The really brave new world

I saw Mike Judge’s Idiocracy tonight. You can be excused for never having heard of this movie, seeing as how 20th Century Fox sat on it for two years and released it to fewer than a dozen markets with no publicity last fall, but it is a riotous tale about what might happen if Morons Ruled the World. It’s flawed — a lot of times, the premises are better than the execution and parts of the movie are just frankly bad — but it does bring to mind the lyrics from Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta”:

Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding
The cretins cloning and feeding
And I don’t even own a TV.

Highly recommended as a fun rental. Contains: Monster trucks, garbage avalanches, pro wrestler presidents, lots of fart jokes, Starbucks restaurants that offer you a latte “with release,” tubs of butter, whole TV channels dedicated to self-pleasuring and the funniest Costco reference you will ever see.

P.S.: It’s designed to make you think. Really.

The obsession is back

Oh, Lord, it’s gonna be a long season. America’s obsession with the freaks that pop up when this show gets going every year is just amazing. These early episodes always prove some realities to me: 1) Lots of people are under the mistaken assumption that they can sing; 2) Lots of people who normally can sing don’t do so well a capella; 3) People who can sing a capella, but never have performed on stage, generally aren’t going to do great when thrown in front of TV cameras and lights and told to sing to the most-famous people they’re ever going to meet.

My favorite moment of Wednesday night came when a hairdresser/performer wannabe tried to mousse Simon. That got the usually-off-camera security guards involved right quick. Those guys looked like they could put up a good fight against Jerry Springer’s muscle, and that’s saying something. They chased the guy right out of the room.

By the way, there is no program on television that is improved more than this one by being watched via a DVR/TiVo recording. You can zip right past the most painful and cruel stuff; you can skip the enormous amount of padding that goes into some of the shows; and once the real competition gets going, you can go right past all the results-night crap and get to the meaningful moment. It’s a beautiful thing.

The end, my friend

There are more painfully stupid chapters in recent radio history than I can remember, and every once in a while, some knuckleheaded DJ gets fired for doing something beyond the pale. That’s usually the end of the stupidity at a given station for a while, and ratings-whoring station directors let all sorts of nearly-as-bad stuff go on all of the time, but the Morning Zoo idiocy got somebody killed this week.

According to the AP, 10 people were fired at a Sacremento radio station after a contest participant died from drinking too much water. Now, water-drinking-without-peeing is fairly tame compared to various gross-outs and sex-act contests that have been staged on radio in recent years, but water intoxication can kill you, as the clueless “morning rave” team of KDND-FM found out.

The amazing part isn’t that someone died. The amazing part is that it took so long. By the way, KDND doesn’t go by its call letters. It calls itself “The End.”

Never has a radio station nickname been so unintentionally appropriate.

The all-seeing eye

The Washington Post has a depressing article today about the all-pervasive nature of modern security. Almost every inch of your life is tracked, mostly to allegedly protect you, although it wouldn’t take much for someone with evil on his mind to really mess with your day.

The article caused me to stop and think about how carefully my life is tracked, particularly since I spend so much time online. Let’s see: Get up in the morning, get ready for work, drive to work (‘black box’ in car tracks driving habits; GPS in cell phone discloses location; cameras are all over the Beltway). Arrive at work and put in a day on the job (cameras everywhere; every keystroke on the computer logged; phone calls logged; email saved for years). Head home at the end of the day and stop at the store on the way (more Beltway cameras, more potential GPS tracking, more black box data, plus credit card and grocery store ‘discount card’ records of my purchases). Watch TV (every DVR program tracked by cable company, which allegedly only ‘compiles’ data en masse) or surf the Web (tracked to a fare-thee-well). Go to bed (nothing tracked as far as I know).

It’s enough to give a man pause.

Passing strange

The big news today in the Baseball Hall of Fame balloting is that Mark McGwire got a pathetic 25% or so, which really isn’t surprising. However, I think the biggest news is that, somehow, a half-dozen or so boneheads who allegedly write about baseball for a living didn’t vote for Cal Ripken. In another blog in which I occasionally write, I opined today that this was proof that a few writers had been konked on the head by one too many foul balls.  In fact, I think that any foam-brain who voted against Cal either 1) is trying to draw attention to himself (the favorite tactic of hack writers everywhere) or 2)is too stupid to dress and/or feed himself. Either way, the no-to-Cal vote is more that a little passing strange.