Survivor Gets Racial

MSNBC was buzzing today with the news that the upcoming season of Survivor: Cook Islands will divide the 16 contestants by race. The game will start with four teams: Blacks, Whites, Hispanics and Asians. All day long there’s been a parade of minorities on the screen. There were two Asian women, a Dominican guy, two black guys, etc., all saying how terrible this is and it’ll set race relations back 50 years and Rosa Parks is turning in her grave and on and on.

How come no one ever asks me?? I think this is great. I will definitely watch the show.

I found the discussion amusing for a few reasons:

• Survivor has been segregating the contestants for years. If memory serves me, starting with Survivor: Amazon, the teams were split along gender lines. In the most recent season, Survivor: Exile Island, the initial division was Old Men, Young Men, Old Women and Young Women. Dividing the contestants by race was the next logical step. I think they should go for broke and have Homosexuals vs. Straight People in Survivor 14. I would watch that too.
  


• Survivor (and The Apprentice, Treasure Hunters, Amazing Race, etc.) are always racial and people are acting like they never noticed. When you have a show in which there are 14 white people and two black people, and people start forming strategic alliances, the black people are fucked*. I saw the reverse happen on that Sean Combs reality show with the aspiring rappers. The white contestants were marginalized so fast, they were in tears, literally.

I’ve been tracking the racial aspect of Survivor for a while now. I had watched a bit of the first season when it debuted, but I never watched the subsequent seasons. I became involved in an online Survivor game last year and I needed reference material because I’d forgotten what the show was all about. I began watching reruns of the earlier seasons on the OLN network and the racial shit was so in-your-face, I started documenting it so that I could blog about it. I took notes, which I will share.

Now, I said I'll watch Survivor: Race Baiters, but I'm cynical. Is there going to be something racial about the challenges as well? The producers always pick black folks who can't swim! I guess that shit is funny to them, watching the black folks coughing up seawater. Fuck that. Contrary to popular belief, there are black people who can swim. Will the entire black team drown??

Here's another scenario: If the producers of the show are smartasses (No! Couldn't happen) they'll pick quartets that have natural intra-racial or intra-ethnic issues. For example, let's take the Hispanic group. Let's say they consist of a Mexican, a Puerto-Rican, a Dominican and a Caucasian Cuban. These people might not have shit in common.

More later...


*Yes, I do know that a brother managed to win The Apprentice last season and a sister did actually win one season of Survivor. I’ll talk about how she managed to do that in the next post. As for the brother on The Apprentice, I stopped watching, so I can’t comment on him in particular, but I can comment about Kwame from season one.

Technorati tags: Survivor | Diversity | Race | Reality Shows

Being Bin Laden

Hey, it looks like Bobby has some competition for Whitney from an unlikely source -- Osama Bin Laden. African author Kola Boof, who claims to have been held against her will as Osama Bin Laden’s "mistress" (she objects to the term "sex slave") says that Bin Laden is a big Whitney Houston fan:

"He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston, and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar. It didn't seem impossible to me. He said he wanted to give Whitney Houston a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives. I tried to hide my outrage at his racist remarks, but it would come to pass that for the entire time that I would be trapped in his palm, Whitney Houston's was the one name that would be mentioned constantly. How beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and her husband—Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women's husbands killed."

Oh my!

Read more...

Technorati tags: Osama Bin Laden | Whitney Houston | Bobby Brown | Kola Boof

LLWS notes: Staten Island team reprimanded for on-air obscenities

From USA Today:

SOUTH WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. (AP) — Staten Island manager Nick Doscher and one of his players were reprimanded by Little League World Series organizers Monday following an incident during the New York team's 1-0 loss to Lemont, Ill., in which the player yelled an obscenity and Doscher responded by striking him.

Staten Island, trailing by a run, had just turned a double play in the top of the sixth when the unidentified player swore as the players huddled in the dugout before the team's final turn at-bat.

The obscenity was clearly heard on ESPN's prime-time broadcast of the game, just before the network cut to commercial. It appeared that Doscher then struck the player with an open hand.

Dang! I think I TiVoed this! I gotta check it out!

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"Did the Patriots' season start yet?"

SWEET!

OMG, I would've been happy with two out of five, but we swept the Red Sox.

I like what this guy from Newsday posted in his blog:

There are things you know you want to say to those obnoxious, annoying Red Sox fans in your office but you're afraid to because you have to work with these people and you fear repercussions down the line. Understandable. I'm here to help. Just print these out and send it via interoffice mail so they can't figure out who it is.

"Ortiz really had an MVP performance this weekend."

"Youkilis hitting behind Manny is the worst protection I've seen since Pagliarulo hit behind Balboni in 1989."

"Hey, Red Sox Nation, you've got a top-notch bullpen up there!"

"Boy that Coco Crisp is one heck of a player. And a much better value than Johnny "10-for-23, 8 RBIs" Damon. Good call."

"I'll have to double-check the box scores, but I'm fairly certain I saw Alex Rodriguez deliver a few key hits in important spots."

