(THIS is reality tv I can get behind. If only the rest of the format had such obvious… talent.)

I know I said that my festering, moldy faith in humanity was entirely extinguished when Argentinians were sending death threats to a psychic octopus in Germany over soccer. There was no recuperation time between the words in that sentence for my species empathy to deal with the rapid-fire asinine. Every facet, every syllable of that collection of utterances, contained so much wrong that I saw no recovery for us as a people. My belief in the essential goodness of man flat-lined then, and I assumed all was lost, and I would spend the rest of my life waiting for the day we all worked in tandem to drown the human race in something that would really embarrass us throughout the galaxy, like Mrs. Butterworth’s or melted popsicles. But over the weekend, people began to puzzle me again. An aspect of human behavior actually made me think, and against all sound reasoning – selfless and with no thought to my personal safety – I followed my brain cramp down the badger hole as far as it would take me.

Like all great lines of reasoning, mine starts at People Magazine, where Hills star Kristin Cavallari offers, without even the courtesy of a spoiler alert, the biggest shock of, perhaps, this modern age post-Christ. Second, of course, to when I learned that Woody Harrelson is getting way more tail than any of us combined:

“Nothing you see on TV is real,” Cavallari, 23, tells PEOPLE. “Fans need to understand it’s all entertainment. It’s all in fun. I would never put my close friends or a real relationship on a show.”

Let’s get this straight: if you ever watched five minutes of The Hills and thought a millisecond of it wasn’t meticulously scripted, sponsored, planned, airbrushed, and filmed… If you thought you were experiencing life and love, joy and suffering with these people – and this is no judgment on your character – you should start fund raising, because you are uniquely qualified to board the short bus, express to Elected Official Town. You’re that special kind of mongoloid they keep in padded basements because you are a danger to yourself and others. And to those with the capacity to believe literally anything people tell you, I have only this to offer: Icy Hot feels really good when you rub it on your balls and/or clit. Of course The Hills isn’t real reality teevee! They’re all too genuinely pretty, and i could spend the rest of the day berating you, but that brings me to the part that seriously confuses me. What the fuck is up with reality TV?*

I know its a question that’s plagued intelligent people for coming up on 20 years, but I want to make a confession. Some time ago, I made my peace with reality television. Something finally clicked for me, and while it never became my cup of strange urine, I got it. With the advent of The Real World and Road Rules came television for morons-by-choice, that species of dingleberry that can afford to be willfully ignorant of book-learnin’ and the world around them. It was either because they were rich, or because they were so strikingly attractive that people bought things for them, or both, which really is just the true crime of the century. And they deserve entertainment too, which is why reality television came along, so that the dumb jocks, the ditsy assed cheerleaders, and the insufferably boring could relate to the characters they saw without having to waste their precious few braincells on useless minutia like symbolism, plot structure, meta-details, etc. Fat chicks could pretend that, if they cared deeply enough about these real people, that they had popular friends. Closeted teenagers could experience all the drama they so desperately craved without coming out and risking becoming walking hate crimes everywhere they went (this was the early nineties, after all). No matter what, this shit was solidly marketable, even into the sticky, sulfurous depths of over-saturation,  and that commercial viability relied one very important factor: everyone was slammin’. Topics like taint-rash (clinically: grundelous itchysaurus) and barely alcoholic anise liqueur, things that would alternately bore and disgust any other human being, sounded downright interesting out of the mouth belonging to the fake double Ds you were staring at. Viewers would pay rapt attention to a man talking about how he does his hair because he was pretty and because, frankly, Murphy Brown was way too confusing. Oh, let’s face it, these people would need the Cliff’s Notes to an episode of Designing Women or Full House.

So, wait, is the black guy banging Delta Burke? Why is he always there? Does he like floral upholstery?

So, that was all good. Without The Real World, MTV would have ended up showing C-Span reruns with color commentary by Carson Daly, since music was out of the question, so you were going to be flipping past that channel anyway. Let the D students have their fun, and if you happened to catch some masturbation fodder on your way past it, so much the better for everyone except the angels you killed. As predicted, the virus spread, because it was cheap as hell and required no effort to make, a formula that dollar signs are attracted to like maggots to the improvised amputee experiment in my basement. Soon, every channel had reality shows, even the supposedly educational ones like History and Oxygen, and the beautiful people you were replacing your spouse with when you closed your eyes during relations were spewing their beautiful absurdities across the airwaves.

