Blogcritics Author: Al Crapblog

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Reality TV: Our Stupidity Is Bound To End Us All

Al Crapblog — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 07:06:40 EDT

The term “Reality TV,” when entered into Google, returns 25,800,000 hits. “Reality Television,” another 3,000,000, so just short of 29 million hits altogether. What the hell is wrong with people? Seriously. Albert Einstein said “We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.” I’m sorry Albert, but if you were subjected to The Bachelorette or Joe Millionaire, you too would begin to despair of humanity. If Reality TV is something unpleasant to you, then summertime is the 9th Circle of Hell. While the few scripted shows that still manage to claw their way onto the schedule take a rest, the B-list of Reality TV shows comes to take a dump on our heads. Can you imagine that? An actual B-List of what is already the Z-list of TV shows. That’s when we’re blessed with Dancing With The Stars, So You Think You Can Dance 2 and My Fair Brady, the latter of which I admit I had never heard of until two minutes ago, but it sounds like a true horror.During TV's regular season we have the top guns, and we're mostly all aware of the better-known shows and their concept of entertainment -- watching people eat vile, crawling insects, or bathing in a huge vat of yet more vile creeping, crawling insects, or snakes, or frogs, or piranhas. Well, maybe not piranhas. The standard-bearer, however, for this dreadful spate of swill has to be Big Brother, the very concept of which makes the mind boggle when one realizes that millions watch it: A group of normal people live in a house together and we see them sitting around talking to each other. I am a normal person and my friends are normal people, and if I want to hear a bunch of normal people talking about their normal lives, I can just invite them to my house and actually “live it.” The absurdity of watching a bunch of people I give not a damn about sitting around talking about their normal boring existence is hard for me to fathom. One wouldn’t stay and listen to a table of strangers talking in a restaurant for an hour. So why watch them just because they’re on your idiot box? And never has that term been more appropriate. Fortunately, this phenomenon has no direct effect on my existence, as summer becomes a good time to catch up on missed movies or, God forbid, reading a book. The effect is more one of the sorrow it causes me to know that millions of my fellow inhabitants on this planet crave so little in the way of entertainment. I was going to say that so many of my fellow inhabitants were brain-dead morons, but then I would most certainly be insulting a lot of readers.The point is, as long as the majority of people find this stuff to be entertainment -- and the networks not being stupid, you can be sure that the majority does have a taste for this drivel -- I fear for the future of us all. Hopefully evolution will start taking care of these folks. Since our president has stated, with such designed intellect, that the jury is still out on evolution, we might have to deal with the problem ourselves. In the meantime, I’ll bet he’s an avid fan of The Biggest Loser.

I am an Olympic gold medalist and Nobel Prize winner. I have reached the summit of Everest twice and in my spare time I like to BASE jump. I am also partial to embroidery. My greatest challenge faces me now though - to get people to come and read and comment on my damn blog

Fat People: Poor, Stupid, Americans?

Al Crapblog — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:49:45 EDT

There is a potentially controversial article in today's Sunday Times (UK) about obesity. The article postulates that fatness and obesity are directly related to poverty and ignorance; that rich, educated people are rarely fat. Also, it says, "Obese means not just podgy, but dangerously, disablingly, distastefully fat, as in American fat."I have to admit to having a chuckle when I read that. I am an expat Brit living in the United States. I love the US, so it is not a slight on this country, but no one can deny the preponderance of vast, humongous people shaking the sidewalk as they walk along -- those who actually do walk anywhere, that is. As the article itself shows, Britain is not immune to this problem; they are probably second only to the US. The US certainly must have a problem when Americans are used as examples whenever the conversation turns to obesity. Not just in this article, but whenever I travel outside this country, I find the topic comes up an inordinate number of times. "Oh, you live in America; isn't everyone beastly and fat over there?" To which, after today's article, I can now respond "No, only the poor, stupid ones, apparently." I have two main points I want to consider. First, is the article's theory true? Second, are the parents of obese kids stupid or evil? As for the first point, I am leaning towards it being half true; maybe three quarters. Half true because I buy the notion that the poor find it harder to eat healthily on a purely financial basis. Three quarters because I don't think ignorance or lack of education plays that large a role. It does play some role, so I'm accounting for a bit of stupidity in there with the poverty.We shop at Whole Foods (a healthy, largely organic food supermarket) and Publix (a major supermarket chain). It is patently obvious upon simply perusing the receipts that when we do a weekly shop at Whole Foods, we are paying around $100 more than when we do it at Publix. Healthy, natural foods are more expensive than processed crap. I recently heard an old lady in the checkout line explaining, as though ashamed since no one had asked her, that she was buying a loaf of 20 cent supermarket-brand white bread because it was all she could afford. There is no doubt that it is cheaper to eat like shit. It is also easier, especially if you go for the fast food option ahead of cooking your own cheap, unhealthy crap. It occurs to me that there is also a laziness factor involved here, which no doubt goes hand in hand with the "no exercise" cause of obesity. Better to drag yourself into the car and drive two blocks for a super-sized quadruple cheeseburger than to walk to the kitchen and have to stand there making, or zapping, something. But yes, coming back from my tangent, lower incomes certainly play a part, but lower education?On that one I'm torn. On one side of the question, I have a few friends myself who, though not obese, could stand to shed a few dozen pounds. Most of these are highly intellectual, college-educated people in very successful careers. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are smarter than me, but they would. They are well off and clever; so where do they come into the equation? On the inverse side of the same query, if stupidity played any part in fatness, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Lindsey Lohan would be like a pod of blue whales. So I'm not sure I can agree on that. The one quarter fraction that I gave to the ignorance side of the theory is for those people out there, and I suppose there must be some, who are so ignorant that still now they don't realize that eating crap and living on the sofa results in a couple of extra pounds gained. Other than that, I don't believe any lack of education allows you to never stumble across the information that eating fast food and other crap might be somewhat detrimental to your figure.Now for part two. Are the parents of obese kids stupid or evil? I believe these are your only choices. I'm not talking about anyone who is obese through some kidney condition or any other ill health or accident or even those cases that do exist where the obesity is hereditary. I am talking about obese kids, seemingly nearly always the product of obese parents, made that way by their bad diet. Parents have total control over what their small children ingest, from infancy through to at least early teens. Maybe before that they get the chance to sneak the odd candy bar here or there at a friend's house, but obesity comes from a long campaign of overfeeding crap to your children. So, does this happen out of moronic ignorance or plain Beelzebub-worshiping evil? For surely the obese parents are all too well aware of whatever unpleasantness life throws at an obese person -- from whatever personal feelings of discomfort and actual fatness-induced illnesses or diseases to the mockery of cruel children and the difficulties of getting around in one's day-to-day life. There may be exceptions, but I would be enormously surprised to hear any obese person turn down an offer from a well-meaning genie to turn them into a healthy, fit, thin person. That just wouldn't happen. That being the case, any loving obese parent who, by definition as a parent, would want the very best life possible for their child is not going to want their child to grow up obese themselves, with a catalog of obesity-related diseases. According to the Times article, two thirds of diabetes cases in Britain are of the avoidable type 2 associated with obesity. Obesity increases your risk of having major illnesses such as stroke, heart disease, some types of cancer, and osteoarthritis. Clearly no parent wants that for their child. All that said, I now state that any parent who knows the effects of a bad diet and yet still stuffs their children so much and so often that they become obese at such a young age is either irretrievably stupid (they really don't know the effect that their diet will have) or unconscionably evil (they know but still willingly opt to give their children a shorter and more unpleasant life than they otherwise could and should have had).