The Deplorable State of Educational Television Programming

I’ll start this post off by offering the following caveat:  I have never watched the majority of the shows mentioned here and never will.  I normally like to be educated on what I am criticizing, but in this case I just can’t.

There was a time, though it’s hard to remember now, when people who were interested in learning something new or educating themselves had the option of watching television to fulfill that desire.  I know television programming is often thought of, both now and then, as a barren wasteland devoid of anything useful or intelligent, but I can only imagine what the people who thought that years or decades ago must think of television today.  Years ago, if you wanted to learn about science or technology, there was the Discovery Channel.  If you wanted to learn about history (specifically, World War II) there was the History Channel.  Or if you weren’t picky and just wanted to learn something, you could turn on The Learning Channel.  Most of television was still shit, but every once in a while, if you sought it out, you might actually learn something.

So what happened?  Eventually the executives at these channels realized that people who actually want to learn things don’t watch television; they read books or newspapers, or just find formal educations.  So they changed their programming to appeal to the people who might actually watch their shows.  As of my writing this, the next three hours on the discovery channel are all Mythbusters.  After that?  A solid 6 hours of American Chopper followed by an hour of Howe & Howe Tech.  But don’t worry if you haven’t gotten your share of chopper programming for the day because then there’s another two hours of American Chopper then an hour of the Howe’s and another Chopper episode before the paid programming starts at 3am.  Tomorrow, a grand total of three different shows will air: Auction Kings, Dirty Jobs, and, you guessed it, American Chopper.  If you watched the Discovery Channel for a week straight you might learn a) a few random facts from Cash Cab b) the answers to some myths that I’m sure have long had you puzzled such as whether you can curve a bullet or whether you can walk on water (dare to take a guess?)  and c) why people from every other country in the world have such a low opinion of Americans.  Personally, I don’t think these are terrible things to learn, but I can’t watch channels that have a Deadliest Catch commercial to interesting fact ratio in the double digits.

So if you’re interested in science and technology, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing left for you to watch.  At least us history buffs still have something to fall back on.  Let’s see what’s on the History Channel tonight (My apologies, it’s just called “History” now.  I guess they’re too cool for channel, but at least they kept the most important part: the history.)  Well, let’s see, from 7 pm to 4 am, when they start showing paid programming, they’re only showing two shows: Pawn Stars and American Pickers.  The former is about a family that owns a pawn shop and the latter is about two friends who go across the country buying antiques and collectibles.  Well, at least no one can accuse them of being the “Hitler Channel” anymore.  Otherwise, History offers a wide array of programs on possible alien life and apocalyptic scenarios from the world’s foremost experts on the subject, such as Nostradamus.  For those of who find this type of programming a little too sensationalist, History also offers programming about two of the world’s most boring and repetitive jobs: trucking and lumberjacking.  There’s only one thing I can think of that could possibly be more boring than driving a truck all day, and that’s watching somebody else drive a truck all day.  I don’t care what you’re driving on: Ice Road Truckers, Lava Road Truckers, Intergalactic Road Truckers, Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Roads: Time Traveling Truckers, it’s still trucking.  The greater your chances of dying doesn’t make me any more excited about your work, it just makes me happier that I’m not you.  If you haven’t noticed yet, none of these programs is even slightly related to history, unless you count people from the past making predictions about the future.  I’m no naming expert, but I think they removed the wrong word from their name.

And then there’s TLC.  To be honest, I feel bad about making fun of TLC because I just feel bad for TLC.  At least they’ve tried to distance themselves from any possible indication that they’re here to educate.  As far back as 1998 they started going only by “TLC”, separating themselves from their former identity as “The Learning Channel.”  For a while they basically became an interior design channel until they noticed the money in reality shows.  Now they’ve cornered the market on shows about families large enough to have been from the 19^th century (Jon & Kate Plus 8 not big enough for you?  Don’t worry, they’ve still got Table for 12 and 19 Kids and Counting (formerly 17 Kids and Counting)) and cake designing shows (but don’t tell that to Food Network’s Ace of Cakes).  Every once in a while they’ll throw in a special about morbidly obese people, Siamese twins, or people who are pregnant that really shouldn’t be.  It seems that the only thing anyone can learn from most of TLC’s shows is how lucky they are not to be the people on the shows.

