Man vs Dense

People are dumb.  What happened in between the time I was growing up in the 80's and now that made people so much dumber?  Or maybe they were this dumb, but the world wasn't as connected as it is today, so we couldn't tell?

Take tv for example.  There is a show called "Man Vs. Food."  It about this guy who visits restaurants, checks out the food, and then at the end he tries some gluttonous, insane eating challenge.  Can you eat 6 pounds of fries and a 10 patty burger?  Can you do it in less than 10 minutes?  Can you eat all of these hot wings that will probably burn your intestines?  Hooray, give it a shot and you can become a celebrity!

Yup, that's the guy.  Adam Richmond.  You can't beat the guy's originality, and he does have a bit of charisma.  At least when he's not trying to wolf down a huge pile of food, he's charismatic.  I'll admit I do like the show.  It's fun to watch while I scream "EAT IT, EAT IT, YOU PIG!" at the tv screen.  How fun to watch in high definition!  It's too bad that after Man Vs. Food they don't have another show called Man Vs. Toilet.  I'd honestly love to see him use the bathroom after he's taken one of the "Hot wings" challenges.

But that's tv, right?  Tv is supposed to be silly.  Real life isn't like tv, is it?  Actually, real life is worse than tv.  I work in a Las Vegas casino.  The place beats the hell out of any show that was ever on tv!  

I work with people who complain about how bad the casino is, how badly the casino runs, and what a slum it is.  And then they come in on their days off to spend time in the casino they hate.  There are a hundred different casinos here in Vegas, why would you go to the one you work at on your days off?  And then these people seek out other people they know so that they can show off that they're hanging around on their days off.  There have even been a few who go to the bar, get drunk, and then start harassing hotel guests and we have to throw them out.  If you saw this kind of thing on tv, you'd think it was made up!  No one really does that, right?  Wrong.

We have people who are tv celebrities because they go out and get drunk and act like idiots.  I'd like to say I'm talking about Jersey Shore, but there are other dumb shows on, too.  All you need to do to become a celebrity now is be on tv.  It doesn't even matter what for!  If you're on, you're hot!  There are shows about repossessing cars, bounty hunting, and even a show about cheating on your significant (or insignificant) other!

Are we really in a culture where people want to watch some idiots cheating on a spouse?  What the hell?  Great thing for the kids to learn from, right?  

So if you ever wonder why we haven't made it to Mars yet, or why we don't have flying cars.  Why we haven't developed transporters like in Star Trek, or why we don't yet understand how to build star ships that can travel the universe.  Watch some tv, or look around you.  We're more interested in being dumb.  Well, that and being greedy.  Maybe later I'll write a blog about greedy.  Oy.

TV when you're sick

I caught this year's flu.  Yuck.  And so what did I do for my days off this week?  I stayed in bed and watched tv.  And what do you suppose I watched?  Re-runs of I Love Lucy?  Unfortunately no, I ended up watching some reality tv.  Well, sort of reality.  Take this show Carfellas.  Does this actually look real to anyone?  It might be, I'm sure there are people like this somewhere.  But it looks a bit made up to me:

Now the premise of this show is that the main guy Mike was in prison for "racketeering" for the "mob" I guess?  And now he's out of prison and decides to run a used car lot with two other fat Italian guys.  Not that I don't believe this, but I tried googling his name, and can't really seem to find any news reports, or anything that really links this guy to a "mob."  And the only news report I could find that said he did three years in prison was written as a promo for the show.  I don't see this one lasting.  *chuckle*  

Next is one of my favorite shows now!  It's called "Bar Rescue." This guy goes to bars that are really pretty much slums and fixes them up so they'll be profitable and decent places to drink.  He always fixes up bars that are also restaurants, and the best part of the show is when he goes in and starts yelling about how the kitchen is filthy, or how there is a dead mouse somewhere, or garbage piled up in a corner.  And the employees never seem to understand what he's yelling about.  They'll tell the camera "I'm pretty embarrassed about what he's saying right now." but they've been working in this filth for years!  So they were embarrassed, but were always to lazy to fix anything!  It's hilarious!

I watched this episode this morning.  This clip wasn't in the episode, though.  Probably because good ol' John there talks about "manipulating employees."  If you actually listen to what he's saying, he's right.  He does know what he's talking about.  "You want employees to like you so they don't steal from you." Very good philosophy!  *chuckle*  The bar that they're in right now was called Swanky (Stinky) Bubbles.  One of the owners was giving away most of the drinks free to women so he could hit on them, but he couldn't figure out why the bar was losing money.  One of the "cooks" quit when John told him to start cleaning up the filthy kitchen.  It was really hilarious!  The funniest part of this episode to me was that at the end they always tell you what happened 30 days after the bar was fixed up.  30 days after this one was fixed up, it was right back in the toilet where it started.  Some people just don't listen. *chuckle*

And last, but not least, another ultimate favorite of mine:  Man and Woman vs Wild.  This one is just silly.  The man is an ex military survival expert, and the woman is his blonde, ex newscaster wife.  She's a British bimbo.  I don't say that to be rude, but you don't take your city girl, feminine blonde wife out into the wilds and then try to survive without supplies.  In the "Alaska" episode, they wouldn't have survived, and had to stop the show and call in rescue people.  Things just didn't work out.  That's ok, I can accept that, people don't always survive.  In another episode though, the blonde woman ends up with heat stroke and they call in a medic who gives her water, and food, and gets her well again in a couple of hours.  Then she wants to continue.  It's not really a survival situation if when things get rough you just call in a medic! Just a goofy show!  

Now not to dog on the blonde, but look at how much footage they show of her with this thing in her mouth.  How many of the crew do you think were in stitches watching this?  Yes, it's meant to be a survival technique, but all we see on tv is this blonde shoving a phallic object into her mouth over and over.  You don't see the guy sucking on it.  How...entertaining.

So, that's it for watching tv while I was sick.  I think I slept through most everything else.  With any luck I'll feel better next week and get back to work on setting up my book for release.