But, reality fans, now that it’s 2010, what is the fucking deal with your chosen format? Look at this objectively for a minute. These are the people you’re glued to your television over in this, the third decade of rtv’s existence:

This is not, in fact, a collage from arts & crafts time at the home for the deranged.

I know you don’t like to do this, but try to concentrate. What do all of those people have in common, beside fake tans? If you guessed, “They are all insurmountably, devastatingly fugly,” you should buy the Scumbag Style home version game, because your friends will be impressed that you’ve finally found something you’re good at besides getting herpes and pounding energy drinks.Yes, those people are genuinely aesthetically unpleasant,* and suddenly reality stars rutting indiscriminately, trading VD and hair gel with each other like bubblegum cards with each other loses a bit of its luster. The truly befuddling part of this is that reality fans don’t see it. To make up for the fact that these people couldn’t get past the bouncer at a Chick-fil-A, they paint these people up with tans and makeup, and give them damaging perms and eyeliner Marilyn Manson would call a tad whorish. They are literally wearing masks! If you think these people are actually attractive, you probably thought Alf was a fucking documentary.

Have we truly run through all the beautiful people with no self respect? Have we, with our insatiable thirst for vacuous pap, deflated the nation’s supply of superficial narcissists to shells of their former hollow selves, resembling a pile of used condoms more than actual people?  Or did we just lose them to the titty bars that can offer more dignity to the aspiring attention whore? Every day a new crop of reality shows enters the pseudo-entertainment landscape, pushing up the corners of our television consciousness like mutant weeds on a stone tiled patio. But – and I genuinely want to know this – what pillar of shallow callousness have you invented to support it, now that all your hot sluts are used-up dish rags for Paco to sweep off the floor of Lot 8? Because the industry must be doing well, it’s everywhere! Look, as an example, this piece about the “winner” of The Bachelor was in the real actual news:

Vienna Girardi’s ex-boyfriend Lee Smith has once again cashed in on their on-again, off-again relationship–that he says overlapped with Vienna’s engagement to Bachelor Jake Pavelka… “We were in my truck hooking up, her shirt was off and Jake just kept calling over and over again,” Lee told Radar. “She said, ‘I can’t just ignore his calls or he’ll freak out and call every minute.’” (HuffPost)

So she’s a whore. The show is months over and she is still using her cooch for money and fame.  That was news when the girls on these shows looked like the girl next door you spied on when she did camel-toe pilates in the back yard,

Spoiled because nobody ever told her, "Hahaha no thanks."

operating the binoculars with one hand, and not like some baggy eyed emaciate that fell face first off the train to Auschwitz. There might have been some anthropological interest in deciding why a 10 might have low enough self-esteem to put herself through the gynecological rigors of a reality season and its aftermath, but everyone knows dogs need physical intimacy to replace the real emotional connections they feel incapable of creating with anyone other than their many cats. They do anal on principle and the second date. No amount of hair and makeup doctors can hide the fact she’s not good looking, and yet we all seem to be pretending she is. So I ask you again: how do you, the fans, justify this? What the hell is so interesting about this that you will sit through a half hour of product placements and corporate brainwashing to see it?

It certainly isn’t the writing, which in true reality television means concepting, I suppose. Not only does the viewer have to look at someone they could see walking down the street on any given day in rural Tennessee, they have to deal with the most insufferable, from-concentrate, packaged loutishness out of the mouths of these fugmos. Do you genuinely give two shits about the nuptials of the middle-aged third banana from a spin-off of another reality show based on a terrible menstrual drama no sane person ever watched? Because that’s what you’re getting on Bethenny Getting Married. Why should I care about the cat fights and infidelities of rich old cunts (Real Housewives of Orange County) who have to create adversity because life isn’t handing them enough? Why do I have to see how they do it in different towns (Real Housewives of Everywhere Else)? I literally hate you for populating the earth with 13 small versions of you, and you think you can bitch at me about how hard it is to raise them? Drown the little bastards, and put some fucking Star Trek reruns on. The Bachelor seems to me to be less of a contest than a game of Russian Roulette with the bullet being a towering stack of illegible divorce papers to wade through in three months. Tila Tequila is not, in fact, hot; she only lasted because you all thought you’d see some lesbian shit on basic cable, when, if you throw down for Cinemax, you can see actually attractive chicks go at it nightly. If throwing a bunch of tards in a big apartment isn’t holding your viewers like it did in ‘92, and your solution is to grasp at flimsy devices – devices like  “Who has the constitution to blow Flava Flav” – then maybe you should go back to being a Bon Jovi roadie.