So what’s left for those of us who still want to learn something?  First and foremost, I would recommend reading: probably books, but there are still some decent magazines and newspapers out there.  For those who are still dedicated to getting their knowledge from television, there aren’t a lot of choices left; you’re pretty much left to decide between PBS and BBC, neither of which has been motivated to air more profitable shows because they’re non-profit networks.  Or you can just do what I do and casually read Wikipedia.

BV


Note: This post was written days ago.  Today's actual television listings may vary.

Cold [ ] Hard [ ] Facts [ ]

Well, the NFL lockout ended this week, which means ESPN's Sportscenter will be bringing back all of our favorite NFL related segments, including one which aired yesterday for the first time since the lockout ended.  For those of you that have watched ESPN in the last 8 or so years, they have one recurring segment that bothers me more than any other (and if you read this blog enough, you’ll realize that that’s saying a lot): Cold Hard Facts.  For those of you unfamiliar with the segment, out of ESPN’s own mouth:

Coors Light "Cold Hard Facts" is a regular feature airing on SportsCenter on Thursdays at 6pm, 11pm and Fridays at 1am. In the feature, one of ESPN's top analysts tackles a "six pack" of questions related to the day's hottest topics.[1]

Shameless product placement aside, Cold Hard Facts really isn’t a bad idea.  During football season, for instance, it could be a great lead-in to the weekend games.  Six interesting facts wouldn’t be hard to come up with: Team B hasn’t won a game against Team B on the road in 16 years.  Quarterback A is has a 52 passer rating when Receiver A, who is injured, doesn’t play.  They could be interesting and offer insight about the upcoming games, and with only six for a whole week, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge to make them meaningful.  Instead they just ask one of their “experts” six questions all of which require answers that are opinions or predictions.  Not only is this stupid and pointless, since it’s the exact same thing they do every day on SportsCenter between highlights, and is in no way a special feature, but it’s the exact opposite of what it promises.  The segment is called “Cold Hard Facts;” shouldn’t it offer something remotely factual?  When I turn on Baseball Tonight I would be upset to find an entire episode dedicated to soccer, not to mention how pissed I’d be if every single show already only ever featured soccer.  Things have names for a reason.  I don’t call my website “Bort Valentine’s Cooking Blog.”  I know it’s just a weekly segment on SportsCenter, but come on, at least try to have it make sense.

On a different note, tomorrow we’ll be introducing our weekly Radio Shack “You’ve Got Questions, We’ve Got Answers” segment where we’ll take real emails sent by our readers and respond with an unrelated Oscar Wilde quotation.

BV

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[1] http://mediakit.espn.go.com/index.aspx?s7=68&id=98

Vegetarianism, Masculinity, and Self-righteousness

                Today I’m interested in sharing with you something that has puzzled me for years, in hopes that one of you can answer my question.  Why do so many people hate vegetarians?  It’s not everyone, it’s probably not even most people, but a good amount of Americans seem to regularly hate on vegetarians.  The usual criticisms vary from calling them stupid and pussies, to arguing that they’re misinformed, to complaining that they’re too annoying.  I can understand if someone is annoyed at a certain vegetarian friend or acquaintance that’s constantly proselytizing or nagging omnivores, but they are few and far between, and the rest of these complaints are completely misguided.  I’m not a vegetarian myself, but I can’t understand how anyone on either side of the issue can be so incensed by vegetarianism.  If anything, they should be praised for taking one for the team and asking for nothing in return.  My guess is that even for most vegetarians, being a vegetarian sucks, but they do it anyways because it’s something they believe strongly in, and as a result, they help the environment which helps everyone.  In short: you doing nothing + vegetarians making a sacrifice -> benefits for everyone (including those who did nothing) -> a lot of people hating on vegetarians and calling them pussies.  There has to be something I’m missing here.

                I’m not going to spend this post going through the merits of vegetarianism, nor is my object to convert anyone to vegetarianism.  In return, all I ask is that you not make this necessary for me by conceding that vegetarianism is on the whole advantageous for society.  Even if you don’t have the slightest care for animals, it is a well established fact that vegetarianism is better for the environment because farming vegetables requires less greenhouse gas emissions and natural resources per calorie than raising meat does.  Okay?  Moving on.

