Insanely Boring Books

I'm sure we've all experienced that strange effect where being assigned a book for class drains it of all entertainment value; and this effect makes me a little uneasy with labeling some of the "great works" as boring... but I will do it anyway.

Cry, The Beloved Country:
Wow was this boring. I have wiped most of this from my memory, so please hold as I slide over to sparknotes for a refresher...

Ok, I just skimmed that and the plot summary makes it sound great; don't be fooled. I remember getting into it periodically, as the characters are interesting and the story is pretty good; but the author's style is just too devoid of flair. This is actually a better book than the other two I will mention in my eyes, but I can't get over the way this took up so much of my time in 9th grade english class; I shall never forgive you Alan Paton...



Siddhartha:
Another book that I barely remember. Now I realize that this has a lot of deep philosophical concepts and deals with enlightenment and all that jazz... but I was 14 and all I remember is the main character sleeping with hookers. This probably says something about me; but hookers stand out in a 14 year old's mind. Also, for someone who loves The Catcher in the Rye, I have a strong distaste for pretentiousness, which I could easily assign to anything attempting to explore the meaning of life if I wanted to be an ass about it. I remember reading this in about two sitting because I had a paper to write on Monday... I'm sure this didn't help my experience with it.


The Grapes of Wrath:
WOW, John Steinbeck you slippery son of a bitch. People love you, but I cannot flippin stand your writing. Would it kill to bring this thing above the stylistic level of say... the Yellow Pages, or the ingredient list of this bottle of Minute Maid lemonade sitting on my desk? In fact; correction, this lemonade contains "glycerol ester of wood rosin", Steinbeck loses. DRYDRYDRYDRYDRYDRYDRYDRY. If I were stranded on a desert island the one thing I'd bring is this, because there's a fairly good chance I could throw it off shore and relieve myself of the whole "surrounded by water" thing. One morning I was in my school's dining hall with a craving for some oatmeal and was disappointed to see that it was waaaaaay too watery-- the first thought to cross my mind was "If only I had a Steinbeck book to wave at this". Who needs to waste all that time draining the pool in the winter when you can just drop in a copy of "Tortilla Flat"?

Calling it; best Real World season ever

I have determined this from the first episode and am fully confident in it. I was totally wrong on Johanna; but Rachel can see her way out of the season.

You Know What They Say About Texas...

I have seen pretty much every episode of MTV's The Real World ever produced (with the exception of that London season that never happened... actually I've seen a lot of that one too). I've seen those boring episodes from the first season that mainly consisted of people sitting round in silence and periodically discussing serious issues *YAWN*, and the ultimate in TV-14 debauchery (LV). I've the absurdly nice people (Rachel NY2) and the biggest assholes in the universe (Stephen SEA, David NO). I've seen the show slowly migrate from a socially-conscious study of young adult life to Girls Gone Wild for Kids. I've seen the houses get increasingly ridiculous in size and design. I've seen bad jobs (Let's take the craziest people we can find and have them care for children! BOS) and the jobs that actually bring something to the season (let's take the craziest people we can find and have them run club promotions in sin city! LV)

I'd like to think that I've become some kind of Real World expert after the 400+ episodes I've seen, so let me try something out. Just from the little intro show they do and commercials, I think I have this Austin cast (debut tonight at 10) pegged as pretty much carbon copies of previous cast members. First the easy ones:

Nehemia - This guy seems scarily similar to Jaquese from SD. He's part of the trend away from sociopathic black males to more normal-guy black males (Ok, Karamo from PHI destroys that point, but ignore it. He was also carrying the burden of being both a black guy on the Real World AND a gay guy on the Real World so we have to cut him some slack.)


Wes - Brad from SD. Frat boy/jock that wants to go into business and all that jazz. Although he seems to lack the redeeming qualities of Brad and just been an all-out jackass. Good for me, bad for the rest of the house.

Danny - Randy from SD. Randy had the jock air about him, but he really wasn't. He also produced one of the greatest moments in RW history with his drunken "I will CRY" rant on Frankie.

Lacey - This is the resident "weird chick". She's got Frankie written all over her, and she's gonna cause problems like Frankie too. Her attempts at a "quirky cool" look has already annoyed me in her 3 minutes of screen time between the various promos for this season.

Melinda - The sexpot, but she's supposedly a good girl (who proclaimed "I NEED ASS" in the season preview). She's a "freer" Cameran from SD.

Rachel and Johanna - seem boring and I don't care. I've gathered that Johanna is a partier and Rachel wants so "experiment" with Melinda. Rachel is also a veteran. Despite all of this I can't bring myself to care. They seem like "the other two".

Why Did I Buy This???

I have always had an interest in marketing because at heart it's all about tricking people into making irrational decisions; like eating Butterfinger candybars. People, c'mon, they suck... and if you like them you probably know they suck but eat them anyway. But see, if you take this barely edible confection and market it properly you can actually coax people into eating this garbage. I admit that back in my younger days I would periodically buy Butterfingers ONLY because I was a huge Simpsons fan and they were the "faces of the brand".

