Rob & Big - reality show

I tuned in to this for the first time today, never heard of it before. White guy who goes around with a baseball cap and talks "street", and a big fat black guy, tooling around the country.

Reality shows really dumb down America.

Letr me check Wikipedia to see what this stupid show is about.

Rob & Big is an American reality television series that follows the lives of professional skateboarder/actor/producer Rob Dyrdek and his best friend and bodyguard Christopher "Big Black" Boykin. Over 70 million viewers watched the show's first season, and it was ranked #1 in its time slot for its target demographic among other cable TV shows.^[1]
Produced by Ruben Fleischer, the show premiered on November 4, 2006. After 32 episodes, it ended on April 23, 2008.

Synopsis 
Most episodes of the show follow a central task or event in the daily life of Rob and Big, such as: attempting to break Guinness world records, having their home exorcised, skateboarding, and random things such as buying 12 remote-control helicopters, and Rob's obsession with a net gun. Also, during the show the two of them purchased two animals, a mini horse named "Mini horse" and a bulldog named "Meaty."

Ah, so this show is 4 years old, but they have nothing better to show so they're showing this?

Seems kind of stupid...can we not have shows that show people trying to become astronauts, or geologists, of something of that nature? Why do we always have to glorify the dumb-bells. I mean - professional skate boarders, for goodness sake!

Back to our regularly scheduled blogging

Visiting relative  has left, traveling has done, and I'm ready to devote myself to this blog again.

So thanks for  your patience!

All State Commercial

People dancing because they've saved money on all state - an appeal to...god knows what... not the brain. Quick note only today, because: My mother's sister is visiting for three days. My mom's deaf as a post, my dad can't be bothered to get out of his chair, so I will be doing the entertaining - the chauffeuring and the talking and the communicating - for the next three days. So I'll be posting back here Thursday. Thanks for your patience.

Fed Ex's "Nothing's More Important Than Your Clubs" Commercials

I know I've complained about these before, but I see them every time I'm watching a golf tourney and they infuriate me each time I see them.

The reason is simple. It's invariably the male who is treating his clubs like they were babies or little children, while the wife stands aside with their actual children, looking resigned.

Why do I find these so offensive? Because they strike close to home. How many dads do absolutely nothing for their children, but will treat their own toys with respect? (And this is not necessarily the guy's fault, admittedly. How many women have babies that the man doesn't want, because she thinks "having a baby will make us closer" when usually it just drives them further apart.

But once you've actually sired a child, the least you could do is take good care of it and have a presence as a dad. And we've got the black community, where 75% of children are born out of wedlock, and they live in poverty all their lives... and the unwed motherhood percentage for white mothers is the fastest rising percentage...so that's another generation of children that's going to live in poverty and whine about how the rich and middle class folks are "keeping them down" because they don't pay them enough welfare so they can live well,...

These are the thoughts that go through my head as I watch these commercials.

First we've got the one where an African-American couple is sleeping in bed. There's a child camera in another room, which is on the bag of golf clubs. Man wakes up, hears something, looks at the camera, and then we see that he's talking about golf clubs and not a child. "They're okay. I'm going to check on them anyway." Rather sad when you consider most African-American biological fathers probably do care more about their golf clubs than their children. (Again, just look at the statistics of children born out of wedlocks.)

Then we've got the white dad strapping something into the back of his SUV, talking to it tenderly like he's talking to a child. Camera pulls back to reveal he's talking to a bag of clubs. "How do you get so dirty," he says sweetly, licking his finger and then wiping off one of the club heads. Meanwhile the wife or girlfriend is holding a little girl, both of them looking a bit resigned as they know they are certainly not the most important things in this guy's life.

The rest of the commercials are more acceptable, in that although one of them is kind of stupid and over the top, they are enough over the top to be funny, and the humor does not come at the expense of human beings - aka children or wives.

So we've got the guy who wants to test Fed Ex by sending his cold fusion invention somewhere before he trusts his clubs to them.

And finally, the one commercial that I actually enjoy, some black executive has invented a shrink ray and is shrinking his clubs. A white exec says, why don't you send them Fed Ex. My favorite line: "You've obviously mistaken me for someone who doesn't have a shrink ray."

House - TV series

I don't know that this show counts as devolution media...I just find it so sad that it is so popular.

Hugh Laurie - a British comedian - plays the American doctor House, who is a complete and total jerk. And yet he somehow gets the affection of his beautiful interns (there's at least one female intern, plus two male interns) and the head of the hospital.

Apparently women like "bad boys" even when they're total jerks....which is very sad not to say frightening.

(I remember many years ago a movie called The Fisher King, the main character played by Jeff Bridges tells his girl friend that he only stays with her because of the sex. She's hurt - but does she dump him, despite knowing how he feels? No, of course not. Then, to cite only one other example - there was some show on BET, a black teacher, and an overweight black woman has a crush on him, he insults her all the time, yet she continues to pine for him and love him despite all this verbal abuse - I just wanted to kick both him and her).