                For the most part, vegetarians are not misinformed about the benefits of their practice.  Among the wealth of sources corroborating that a vegetarian diet is overall more healthy than the average American diet, this position paper by the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada states in the opening line that “vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.”  The concerns about the lack of protein or iron in a vegetarian diet are also largely overstated, as there are a variety of easily available sources of these nutrients within the confines of the vegetarian diet.  Another argument against vegetarianism is that humans are by nature omnivorous, and that a vegetarian diet is therefore unnatural, to which my only response is that I can’t imagine it’s any less natural than loading up cows and other animals with hormones so that they can digest corn and other animal feed they were never meant to eat.

                Again, I don’t mean to lecture on the benefits of vegetarianism; my main focus is instead on the perplexing fact that vegetarianism in our society often carries with it the negative connotations of effeminacy and self-righteousness.  In some ways it makes sense that men often dismiss vegetarianism (along with many other environmental protection efforts: think Prius ownership) as a feminine practice: females make up about a 2:1 majority of all vegetarians.  There’s also some evidence that soy products (common in the vegetarian, and especially vegan diet) may increase estrogen levels in males, though there have been studies coming out on both sides of this issue (not to mention that excess body fat (negatively correlated to vegetarianism) has also been proven to raise estrogen, and consumption of monounsaturated fats such as those in nuts (also common in a vegetarian diet) has been shown to correlate with an increase in testosterone).  For some reason, though, there is a stigma against vegetarianism that goes way beyond this.  Quite simply, eating meat is seen as manly.  Perhaps this goes back to earlier eras when hunting was seen as a man’s job, and how much meat one ate could be tied to their skill as a hunter.  Even in more recent times when meat was far more expensive than it is today, providing meat for one’s family could show that a man was a successful provider.  Still, this hardly relates to eating meat in the present day.  If you’re eating meat from a buffalo that you yourself took down with a spear, I’m more than willing to declare you far more of a man than I’ll ever be, but if you’re eating beef from a steer that was raised in captivity and slaughtered helplessly hundreds of miles away, you’re just another person.  And for that matter, if another man chooses to sacrifice his own taste and social standing to become a vegetarian so that his children can live in a better world, that doesn’t make him any less of a man, if anything it makes him a greater man.  Sadly we live in a world where putting oneself second and sacrificing on behalf of others (in any context outside of war) is considered feminine, and masculinity is determined by the degree to which one consumes food and anything else with no regard for the consequences to oneself or others.

                Finally, we come to the issue of vegetarians as annoying, self-righteous, proselytizers.  First of all, while I have no evidence to back this up, I believe that most vegetarians (the one’s I know at least) are generally humble people who commit themselves to vegetarianism, and leave everyone else to do as they please.  Then there are some who will bring it up occasionally, and may suggest it to someone else, citing their own satisfaction with their experience.  Most of these people will simply drop the subject if you’re not interested in it, and won’t judge you because of it; they’re realistic and understand that it’s not for everyone.  Finally, there is a very small percentage that feels it’s their job to convert others, and make it their goal to do so.  Yes, these people can be annoying, but they make up a very small percentage of the vegetarians out there.  Additionally, they’re not bringing it up because they want to annoy you or make you feel bad, they’re bringing it up because it’s something they feel strongly about, and they would feel remiss not to make some sort of effort on the behalf of vegetarianism.  For those who believe that animals have the right to life, seeing someone eat an animal may be equivalent to watching someone eat another human being (or at the lower end, someone’s pet dog).  I would hope that people who believe that meat is murder would stand up for their beliefs, just as anyone else would if we witnessed our society and courts not just allow, but outright approve of a genocide or mass murder that had been ongoing for millennia.  You want to eat another living animal?  That’s fine with me.  But you can’t bitch about it when you get a short lecture a few times a decade from an outspoken vegetarian.

                I’m not asking anyone to become a vegetarian.  I’m not asking anyone to shower vegetarians in appreciation.  All I’m asking is to stop making fun of them, and at the very least be neutral towards them.  Every ounce of meat they don’t eat is just more for you.  Every gram of CO­­₂ they don't burn is a slightly better world for you and your children.  Every animal they don’t kill takes a little suffering out of a world that has far too much of it across all species.  Yes, it’s annoying to be told you’re doing the wrong thing by a vegetarian, but I can’t imagine how much worse it would be for a vegetarian to be told their doing the wrong thing by some ignoramus.  If nothing else has convinced you, and you still see vegetarians as a group of judgmental pansies, then maybe the best reason not to judge them is because it would make you no better than they (theoretically) are.  I’m not a vegetarian.  I like meat too much, and I don’t like vegetables enough.  If some vegetarian out there wants to think they’re better than me, however, I’m okay with that, because I know they’re right.