"Did the Patriots' season start yet?"

"Dude, Kyle Farnsworth got the save. Kyle Farnsworth! It hurts, doesn't it?"

ROFL!

But God knows, we'll go out west and drop 4 out of 6 to Seattle and the Angels and the Sox will be right back in it.

Read more...

JonBenet suspect heads to U.S. in style

From AP:

ABOARD THAI AIRWAYS TO LOS ANGELES - John Mark Karr, the suspect in the death of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, sipped champagne and ate fried king prawns in business class Sunday after being put aboard a flight to Los Angeles to face charges in the United States.

As Karr wined and dined in style and chatted with the three U.S. officials escorting him, another bombshell emerged: Reports that Karr sought treatment at a Thai sex-change clinic.

This gets crazier all the time. And I still have my doubts that they've got the real killer, but we'll see.

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Do the Math

I was nervous about this five-game death match the Yanks have with Boston starting this afternoon until I did the math. Since we’re currently up by 1-1/2 games, these are the possible scenarios:

5-0: We leave Boston 6-1/2 games in front. Woo Hoo!
4-1: We leave 4-1/2 games up. Solid.
3-2: We’re 2-1/2 up. Livable.
2-3: We’re a 1/2 game up. Hey, a lead is a lead.
1-4: Oops, we’re 1-1/2 games down. We could reclaim the lead again by Wednesday.
0-5: Holy Shit! 3-1/2 down! But we were down by more than that earlier this summer.

I think the most likely scenario is a 3-2 or 2-3 split. Surely we can win two stinking games up there. The key is taking one of the games of today’s doubleheader.

Book Meme

Taken from the Henchmen's blog:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of it and the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag three people

My answer:

It takes a few years for the arch to become permanent. Baby is beginning to use her hands. Her hands are becoming more of a focal point for her. She may open and close them, bring them together, wave them around and move her fingers.

From the "Milestones this 7th week" chapter of Your Baby's First Year, Week by Week.

I'll forego tagging you.

Life on Mars

I’ve found another little TV gem to tide me over until Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Prison Break (new season starts Monday!) return to the tube.

Life on Mars, a fantasy on BBC America is a cop show set in 1973. Only, the main character, Sam Tyler, is really from 2006. While investigating a serial murder case, Sam was hit by a car and when he woke up, he was stuck in 1973, complete with flared-leg pants and wide collared shirts.

Sam believes that in “reality,” he’s in a coma. So he acts funky towards people and doesn’t try that hard to get along because they’re all figments of his imagination, right? However, he’s not completely convinced of that fact. The detail in this dream he’s having is too specific, right down to feeling sand on the hands of the policewoman who convinces him not to fling himself from the top of HQ to prove that everything going on is one big hallucination.

Occasionally Sam gets close to waking up, but either he does something to stay in the dream or something in the “real” world keeps him under and the dream continues on. I haven’t seen all the episodes, but I get the feeling that at some point in the “real” world, one of his loved ones may have to make the decision to pull the plug on him a la Terri Schiavo, since he may be in a persistent vegetative state.

Creepy.

A good show, though I know that I miss all of the in-jokes a Brit would get and I need subtitles to understand what the hell they’re saying. I have to catch up on the episodes I’ve TiVoed.

Take this quiz to see if you’d be able to survive in 1973.

Read more...

Technorati tags: Life on Mars | BBC

New Blog: Sneak Preview!

I spent the weekend porting The Lion’s Domain over to its new site and setting up Wordpress. The site is a work in progress, and it looks pretty good, but the hosting company I’m using absolutely sucks. It takes too damn long to load the blog, even on a T1 line. :(

I have to find a new host and do this all over again.

You can take a peek at the new blog design here.

Abby Cadabby: New Sesame Street Female

Somehow I never noticed back in the day that all of the Sesame Street characters I was watching were male. This is especially funny because I distinctly remember that I liked Ernie because I assumed he was supposed to be a black child. Does this mean that race and ethnicity have always been a greater part of my identity than my gender? Probably.

Anyway, someone must’ve noticed, ‘cause the folks at Sesame Street finally have a female character on the show. Her name is Abby Cadabby. She is pink and lavender-colored, full of sparkles, and she’s a fairy. The creators of the show have made a point of having her be very vulnerable. She can’t fly unless she’s happy, or something.

Is this what girls want? Is this good for them? I wouldn’t have identified with this character at all.

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Gettysburg

Do you hate PowerPoint? Do you think it makes it easy to present good ideas poorly, and make poor ideas look even shittier? Then you’ll love this example of PowerPoint at its worst. Here’s how the Gettysburg Address would’ve gone down if Lincoln had had to do it with a Microsoft product.

Vital Stats

Orlando’s visit to the pediatrician on Wednesday went well. He’s growing nicely. His latest stats:

Height: 25.5"
Weight: 13 lbs. 13.5 oz.
Head Circumference: 43 cm

I used the Baby Growth Percentile Calculator on babycenter.com and got the following results:

Length = between 75th and 90th percentile
Weight = 50th percentile
Head Circumference = between 75th and 90th percentile

Not bad!