Jersey Shore would be an incredible metafictional exploration of the limits of the reality subculture, a sociological experiment worthy of the attention we give the drug culture from 50 years ago, except for one thing: The target audience. You can meticulously arrange your elements so that the true-to-life action you capture on camera is a vivid criticism of reality television from the POV of an avid and honest fan, but as long as you put it on MTV it will be like serving vichyssoise to a starving homeless guy. The apparent star of Jersey Shore, Snooki, is the walking summation to this entire argument:

The smallest Jersey Shore guidette told the senator’s daughter [in an interview that could only have been conceived from the dastardly mechinations of Satan's masturbations when he's on pot] that she voted for McCain in 2008 because, “he was really cute and I liked when he did his speeches.”

Indeed. I wonder, if Elizabeth Cady Stanton could see forward in time, would she put a revolver in her mouth before or after Seneca Falls? Assuming Snooki’s motivations were even slightly defensible – and assuming she could name one thing about how he “did his speeches” outside of lulling her to sleep like a grandpa with a worn copy of Goodnight Moon – assuming all this, McCain was the cuter of the candidates? I thought you reality girls all feel a terrible emptiness inside when a big black cock isn’t lodged firmly in your derrieres. Maybe she has a thing for stubby arms and comb-overs, but these considerations all become moot when you see a picture of this bitch.

They don't make enough watery Bud Light for anyone to call this any more than a 2

Oh, I’m sorry, were you talking? I was just spacing, thinking about a culture that glorifies shallow idiots that aren’t even remotely attractive. You know, the kinds they used to put in homes as the malfunctioning piles of hardened genetic stew that would never be of any use to society whatsoever. We treat our mentally challenged people better nowadays, but we don’t need to be putting them on television when shows like Arrested Development get the ax. We already redefined talent to include “being hot,” we really don’t want to have to open the books for you dumb assholes again. As long as you, the reality tv fan, continue to absorb this schlock like a musty sponge in red wine vomit, it will never be commercially viable to bring intelligence and wit to people who like to use their brains. And that’s fine, we’re good to go read a book, but if this shit is going to continue to exist, conquering cable and network wholecloth like the machines in The Matrix, we’re really going to have to ask for just one damned good reason.

*I’m not even talking about the fashion ones or the singing ones or the cooking ones. At least an argument can be made that those showcase some kind of talent.
**That’s not even the worst of it, I just don’t know the genre enough to look up pictures of specific painted up monsters I’ve surfed past recently.

By Sean “I Care About Facts” Torrie

(Nail on the head, good sir! And with all the cultural sensitivity of mercilessly tickling a child of Thalidomide.)

I love the Tea Party Movement. I really do, I mean that. I’m a huge fan of a free show; this is why I go to the mall after I’m done with all my Christmas shopping, just to watch other people look insane. I feel like the Tea Baggers have all the potential to pull the severely retarded members of the Republican party out and into a third team and maybe we’ll have at least one political party that can function without a complete and undisputed majority, or without referring to their dark master for instructions on how to further deplete the United States of post-Enlightenment thought.

What I really enjoy is the complete lack of research with these folks. Are there any economists in this team? Is there a single lawyer who hasn’t been disbarred?

“Oh Sean, you’ve just been reading the wrong sources, you’ve been corrupted by your generation’s hard-on for ‘hope,’ and ‘yes you can’.”