BV

Google+: a quick review

It may be just another step in Google’s bid to control the world, but Google+’s newest foray into the social networking world is here, albeit invite only for the moment. Looking like a cleaner version of facebook without all the blue, Plus looks like its developers just shuffled around facebook’s key features and gave them slightly different names (see: ‘like’ vs. ‘+1,’ ‘mutual friends’ vs. ‘friends in common,’ notifications being in the opposite corner, etc.) Coming into the world where facebook is so omnipresent that its vocabulary has entered the vernacular and its interface is fully integrated into our smartphones (read: lives), it was a smart decision for Google+ to closely resemble facebook in appearance. It is certainly smooth looking, and the prospects of its interconnectivity with other Google services like Documents, Reader, Picasa and gmail are enticing (Once activated, google+ becomes a button in the far right corner of the existing igoogle interface).

Yet, the new social network’s main departure of facebook is a big one. facebook’s dominant form of communication is the “wall,” a publicly visible but person specific area that other facebook users post on to prove how witty they are. Instead, Google+’s only way to interact is to broadcast a post akin to a tweet or a status update, directed at nobody in particular (although who you send it to is highly customizable, more on that later.) This not only reflects a worrying trend on the internet epitomized by twitter of people sharing pointless information that nobody gives a damn about, (ex. the app on facebook that shares where you are located at that moment,) but it clashes with the google plus mission statement of making internet communications more life-like. In the real world, we generally don’t just yell random observations from our life to our immediate area, we direct our conversation at individuals or small groups of individuals. While the ‘circles’ feature allows you to choose who receives your statement, it remains an awkward tweet-like item that seems shouted into cyberspace.

Circles is of course plus’s biggest idea, and there google finds their greatest success. It works like this: when encountering a new person on +, you immediately choose which circle to place the other user in. Default circles are: Friends, Acquaintances and Family, but you can create your own for whatever your needs. Then, whenever you share information, you choose which circles to share with. For example, if Juan is my boss and I learn that he has google+, I can add him to my “work” circle, and later when I share a picture of myself funneling a four loko, I will click the “friends” circle to share with, and my job will be safe. Meanwhile, on facebook, my grandfather is seeing pictures of me doing the Macarena in my underwear (the result of a dare, I swear.) The circle interface is a joy to use and exceedingly simple, with drop down menus and drag and drop fun to be had all over the place. Seriously about the drop down menus though, they are just everywhere; clearly the designers had some fun when they were making this thing.

Circles is the best of the Google+’s three main innovations, and it is by far the greatest contribution to the social network community. Sparks, which is weird and confusing, allows you to pick interests and then follow stories about them in a stream-like format. I haven’t really figured out how to use that yet, so I’m not going to talk about it. The third idea, “hangouts” is relatively straightforward. It allows you to “hangout,” which basically means you are available to video chat. Up to 10 other users can then hangout with you, making it sort of like a video conference, but with a chill name.

I should talk about the “stream,” which is like facebook’s news feed but with circles integrated into it. Not only is it nice and clean, and looks pretty much exactly like the newsfeed. By default it displays content uploaded by all the people you follow (everyone in all of your circles,) and on the left there is a menu allowing you to choose individual circles to display. Its pretty nifty and pretty smooth to use, which sort of sums up the google+ experience as far as I can tell. Its been reasonably easy to pick up, and has limited novelty appeal (making circles was fun for about 5 minutes,) but without the 700 million+ users, (not to mention all of their pictures) there is really no reason to choose it over facebook for the time being. The most promising thing about google+ is that it can at least provide facebook with its first serious creative competitor since it dethroned myspace.* With any luck this Zuckerberg and crew will find a way make it so that we can easily choose with whom we share our information, and we will all be saved a couple awkward conversations at family reunions.

*A quick google search notified me that myspace may in fact still be around, who knew? Next thing you’ll tell me is that Friendster is still up and running.

Mundsson