Anyway...watching House today, he comes back from having been in a coma and received a Ketamine treatment that has helped his leg (though, if I remember correctly, at the end of this ep it wears off and he's back to having to limp and be in pain all the time). His three interns greet him and he ignores them. But the woman of course is not offended and continues to try to talk to him like he's a normal human being.

 In times like this I always say...what would happen if a woman were in the role? Would *she* get the same respect that a male doctor would get, or would she be excoriated as a ball buster and would the series be quickly cancelled?

Almost Naked Animals -Cartoon Network

Jeez I feel so sorry for today's kids. When I was a kid, I got quality cartoons. Sure, the animation by Hanna Barbera was typically primitive but at least people looked like people, and everything had a clean, unsullied look.

Contrast that to the utter, utter garbage that kids are watching today. Garbage that does not uplift or create heroes (like Spiderman or Superfriends) but degrades and panders to the lowest form of humor.

So I'm watching channel 40, the TOON channel, otherwise known as Cartoon Network.

So right now there's an octopus wearing Y-fronts, with fur or something all over him. Some kind of a rabbit, in underwear...indeed, they are all in underwear.  All ugly.

The plot of this particular episode is apparently that the octopus, when afraid, ejects ink, (at least it wasn't feces) which turns into paintings that are valuable which the rabbit character can sell. So the rabbit spends the entire episode trying to scare the octopus into "inking" his pants, and finally succeeds at the end because he's scared of clowns.

What utter, utter, utter garbage.

Then there's the preview for Revenge of the Island - a bunch of teenage age kids on an island - drawn in today's way with large, square heads, and skinny bodies.  One of them is trying to do a pushup, can't, there's a green mushroom cloud from his butt as he apparently farts... jesus.

Jee-sus!

Lifetime: The Houston Family Chronicles

According to the Huffington Post, Lifetime TV has ordered a reality series called Whitney Family Chronicles, chronicling the lives of Houston's family since her death.

Why? Why? Why?

Aren't there any successful black families out there whose lives can be chronicled? Why focus on Whitney Houston, who had it all and threw it away on drugs? I can't tell you how much that annoys me... it's one thing for poor folks who see no way out to take to drugs - of course they definitely won't stop being poor if they do so, but.... but it's another for someone beautiful and wealthy to start taking drugs when they must know what it does to people... John Belushi? River Phoenix?

Of course it's not jut the poor and the super wealthy who do drugs... lots of middle class and wealthy white folk apparently can;t figure out anything better to do with their money either - they're all stupid and should all be deported to Mexico. Well,deport isn't the right word - exiled to Mexico. If they want to throw away their lives, let 'em throw it away in Mexico and stop being a waste of space in the US.

Times Magazine's Breast Feeding Cover

The cover isn't "devolving" in itself, but the article is interesting. Apparently there are some mothers who will go on breast feeding their children - at least, their sons - until they are four or five, long past the time when they are capable of holding a spoon to eat solid food and holding a sippy cup to drink liquids.

What does this tell these three year old boys, who already think they are the lords of creation and that their mother exists only to service them? Pretty much that that's how they should look at all women - as creatures to provide them with sensual gratification, and no need to concern yourself about them as human beings at all - no need to pay attention to their feelings - it's nagging and it's alright to ignore it!

Sad state of affairs when there are women who will actually buy into this claptrap, just as there have been women since the dawn of time who keep their sons tied to their apron strings.

Goodwill - commercial

Watching KGWN - perhaps a local Colorado channel. 10.30 pm, just before the abysmal Two and a Half Men started.

Woman standing in front of some kind of a store, wearing a wig kinda like Uma Thurman in one of the Kill Bill segments. She rushes into the store and rushes out again carrying a dress or something. A "getaway" car stops by her, she gets in, and it zooms off.

The slogan: "Goodwill. Prices so low, you'll think you're stealing."

Then a clerk comes out holding a couple of dollars, saying "Ma'am, you forgot your change."

What kind of a revolting commercial is this? How many people actually go into stores and do some shoplifting - teen girls usually, but still... do we really want to glorify the thrill of stealing something - which is what this totally offensive commercial does?

Men at Work - sitcom trailer

1.55 pm, watching Everybody Loves Raymond on TBS, just saw the trailer for the upcoming sitcom, Men At Work. Best as I can figure out from from the trailer, the show consists of 4 men who act like pre-pubescent teenagers.

They're in a restaurant or somewhere, beautiful blond gives someone, supposedly the main character, a tray or something, and behind him these three guys are doing pelvic thrusts or other forms of celebration that he apparently got a date.

It's one thing to go throughout your life enjoying collecting model trains and ships, and maintaining a child-like demeanor, it's another to go through your life being childish, which is apparently what is being celebrated in this particular show - men's obsession with women as sex objects, not people.