TV that makes you stupider
Tuesday July 17, 2007
Because I was assigned to write an editorial about the attempt now underway to promote soccer in the US by hitching it to the Beckhams' star, I had to watch NBC's hour-long special trailing Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham as she...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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"Of the making of idiots there is no end." That is why we have celebrities.
On another board I post on, we have a thread called "movies, music and TV that make you secretly beg for The Sword of Islam." This show is one of them.
>"movies, music and TV that make you secretly beg for The Sword of Islam."
Jaybird, I was thinking exactly the same thing, but less eloqently. WSell said! Also in this category is Entertainment Tonight, which I've occasionally watched the last few minutes of. Blech!!
Mr. Dreher, would that happen to be A Year with Queen Elizabeth? Or a different program?
"It was enough to put any conservative in touch with his inner Bolshevik."
Such a clever line! Ron, I can see why they pay you the big bucks.
That's hilarious, jaybird.
I probably shouldn't bother to ask, but: why is a couple who are being peddled as the world's most beautiful in the market for a blow-up sex doll?
Hell, I shouldn't even bother to wonder. Never mind.
I probably shouldn't bother to ask, but: why is a couple who are being peddled as the world's most beautiful in the market for a blow-up sex doll?
She probably needed it for the HOV lanes. Gotta love that LA traffic~!
A television would be terrific fun to blow up. I'm thinking a triple wrap of det cable, maybe in quadrants. And shoot it to detonate it, rather than using a charge. Would be fun. Join the Army, learn pyrotechnics. ;)
I have to say that I was greatly entertained by Posh's adventures. She didn't come off as stupid as Paris, Nicole or Lindsay do. She really did come off as rich Brit coming to America and having the adventures that rich people do. But I found it tolerable--in that I didn't roll my eyes during the entire hour. Her search for a house that was safe for her kids was endearing. The purchase of the sex doll made logical sense in context--it was a decoy so she could buy her husband a "Welcome to America" gift. Granted there are better things to watch on television for an hour, but this isn't nearly as scuzzy as some other things I've seen in the past week, month, year...
May be it's the Irish in me. The world's richest and msot decadent welfare family, the Windsors,are are in so many ways much more awful than any of the others. What a complete waste of British tax dollars, to keep these inbreds living high on the hog. Lindsay, Paris, Posh are all disgusting. But they aren't funded with tax dollars.
I think the blow-up doll was to put the paparazzi off her scent as she went somewhere else. Didn't they put a blonde wig on it? I only watched about five minutes of it. I'm sure the Beckhams will fit in perfectly with the Hollywood set. The question is will their marriage last? It appears the former Posh Spice is getting far more attention than her overpaid soccer-playing hubby. One mate eclipsing the other doesn't usually work too well in the world of celebrity couplings. Oh well, here's to America and our capacity to take in some more shallow, self-obsessed celebs!
Slightly off topic but, if you want to push soccer it needs to be filmed the way the Univision and the other spanish stations film-close to the field so viewer sees ball action at eye level as it takes place, concentrate on one section of the field and never show more than half the field during aerial shots. CNN does a lousy job and they film so far away that the players look like little dolls. It is boring!
Back to the topic at hand. Not worthy of a tv show. Have you noticed that not one but three celebrity shows air at the same time! Do we really watch that much celebrity gossip?! Why?!
I also thought about an act of vandalism, throwing it from a balcony for example, i m afraid mother and neighbours would not understand :( at least we use it as an alarm clock, negative emotions help to stand up.
Remembering interesting programmes, exellent kind cartoons for children and good quality films shown in old soviet times, i think tv needs dictatorship of good taste badly.
(Also, i meant like Another believer)
Isn't there a limit on the number of idiotic rich blonde celebrities the public can take?
Nope.
TV today should send people running to their public libraries and bookstores for something substantial to stimulate the brain cells, but noooo. I actually have seen people "veg out" in front of the TV. We have a friend that said he only had 3 channels. I told him he wasn't missing anything; that we have 400+ and there's nothing on them but trash, so he's better off saving his money.
I'll be glad when college football season's back.
This is also a sorry commentary on the state of journalism.
The "arrival" of Beckham and Posh Spice in LA was an entirely manufactured event, planned and scripted months in advance, and involving no "news" whatsoever. Even the crowd bussed in for the events, amounting to a paltry few thousand, was artificial.
Yet USA Today splashed it across the front page, as did most of the major sports publications and websites, hectoring us that this was something we are Supposed To Pay Attention To. No wonder so many people (especially those with respectable IQs) are choosing to just tune out the media; the real world is more interesting than the artificial any day.
College football is not much better than "pop culture" unless you're talking about Williams v. Amherst. The major Div 1 football factories have a bunch of kids who would NEVER get in the school otherwise playing the game for the enjoyment of alums. By the way, I spent a year tutoring football and basketball players at a major Southern university and it was eye-opening to say the least.
"Kill your TV" is a left-wing bumper sticker from 1982.
The History channel, to name but one of the many great channels avail right now has taught me tons about things that are hard to understand if you are only reading books.
Like dogfights. The graphic re-creations are amazing and no book is going to convey that.
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