He received four more shots. He howled in pain, but he was fine again in a few minutes. He didn’t get a fever later, thank God. He rolled over three times for the doctor and he giggled while she was examining him, so he’s becoming more and more social. At his next appointment (6th month checkup) he should be sitting up on his own!

Unicorns are Rad

Yes, unicorns are rad. And they’re not just for girls -- guy’s dig ‘em too. I blame my co-worker Nicole for giving me the scoop on a male unicorn enthusiast’s site.

An excerpt:

The story behind this is simple I guess... a "fair" maiden coaxed him to lie in a peaceful glade, then held fast to his head while men and hounds leapt out of ambush and cut the magical horn from his brow. Now, he's PISSED!!! Which makes this picture completely and totally rad.

Which goes to show all the wonderful things you can find on the internet. Did you know that there are directions on how to field dress a unicorn? And there's even a site where you can purchase an action figure unicorn that spears a mime!

ROFL!

Read more...

Technorati tags: Unicorns | Fantasy

Dominican Dandies

Is Yankees announcer John Sterling hitting the sauce? He's been getting increasingly erratic this season. It's a daily ritual for the radio personalities on WFAN to mock him, and they're going to have a field day tomorrow.

Just now in the top of the 6th inning of a game where Randy Johnson is throwing a no-hitter, 2nd baseman Robinson Cano hit a homerun. Sterling shouted with glee, "The Dominican Dandies have done it again!"

I'm like, WTF?

What he was trying to say was Cano and his buddy Melky both hit homers in this game, and isn't that great, but "Dominican Dandies"?

Asshole.

Yo, no-hitter through 6. But Randy won't complete this game.

UPDATE: Yup, I was right. It's the bottom of the 7th, the no-hitter is gone and Randy is getting lit the fuck up. They've scored two runs already and no one's out. Joe had to yank him.

Technorati tags: John Sterling | Dominican Republic | baseball | Yankees | Randy Johnson

How the iPod is Changing Major League Baseball

I'm close to buying a new iPod because I'm tired of my Shuffle. I was doing some research and I came across this:

The iPods are changing the way everything works, even in pro sports. Professional athletes have discovered a new use for the iPod: Using it to study their opponents. The Colorado Rockies are using it to check out batting styles. It’s a clever idea: Keep a portable reference of your rivals and study them, with a hard drive that fits in your pocket.

Who knew? But the Rockies still suck.

Read more...

'Superman Returns' director signs TV deal

From Digital Spy:

Superman Returns director Bryan Singer has secured a massive contract to develop new shows for television channel ABC.

In a deal reported to have reached the seven-figures mark, Singer will work on three new scripts, one of which is assured to be a pilot that he will helm.

Talking about his newfound enthusiasm for medium of television, the director explained to The Hollywood Reporter: "You put something together in a quick time frame and get to create something that could have a long-lasting effect. [Also] television has an organic quality to it. Movies are pretty set. TV shows are open-ended, they can evolve over time."

His previous television experience includes developing sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica and also directed and produced episodes of the hit show House.

Interesting. With the success of Lost, maybe ABC has an appetite for pseudo fantasy fare, but mainstream TV has yet to show me that it’s really willing to give straight-up Sci-Fi and Fantasy a chance to build a fanbase unless it masquerades as a drama (as Lost does). The X-Files would’ve been pulled after half a season if it hadn’t been on Fox. Let’s see what Bryan is able to come up with and develop for the small screen.

Technorati tags: Bryan Singer | Superman Returns

Your Comments

There are a whole bunch of comments that I didn’t get a chance to respond to because of my DSL issues, so here they are.

JamaicanQueen said...

Oh my gosh! He has gotten so big! I can't believe how big he has gotten so fast. And look at that smile! You are gonna have little girls calling your house very early!

Yes, people have been warning me about that. What will I do? How does one handle kid stalkers??

A Army Of (Cl)One said...

So Orlando is at the push up stage. How much is the lil guy rolling around or is he crawling yet?

He can’t crawl yet, but he can roll over from his back to his stomach with great effort. I cheer him on when he does it. It’s so cute. :)

Luke Cage said...

Look at dat lil mannnn!!! What's up little guy? Welcome to the Republic!

I’m thinking of dressing him up as a padawan for Halloween!

Thank the Maker

I’m back!

My DSL modem has been reset (after a 45 minute tech support call to Verizon) and I can post again.

Tears of joy!

Technorati tags: Verizon | DSL | wireless | modem

Verizon is Booty!

I never realized how much I depend on Internet access. If I can't get online I can't shop, pay bills or entertain myself.

The horror!! :(

I have to have a one on one with a Verizon rep tonight to sort out what's up with my line.

Technorati tags: Verizon | DSL | wireless | modem

My DSL is acting funky

My wireless connection is crapping out. Sorry I haven’t posted or responded to comments! :(

Technorati tags: Verizon | DSL | wireless | modem