This same thing goes on in any number of fields. For example; why do I have Hellman's mayonaisse in my fridge right now? Would I even know if somebody had put Kraft mayo on my ham and cheese sandwich? Why do people keep buying Nikes? I haven't seen a new Nike shoe that wasn't competely ass-fugly in about 4 years, yet the company has not gone under. Nice commercials though.

The art of getting you to make unnecessary purchases goes beyond the tube and the radio. I'm sure we've all seen those shows detailing how supermarkets get you to buy a whole bunch of unneeded crap by making it impossible to tell how long you've been in the store and putting the most expensive/most recognized stuff at eye level... going so far as to put male-targeted products slightly higher than female-targeted products on the shelves. This stuff is really quite shady and is probably asking for some kind of massive class-action lawsuit against Shop Rite; but I'm getting off my nearly non-existent point.

So I trekked over to Best Buy a few days ago because I wanted to pick up the new Coldplay (Biggest band in the world!1!!1!1!) and White Stripes (Weirdest quasi-meanstream-not-that-popular-but-well-known band in the world!1!1!1) albums, which were conveniently displayed in the "Hot This Week" section advertising a markdown to $10 as opposed to the $14-$17 it would eventually evolve into for some silly evil-marketer reason. So I pick those two up, but before I can escape the evil clutches of Captain Industry the 3rd big debut of that week catches my eye.

Now I also have the previous release by the Black Eyed Peas for some reason (well, note that I didn't say that I bought the previous release) and thought it wasn't that great. The 2-3 songs that everyone heard 14 million times were ok, but the rest of the album wasn't anything special in my opinion. Despite this, the lure of purchasing 2 or 3 entertaining songs for $10 had hooked me. Now if Best Buy had just arranged their CDs in alphabetical order there is no way in hell that I would own something called "Monkey Business" right now.

In the end the CD is ok in that "This is a Black Eyed Peas album so you knew what you were getting out of this" way, but I resent the fact that I was Jedi mind-tricked into buying it. Screw you Best Buy.

Slavco And You

I have watched epic amounts of television in my life, and this is still the case. Not only do I watch an exceptional amount of television; but I also will watch bad television... even when I know that the program I'm watching at the moment does suck quite a bit.

Now if you're interested in watching some television of "questionable quality", click over to VH1; because they are running that side of town right now. They are running this show called "Kept" right now that is particularly ridiculous (actually there's a show airing right now about a nationwide search for a 10-man male stripper team; so maybe I should let up on the gas). This one is about former(?) model Jerry Hall's quest to find a man to keep around and play Sugar Mommy to... no, seriously. Anyway, it's pretty entertaining thanks primarily to three people; Seth, Slavco and Ricardo.

Judging from his *outstanding* accent, Seth is from somewhere in Massachusetts and is the closest thing to a normal guy on this show. He has a cool attitude about the whole fiasco taking place in front of the cameras, and is the star of this show's "confessional" segments. Best of all he tells dirty jokes in front of all of Jerry's high-culture friends and generally drives them crazy. If you haven't gathered this already; Seth's time on the show is likely to be wrapping up shortly, so you might want to start watching it about two weeks ago.

THEN you have Ricardo and Slavco; who seem to be of one brain. They are two male-model "look at me, I'm the crap" types who have managed to get every other contestant to despise them in what has probably been 4 days of real-life time (of course, 4 weeks of tv). There is a 90% chance that these people have been paid by VH1 to act this way and make me hate them.

Mission accomplished.

Michael Jackson

So the Michael Jackson verdict came in. The correctness of this verdict is not the issue here.


What I have a problem with are all of the parallels being drawn between Michael Jackson's aquittal and Orenthal James Simpson's aquittal 10 years ago. It seems like a case of people injecting race into a topic where it doesn't belong.

As has been cited time and time again, the jury in the OJ Simpson double-murder trial was predominately black. In fact, the racial breakdown ended up at 8 blacks, 2 hispanics, 1 caucasian and 1 half-caucasian, half-native american. In the wake of the racial tensions of the time (LA riots, Rodney King incident, etc.) and OJ Simpson's history of having been "the black man that connected with whites", race became a HUGE issue in the trial; and the ethnic breakdown of the jury very well could have played a part in Simpson escaping conviction.

Now to make any comparison between that verdict and the one that was made in Santa Maria, California a few days ago is nonsense. Michael Jackson was aquitted by a jury of 8 whites, 3 hispanics and 1 asian. Was this jury compelled to set one of their own free? Were they reacting to a perceived history of judiciary unfairness to their peers? Had racial unity prevailed over common sense?

Never let the truth get in the way a good complaint.

The Name is Good Enough

Now stop bitching