Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 12:33PM Texas is beginning to seem a lot like England. It just won't stop raining. I was watching the Weather Channel last night (yes, I'm turning into my mother) and the whole week had a little line of rain clouds, one for every day. Sigh.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 5:32PM I occasionally get e-mail from a Web site called Concierge.com. Usually the links don't sufficiently interest me enough for a click-through, but this one did.
This was my favorite of the 14 featured bogs - the egg-shaped thingies are actually toilet cubicles:
If the link at top doesn't work, go to www.concierge.com and search for an article called Amazing Bathrooms.
Monday, June 11, 2007 at 5:28PM Although I enjoy my fair share of politically incorrect pursuits, I've never been able to sit through a single reality TV show. I tried a couple of times but I always got a headache.
Today, I got one of my regular e-mails from Discover Magazine that had a link to an interesting, albeit disturbing article about reality tv. Here's an excerpt:
"America’s Next Top Model is not really about who wins a modeling contract but rather about observing what young anorexics are willing to do to one another under the sanctioning authority of supermodel Tyra Banks. Will they steal food, sabotage another contestant’s makeup, or play particularly vicious mind games? Survivor has never been about human ingenuity in the face of nature but about human scheming, betrayal, and selfishness in the course of competition. And The Surreal World, which throws a bunch of has-beens and recovering alcoholic former child stars into a halfway house, has nothing to do with our desire to emulate celebrities. It’s about watching sad people sacrifice any remaining vestige of self-respect to garner an extra few minutes of life on the tube.
The disturbing part is that we call this entertainment. Milgram* was hoping to learn something basically uplifting: History’s worst sadists were in fact decent human beings, just highly susceptible to the corrupting influence of authorities. What reality TV proves about us is far worse. Apparently, we’re just waiting for an excuse to be true to our darkest natures."The entire story is here.
* Stanley Milgram, infamous for conducting behavioral experiments to try to determine humans' capacity to inflict cruelty.