No. But fuck you very much for judging me. I voted for Nader. I did it with a smile on my face because this Obama guy seemed too idealistic, and McCain TOTALLY SOLD OUT TO PANDER TO THE FAR RIGHT REPUBLICANS. I dug McCain as a presidential candidate, until he became a presidential candidate.

I’d have also loved to see a New Yorker in the White House, but Giuliani is a whore.

I’ve digressed.

Do you know what happens with the ginormous bank that you borrowed money from becomes bankrupt and has to close down? The answer isn’t that you get to own your partially paid for house. I’m not even sorry, you’re a nitwit if that was your answer. Your house gets sold and you get much, much less than a fair notice of eviction. Odds are good your house will be purchased by a less ass-backwards corporation who will know to demand a higher credit rating than the bank did, and either way you’re homeless. Then the government can pay for the construction of a few million shelters. We saw how well they did with that task in Louisiana a few years ago. [All dirtying up the Superdome with the filthy riff-raff and assorted hoipoloi - ed.]

I think it is pretty fair to say that the bank bailout was with a great deal of the “representation of the people” that the Tea Party claims a lack of. If your concern with this is a fear of socialism then you have a series of other concerns to address: like the fact we’ve been a socialist republic since the ’30s, or that while socialism is communism’s cousin, it’s communism’s cousin that got a degree in stable economics, not totalitarian politics.

“But Sean, the Nazis were socialist, that makes it bad, right?”

Ok. This is important, kids, and I think it is something everyone should know: under the correct temporal circumstances, everybody is Hitler.  I’ll shorten Godwin’s Law for you: The first person to bring a comparison to Nazis into an argument loses. It’s a god damned cop-out. You’re not thinking creatively enough to be winning an argument and have not only lost that argument, but for the sake of argument, all of your friends and loved ones because they don’t respect you anymore.

Lemme tell you about Nazis for a minute here. The fun things. Nazis had one of the strongest nationwide anti-smoking campaigns in history. That’s right, they were militantly against smoking cigarettes. Hitler was a vegetarian. He didn’t eat meat because he felt it was cruel. Hitler was also militantly loyal to his girlfriend. They got married like 2 days before his documented suicide. Never cheated on her. Ever. Period.

To be fair, his hobby of making adorable striped pajamas for mice didn't leave much time for browsing JDate.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if you wanna worry about Nazis, then I’d be far, far more concerned about a pair of unmarried heterosexual life-partners who shop at Wholefoods, than a blink-of-the-eye decision to save a few million homes by throwing money at a failing bank, in order to protect the people of a nation. Frankly, people who shop at Wholefoods kinda make me uncomfortable anyway. Stop taking Eastern thought and forcing it down my throat with your Western approach of indoctrinating everyone around you.

This, however, again brings me all the way back to the point I was working to.

I’m a New Yorker. I’m amazingly proud of it. We are an aggressive, mean spirited, and cutthroat people who live (in the metropolitan area, anyway) in one of the wealthiest, most intelligent (average IQ here is the second highest in the world – and I hear living in Tokyo is hell) places on earth. Despite this, our local economy is in the gutter and now we’re taxing the living hell out of cigarettes, with a 20% increase that rolled around on July that will be impacting the entire state (not just the civilized part) and there’s word that Nassau county will be pushing another raise shortly, and further word that there’ll be a beer tax soon. Happy 4th of July: it’s $14 a pack in Manhattan if you wanna celebrate liberty in flavor country.

Now in one of the wealthiest states in the union, certainly we’re the only one with our own central bank, I find it impossible that it is a lack of proper funds responsible as much as an overt mismanagement of finance, and a nurturing attention to pork fat spending. So that, let us just assume, it isn’t so much that we don’t have enough money to run the county, as much as  the elected officials need to eat vegetarian meals with their long-term monogamous sexual counterparts, and not smoke cigarettes after sex, only to later ensure the county pays for the new story on their home, and corporations can jump through a tax loophole and not distribute their wealth. This, my dear readers, is some overt taxation without representation. Meanwhile there was a near-miss vote to close a school in the local district? Call me silly, but education seems kinda important to me. Undereducated people is how you get a standard for education lowered in a region: poorer performance becomes acceptable in colleges, and dumber (or socially ignorant, and therefore morally complacent) people getting business degrees, running the economy into the ground and causing a need for a bailout.

