he sells *pits* and other equipment; of course he sells his secret rubs and sauces; and he charges $750 for 3-day BBQ clinics!

I find him such a magnetic, compelling figure, that I had to cross 'Myron' off my *supreme dork name list*.

Man Versus Hood

I DVR-ed it, but haven't watched it yet. This week's new Man Versus Wild is titled *Urban Survivor*:



For sure, Bear is pretty impressive - even if much of his show is staged.

But still, I'd like to see him experience a REAL URBAN SURVIVAL.

I say, come the first really warm spring day, clad him in shorts, Teva sandals, a Penn Law sweatshirt, and top him off with a yarmulke...

Then drop him into North Philadelphia and see if he can survive!

Hah! He'll be ducking in alleys, scrounging for poultry bones. He'll be fashioning weapons out of jagged *forties*. Etc.

A Good Show...

Season premiere tonight, 10pm on FX.



Last season, the second one, wasn't nearly as good as the first one.

But still, it's a pretty darn good show.

On Bandwagoneers

Alright, in the past couple months I've watched more *chick flicks* (3) than probably in the past 15 years combined!

The other night I let my wife watch the above movie (which I won't link to!) - and I paid attention as well.

Now I started watching that trash when it first came out. It was a pig-fest, long before it got popular. Then they toned it down, etc.

Yeah, the show was disgusting, produced by (male) inverts, and destructive because it literally inspired scores of weak-willed women into such a dead-end lifestyle...

BUT, the movie was a heck of a lot better than *everyone* said - a criticism that's confirmed by the 5.5 rating above.

The film was as well-written and as funny, if not funnier, than the best moments of its run as an HBO series. In other words, if the movie was that terrible, then the show should never have attained such popularity.

I just hate it when all the latecomers jump onto something....and then shortly thereafter poo-poo it.

These docile Morons only started watching the show because *everyone else did* in the first place!

These were the same idiots who blasted the last couple of Sopranos seasons.

Mid-Week Scat

Just when you think, after eating every nasty insect imaginable, drinking his own urine, consuming all sorts of animal dung...Bear finds a way to push the envelope!

Ignorant Bargain Hunters

Comcast just announced some egomaniacal deal with NBC:

Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company, is buying a controlling stake in the entertainment giant NBC Universal for $13 billion, the companies announced Thursday.

The long-negotiated deal drew immediate criticism from consumer rights groups who say that combining Comcast’s control over cable and internet distribution with NBCU’s television stations and movie studio will give the combined company the motivation to choke free video services and gouge cable customers.

"In combining a major television network, a movie studio, a cable programmer and the largest internet service provider/cable operator, this new joint venture must be ready to take extraordinary steps to alleviate concerns about potential anti-competitive behavior if it expects the deal to be approved," said Gigi Sohn, the president of the open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge.

Comcast is paying GE about $6.5 billion in cash and $7.25 billion in programming for a 51 percent stake. GE remains in control of the rest of the company, valued at $30 billion in the complicated deal.

I could care less about the anti-competitive nature of this deal. It is surely doomed to fail a la AOL/Time Warner.

Insteady, I want to highlight the Moron responsible - Brian Roberts.

Admittedly, I know very little about him or the technical aspects of the TV and cable businesses, but quotes like these are sufficiently illuminative:

"There is more of an upside than downside in NBC," Roberts said yesterday on a conference call with investors.

Comcast is buying "at or near the bottom of this economic cycle," and NBC Universal is likely to recover with the economy, Roberts said.

Say what?

Shades of Bank of America's Ken Lewis if you ask me.

Remember Kenny said that Q4 of 2007(!!!!) was going to be the worst quarter his bank ever faced!

And Ken also went macroeconomic bottom-picking with Countrywide...



Remember we had a *booming* economy from 2000-2009, and yet Comcast's stock went nowhere. So even if the wide-eyed, empty-headed Roberts gets his *bottom of the economic cycle*....how does that guarantee NBC Universal will benefit?

And, more importantly, how are they going to do in a toilet-spiraling economy? I've got to think that strapped consumers are going to start canceling or reducing the consumption of their cable TV.

Content is soooooo dead.

Decent Documentary

Watched this 75 minute documentary on HBO OnDemand this week.

I just love everything about NYC history. It wasn't nearly as good as those PBS shows, but it's still pretty decent.

On this same general subject, I highly recommend reading that tremendous book on Robert Moses - The Power Broker by Robert Caro. I just can't imagine anyone who's spent any time at all in the metro NY area not having read it.

It was truly one of the best, most fascinating books I've ever read. I took the tome with me on my honeymoon to Hawaii....and the entire trip felt like a threesome with me, my first wife, and Robert Moses!