Confusion never stops
The post "Pop Music Clueless" at "Two Blowhards"
reminded me of the fact that as far as music goes, I am pretty much
stuck to 80's and 90's, since I am not really aware of any new music
that has been made in this century. That's what you get when you don't
listen to radio or watch MTV. One time when me and my wife were out
with some friends, the conversation turned to wondering how many bands
we can name that are reasonably famous now but didn't exist (or at
least were not famous) five or ten years ago. I vaguely remembered from
HMV advertisement posters at our local mall that there are bands called
"Coldplay", "Nickelback" and "Franz Ferdinand", but I couldn't really
name even one of their songs.
Since the second season of "The Joe Schmo Show", there hasn't really been very many reality shows that are worth watching. I have seen a few episodes of "Flavor of Love", which is entertaining, even though I find the show and its concept quite difficult to comprehend. I'm not sure I can say that I really understand the female mind and its deep complexities, motivations and attractions, but is that modern-day Stepin Fetchit that all these bootylicious women fight over humongously rich or something? That is pretty much the only explanation that I can think of, since I am not really familiar with the aspects of the hip hop culture.
Speaking of watching rich people prance around on TV, we have enjoyed the show "Survival of the Richest". The premise of this show is that seven young adults from very rich families are paired up with seven poor young adults who are deep in debt to work as teams, and each week one team is either voted off or cast out because the lose the competition, depending on that week's events. The last pair standing gets to split a reward of $100,000, which makes me wonder why the rich kids even bother. Perhaps they just want to be on TV and become the next Paris Hilton. Another explanation that I can think of that even if their family has hundreds of billions of dollars, the family is large and the money is controlled by the older generation, which doesn't leave the next generation that much spending money in addition to the basic necessities of the life of the rich.
The handsome Hunter is clearly cast and edited to be the heel of this show. The funniest thing in this show is the way rich kids and especially Hunter are depicted as "spoiled" because they don't bother to do various annoying things that are part of the normal life of the average person but that nobody would ever bother to tolerate if they really had millions of dollars at their disposal. For example, wake up early every day and drive one hour to work in the rush hour traffic, or wait in line at the post office behind some slow grandma who rummages through her purse. If you had money, why would you do stupid and annoying things that you really don't need to do yourself, when you could always hire underlings to do them for you? I sure as hell wouldn't.
As poor as the poor kids are in this show, we should also remember that there are billions of people around the world far poorer than them. By the world standards, these "poor kids" are almost unimaginably wealthy. It would therefore be interesting to see a new version of this show in which the competitors who are currently the "poor kids" would be the rich kids paired with seven literally dirt-poor young adults flown in from some suitable Third World hellholes. For additional humour, they should then all be forced to live by the standards of the latter group Survivor-style, without any of the conveniences of the rich West that these people normally take for granted the same way the real rich kids take their conveniences. It would be interesting to watch these poor-turned-rich kids complain how they can't just turn on a tap and that way get as much water as they want, but they have to walk several miles to the well to get a bucketful of dirty water that they then have to carry all the way back. Of course, such complaints were then considered to be some kind of a moral failure and indication of poorly built character.
In one episode, the rich kids couldn't believe that some people would clean toilets or pick tomatoes for five dollars an hour. Then again, those jobs are famously some of the jobs that "the Americans won't do", as the famous expression puts it. At least the farm workers shown in that episode were pretty much all Mexicans, as far as I could tell.
Since we are at the topic, my wife was flipping channels and came upon an episode of Oprah in which Morgan Spurlock and his wife were boosting their show "30 Days", namely the episode in which they themselves go live on minimum wage for 30 days. It sure looked like a hard life, can't deny that: I should thank my blessings for the better lifestyle choices that I have made. Between the clips of Morgan's show, some actual minimum-wage workers were interviewed about their life experiences. However, I noticed that a couple of essential parts were completely missing from this show, perhaps cut to the editing-room floor because of time constraints. First, at no point of the show did Morgan and Oprah actually come out and explicitly say how much they want the legal minimum wage to be, since the $7 or $8 per hour that the people depicted in the show seemed to be earning on average is apparently not enough. So say it: how much exactly do you want the minimum wage to be? Second, at no time did Morgan or Oprah point out a time of American history during which or any present country in which the bottom 10% of workers had it materially better than these people have it today, which is something that I would believe is very important for their argument.
I also had to wonder about one example family, a black mother and her teenage daughter in San Francisco who first lived in a homeless shelter but then got to live in a tiny social housing apartment. I am sure that somebody somewhere has convincingly explained why it is a self-evident and fundamental human right to live in a super-expensive city instead of some much cheaper area that America has plenty of, but this was never explained in the show. Before these two got their own little place, their life was made more difficult by the fact that the girl got out of school at 1:30 each day and had no place to go to after that, so she just had to wander about the town, which I guess is bad in the land of Anything Goes. Apparently, public libraries are nonexistent in San Francisco. I kind of wondered why she got out of school so early, because I clearly remember that ever since the freaking third grade my schooldays used to be longer than this. A different culture, I guess.