BA-ZING!!! How does he do it?

Now I get that the whole Tea Party thing is a primarily Midwestern thing and all, so would someone mind if I borrowed a small army of unemployment-beneficiary rednecks that are anti-socialism so that I can host either a protest or riot (whatever happens, right?) to get my cigars (sorry, if I’m putting a phallus in my mouth, lighting it on fire and nurturingly puffing on it, it’s gonna be HUGE) back down to a reasonable price? New York’s governor is black and blind too! So that should be all the motivation they need to really get going.

(Those Russians, always looking out for us.)

This oil spill in the Gulf has justifiably been the biggest story this past week or so, and the conspiracies surrounding the blame game have been the stuff of Dan Brown’s most punishing nocturnal emissions. Was it an act of God, as Texas governor Rick Perry suggests? Robert F. Kennedy reminds us that anything a Texas governor says falls squarely in the realm of “bullshit a squatting Sarah Palin couldn’t produce on a steady diet of prunes and Metamucil,” (it was Cheney’s fault, bt-dubs). Was it Obama getting tired of throwing Alka Seltzer at seagulls, and opting for a more efficient chocolately genocide? Who cares really? Just show me where to sign up to help clean the oil off those poor exposed New Orleans breasts. I just want to be part of the solution. The Russians would like us to know they also don’t really give a shit about the whys, and that they have a Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius solution for us.

Why not just nuke it? “It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities,” added Moscow reporter Julia Ioffe. (The Raw Story)

Oh, hey, good idea, we should totally – - HEY, WAIT A MINUTE! Anybody else feel like Russia is grabbing our arms and making us hit ourselves, like a bored older brother who just declared a tickle-fight cease fire? Sure, comrades, we’ll get right on nuking ourselves. In the long, impoverished wake of losing the Cold War, Palin’s pesky neighbors have gotten all crafty on us. It’s like they just woke up from the biggest, 30 year vodka bender, and realized they hadn’t turned LA into a pile of glowing rubble yet. Good thinking, though. Seriously, why bomb someone if you can get them to bomb themselves? You got to get up pretty early in the morning to make Americans go all Three Stooges and poke all our Floridian old peoples’ eyes with the Hiroshima Finger. Check your time zones, we get up WAY earlier than you.  Not to mention, the whole situation gives Tar Baby a hysterical new meaning. You know, because it’s black and liquidy, and it tricked the bunny… go read a book, douche.

“The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers. KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals.”

“Is no big deal, okay? In Russia, we use plutonium to clean cars, make super shining. Vladimir can’t afford toothpaste, he uses spent plutonium.* Cannot even look him directly in face, so shining. We have cocktail called Tall Furry Hat, is vodka, plutonium, and fly agarics all shooked up. Gregory Rasputin used to put in his cereal.” Who do you think you’re kidding, Russia? Somebody ask Jack Bauer what he thinks about this. Oh, wait, he’s already torturing people. Such a go getter, that guy.

Even if the Russians aren’t screwing with us, and they are genuinely giving us some advice on how to blow up our problems like so much Afghanistan (I bet they loved that), are we seriously considering taking advice from the Russians? For all we know, all that subterranean, horror movie strip mining is what made them all third world, fucked up cartoon enjoying crazies. How else do you explain an entire country thinking they were hosting the 1980 Olympics, when the U.S. clearly told them they weren’t? Or these features of a Moscow playground:

(Hey kids, come play on the freakish octopus monster in a top hat! Or, if that made you need to change your diaper a dozen times over, how about the terrified giraffe’s vagina?)

To be fair, the best British Petrolium has come up with is the “crumb under the refigerator” plan, sweeping the oil spill under a big dome and hoping nobody will notice. Shouldn’t there be some other ways of fixing this thing, other than covering it up and pretending it’s not there, and bombing the bejesus out of it? Like, couldn’t we build a giant robot monster that runs on crude to suck it all up? Then another giant monster to kill it when it goes all Mecha-Godzilla on us? Or we could just do it nature’s way, and sop it up with all of the world’s seagulls. Throw all the pigeons in too, get all the flying rats out of the way at once. Annoying bird death, tuppence a fucking bag. I know these plans are remarkably short sighted, but I’m not the president. I’m just trying to help. Also, I hate seagulls. Those are my goddamned fried clams, you squealing mass of God-fail and white poop.

