So one of K’s new-favorite-shows is Science/Discovery’s How It’s Made, which consists of 5-15 minute mini-documentaries of (surprisingly enough) how various items are manufactured, wrapped, etc.
I also have to recommend a slightly more upscale stuff-related documentary, “Objectified.” Check out the trailer here.
Brett Michaels is a man-whore. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who like his music or that I don’t watch his reality TV show, but we have to call a spade a spade.
The quick recap from Rock of Love I and II is that, in the end, the skanky strippers got sorted from the ONE reasonable person in each season and the right person won. Jess was smart and smoking hot, which was probably the reason why she said “no thanks” right after she won. Ditto for Ambre, although she didn’t catch on to Brett’s doucheness until a little bit later.
Fast forward to the third season where, rather than putting the skanky strippers in a McMansion, they’re on tour busses following Brett around on his tour of small clubs. I mean really, why pretend, he’s looking for someone to bang on tour… he should test out the girls in their native environment. When one of the requirements for contestants are DD (at a minimum) implants, it’s pretty clear what you’re going to get.
The highlight of the first episode? It was when two of the girls thought they really needed to impress Brett. Everyone was drinking and it’s apparently very hip to do your shots out of test tubes. (Actually, I’m guessing that plastic test tubes are amazingly cheap and allow for easy portion control.) So, drunk girls with no underwear + a serious need to impress + no sexual qualms + alcohol in test tubes = insert tube in slot A and consume.
Wow.
Happy Chinese New Year! In lunar calendar, spring festival is to celebrate the beginning of spring. I hope spring is really coming, this winter is just too cold…..
Also a clip from China’s annual celebration live show. When I was very young, I liked this show very very much. Watching the show together with my family on lunar new year eve is one of the best memories of my childhood. My father used to record it for me and I would watch it over and over again till the next new year. Anyways, this year’s show is not bad, I especially like the way they used the big big screen.
It seems I can’t embed any video, so here’s the link for the clip.
City Variation.
First, a puppy scratches the face of one of the guys on the Today show and he bleeds all over the set on camera. (Puppy also snagged Amy Robach’s nylons. Mmmm.)
Then there’s a great headline on yahoo news right now, “Annual eclipse shows Sun as ring of fire.” Turn off your spell checkers, that should be Annular!
So with K in the lab this evening, I turned on the TV while doing dishes and what do I find but the Expos-Padres game in which Tony Gwynn got his 3,000th hit. I didn’t expect to watch that much (Tony got his hit in the 1st inning, and on the road, so no big deal) but I ended up getting sucked in.
Oddly enough, this random game reminded me of how much I love baseball. I got to watch a young Vladimir Guerrero golf a homer, crushing a pitch that was ~2 inches off the dirt, way way way outside, well over the straightaway centerfield fence. Michael Barrett, then a young thirdbaseman with good wheels and not yet a reputation for alienating teammates and opposing players alike, got a triple as the Padres promptly blew a 4-0 lead, Rondell White was patrolling center for the Expos, and Phil Nevin went 2-5 with a homer and 4 RBIs.
None of this is remotely interesting, and yet it was like catching up with an old friend – the conversation was a little rough around the edges, but it was still familiar and comfortable.
In keeping with tradition, I propose this Wednesday evening. I’m happy to host, if people can make it, but I don’t have DVR so we might want to go with G-Money’s setup.
It is difficult to raise this subject without seeming to take sides or assign value, but a new paper in Journal of Political Psychology has a pretty interesting take on the idea of hard-wired philosophical inclination. Studying the rooms of 76 college students and 94 professionals, the authors noted significant correlation between neatness/room decoration style and political leaning. The idea is that distinct cognitive inclinations of liberals towards ambiguity and intellectualism, and conservatives toward order, “drive the way one leads one’s life and displays one’s life in their living and work spaces,” co-author Dana Carney, an assistant professor of management at Columbia University’s Business School in New York City. These various room elements are “behavioral residue,” says co-author Sam Gosling, associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and notes that these findings are just the latest of several recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. Brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and even genetic tests are turning up possible clues to our political origins and behaviors.
“It’s pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete,” says Carney. “Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one’s environment is predictable and therefore safe.”
Clearly the line isn’t as clear-cut as that, though, and it’s not surprising that people get defensive about labeled with such a broad brush. More importantly, the Carney & Gosling study isn’t the focus of this post; I present their results in light of a recent Nate Silver interview of John Ziegler, author of the Zogby poll/interview of Obama voters attempting to argue that Obama won only because the “liberal media” (don’t get me started) wanted him to win.
Short version: Ziegler is a talk-show host and as such it’s hard to tell what is an act and what is real. You have to assume that the interview is legit, though, and it’s honestly pretty shocking how rude and uncooperative Ziegler is. However, it makes more sense when (a) you read a 2004 article on him and (b) you consider that he falls into the “neat room” crowd: the world is black and white, that absolutes do exist, and that ambiguity and uncertainty are weaknesses. When Nate asks him detailed or non-stimulating questions, Ziegler becomes rude and belligerent – he doesn’t know how to handle this kind of low-ratings discussion.
The Atlantic article is very long, but good, and I recommend it highly. If nothing else it helped me make sense of the creature that is “talk radio”. To wit, talk radio is not conservative because of some big Clear Channel/Fox News conspiracy (though that doesn’t help) but because talk radio is all about profit, and what is profitable is “shock jocks” and emotional extremes. Rational discourse and moral gray areas don’t inflame passions or draw big numbers, and thus don’t produce sufficient advertising revenue … we have NPR for that. That’s not to say that a lot of “stimulating” talk radio isn’t socially destructive and inflammatory, but at least it helped me understand where it’s coming from.