More importantly, since the girl looked like she was at least 16, she might still be too young for Lusty Lady, but couldn't she work at McDonald's or Wal-Mart? These companies are always hiring, and I'm sure that that extra money would make a pretty big difference for a family that currently lives hand to mouth.
Since the second season of "The Joe Schmo Show", there hasn't really been very many reality shows that are worth watching. I have seen a few episodes of "Flavor of Love", which is entertaining, even though I find the show and its concept quite difficult to comprehend. I'm not sure I can say that I really understand the female mind and its deep complexities, motivations and attractions, but is that modern-day Stepin Fetchit that all these bootylicious women fight over humongously rich or something? That is pretty much the only explanation that I can think of, since I am not really familiar with the aspects of the hip hop culture.
Speaking of watching rich people prance around on TV, we have enjoyed the show "Survival of the Richest". The premise of this show is that seven young adults from very rich families are paired up with seven poor young adults who are deep in debt to work as teams, and each week one team is either voted off or cast out because the lose the competition, depending on that week's events. The last pair standing gets to split a reward of $100,000, which makes me wonder why the rich kids even bother. Perhaps they just want to be on TV and become the next Paris Hilton. Another explanation that I can think of that even if their family has hundreds of billions of dollars, the family is large and the money is controlled by the older generation, which doesn't leave the next generation that much spending money in addition to the basic necessities of the life of the rich.
The handsome Hunter is clearly cast and edited to be the heel of this show. The funniest thing in this show is the way rich kids and especially Hunter are depicted as "spoiled" because they don't bother to do various annoying things that are part of the normal life of the average person but that nobody would ever bother to tolerate if they really had millions of dollars at their disposal. For example, wake up early every day and drive one hour to work in the rush hour traffic, or wait in line at the post office behind some slow grandma who rummages through her purse. If you had money, why would you do stupid and annoying things that you really don't need to do yourself, when you could always hire underlings to do them for you? I sure as hell wouldn't.
As poor as the poor kids are in this show, we should also remember that there are billions of people around the world far poorer than them. By the world standards, these "poor kids" are almost unimaginably wealthy. It would therefore be interesting to see a new version of this show in which the competitors who are currently the "poor kids" would be the rich kids paired with seven literally dirt-poor young adults flown in from some suitable Third World hellholes. For additional humour, they should then all be forced to live by the standards of the latter group Survivor-style, without any of the conveniences of the rich West that these people normally take for granted the same way the real rich kids take their conveniences. It would be interesting to watch these poor-turned-rich kids complain how they can't just turn on a tap and that way get as much water as they want, but they have to walk several miles to the well to get a bucketful of dirty water that they then have to carry all the way back. Of course, such complaints were then considered to be some kind of a moral failure and indication of poorly built character.
In one episode, the rich kids couldn't believe that some people would clean toilets or pick tomatoes for five dollars an hour. Then again, those jobs are famously some of the jobs that "the Americans won't do", as the famous expression puts it. At least the farm workers shown in that episode were pretty much all Mexicans, as far as I could tell.
Since we are at the topic, my wife was flipping channels and came upon an episode of Oprah in which Morgan Spurlock and his wife were boosting their show "30 Days", namely the episode in which they themselves go live on minimum wage for 30 days. It sure looked like a hard life, can't deny that: I should thank my blessings for the better lifestyle choices that I have made. Between the clips of Morgan's show, some actual minimum-wage workers were interviewed about their life experiences. However, I noticed that a couple of essential parts were completely missing from this show, perhaps cut to the editing-room floor because of time constraints. First, at no point of the show did Morgan and Oprah actually come out and explicitly say how much they want the legal minimum wage to be, since the $7 or $8 per hour that the people depicted in the show seemed to be earning on average is apparently not enough. So say it: how much exactly do you want the minimum wage to be? Second, at no time did Morgan or Oprah point out a time of American history during which or any present country in which the bottom 10% of workers had it materially better than these people have it today, which is something that I would believe is very important for their argument.
I also had to wonder about one example family, a black mother and her teenage daughter in San Francisco who first lived in a homeless shelter but then got to live in a tiny social housing apartment. I am sure that somebody somewhere has convincingly explained why it is a self-evident and fundamental human right to live in a super-expensive city instead of some much cheaper area that America has plenty of, but this was never explained in the show. Before these two got their own little place, their life was made more difficult by the fact that the girl got out of school at 1:30 each day and had no place to go to after that, so she just had to wander about the town, which I guess is bad in the land of Anything Goes. Apparently, public libraries are nonexistent in San Francisco. I kind of wondered why she got out of school so early, because I clearly remember that ever since the freaking third grade my schooldays used to be longer than this. A different culture, I guess.
More importantly, since the girl looked like she was at least 16, she might still be too young for Lusty Lady, but couldn't she work at McDonald's or Wal-Mart? These companies are always hiring, and I'm sure that that extra money would make a pretty big difference for a family that currently lives hand to mouth.
Actually, in regards to the Oprah episode about the homeless mother and daughter-- the mother is white-- not black. And her daughter is thus, biracial :)
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Posted by Anonymous | 11:15 AM