*Thanks Mick.

Who dat say dey gon’ beat dem Saints? Well a third grade grammar book and some pretty bad rain. But NOT the Indianapolis Colts, and that’s so good it ranks up there with the dark haired girls winning in a nude wrestling match against the blonds. I may sound like a broken record here, but Peyton Manning is not clutch. He’s proven it time and time before, and despite his trophy, the rest of his team won him the last Super Bowl, and his MVP status was purely a customary tug job. This time he couldn’t even pull out a close game against a team he had every reason to expect to dismantle and sell for parts. I think this legally qualifies management to take him out back and put him down because now he’s just sitting around, eating the food, smellin’ up the joint, and doing Oreo commercials, and the neighbors are starting to complain.

Oh, and congratulations aging The Who holdout fan, your boys managed to beat the momentum of the night over the head with an aluminum walker. Who are you [uh-hah], people that halftime show was directed at? Are you real people, or is the marketing director over at the NFL the Grim Reaper? The nursing home entertainment shuffled around wearing dementia like a checkered fedora through an uninspired, overly indulgent medley of the tunes their record company assured them were hits, when honestly I have never met anybody that enjoys any of those songs save a drunk Anthony Zuiker. At least Prince had the grace to wonder why the fuck he was there, and played a Foo Fighters song in honor of the band that should have been playing the halftime show. You know what I flicked to, after literally 4 seconds of The Who’s garbage rambling? The fucking “Puppy Bowl” on Animal Planet featuring 8 week old canines and hamsters in a fake blimp with more of a concept of entertainment value than Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend combined. Puppeeee TOUCHDOWN! You know what makes for badass, timeless rock? A kid who can play pinball and a seriously loose reference to “my generation,” that somehow still dates itself despite its vagaries because most people of that generation had the decency to die.

Which brings me to a much larger point: when did the Super Bowl stop being about football? Was it necessary that I sit through the talentless Queen Latifah singing “America the Beautiful” with a chorus of bored children before I watched Underwood butcher the national anthem (albeit in the sexiest way someone can butcher something without their tits out)? Exactly how many hours of New Orleans footage did you have to show to justify dragging all those cameras down there, and is that number inversely proportional to how many gold teeth the randos you interviewed were sporting so stylishly? Was it necessary to have that chick interview the three Saints defensive heroes with dumbfuck questions like, “If you had a time machine, what period would visit.” Although in her defense one of them said The Dark Ages because we know what happened before and after but the Dark Ages are dark to us. Anyone dumb enough to make a statement like that should immediately be given the plague and forced to sit through an Everyman play. Mayhap if you asked him about football, we would have heard something half intelligent, and I wouldn’t be left wishing a slow, humiliating death on whoever’s call it was to let women journalists anywhere near a football field. We’ve gotten so up our own asses trying to make the Super Bowl a family event, with something to appeal to all audiences, that we’ve left actual football fans behind like Richard Dawkins on apocalypse day.

Speaking of football, some was played in between commercials yesterday. The Saints didn’t come out swinging, but they finished strong and clean. Drew Brees and his crew have been exciting to watch all year, and I admit to being one of those Saints-philes that would tongue metaphorical dingleberries from their metaphorical cracks if they got itchy. This is all not to mention that there is no greater pleasure in the entirety of the NFL than watching Peyton Manning straight up eat it, and that was reason enough to get out of bed at all yesterday. Man were we stirred up into a panic by what Tim Tebow’s mom might say, and beside that fact that airing it at all was an unethical statement condoning bigotry and intolerance, it was really kind of harmless in and of itself. People are rip shit that it aired at all, but then people need to get a job or a woman that shaves her legs or something. How do you get mad about something that can’t be changed? Well, Peyton Manning can’t change that he’s a wussy little bitch, and I’m alright with him being angry about that. He should bring his mom in for an ad where she wishes she’d had that abortion.