So, it's been a while.

I haven't posted anything lately because I really haven't had much goin' in my life. I came back from my vacation, but nothin' really to talk about there... hit an arcade, checked out a hockey game, watched F1, and played tons-o-Xbox 360. But enough about what's going on in my life, it's time to rant... I haven't done that in a while.

I've been trying to spend more time watching shows with Rebecca that she likes, and I have decided that I want to deck the guy who thought of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" in the face. Because of him, there are no more game shows that don't make me froth at the mouth. It's a friggin' GAME SHOW, there is NO NEED for it to be as dramatic as it is. The worst of these is the show "The Biggest Loser." For those of you that don't know what this show is, it's basically a show about fat people who join a competition to lose the most weight. While I think the premise is... tolerable, the execution of the show makes me want to throw my TV through the window. They spend about 5 minutes telling the viewers about where they are this week. They then spend another 5 minutes of the hour long program showing what these people did in the past week to lose their weight, and it always boils down to running on a treadmill, and eating half of a 6" sub from Subway. The other 50 minutes of the show is spent "weighing in" and "voting someone off" (y'know what, I'd like to deck the guy who invented Survivor while I'm at it).

First the "Weigh In." I don't see why they need to spend the better part of 4 minutes on each contestant weighing them. It seems to me, that it takes all of 10 seconds to weigh myself, and my scale is one of those retarded electronic ones that gets confused if you're not bare foot. I digress; they have the guy/gal walk up to the scale after talking to them for 2 minutes about what they did that week and where they think they faltered. I don't understand why they don't just ask that of the first contestant and then move on because all of the others always say the same thing, sometimes verbatim, as the person before. It's like a weird version of the Telephone Game that never turns into anything funny. Then, after they finish repeating what the last person said, they walk to this scale and stand on it. It throws out random numbers (215, 103, 453, 283) for far too long, then shuts up and is about to throw out the real weight when it goes to commercial. I am scarcely exaggerating when I say they do that for every contestant. When they come back, they find out how much they lost and they are all, to a person, disappointed with how little they have lost. This whole time there is absolutely no levity. There is nothing positive about this whole segment. People are not rewarded for losing the most weight, they are punished for losing the least. That may seem like the same thing, but it's really just different means to the same end and it's just there to make it that bit more dramatic.

Next comes the part where they have to vote someone off. It's not just like a regular game show where if you lose (or in this care lose the least) you go home. The bottom 30% or something like that all have the chance to get booted off. The entire time they are deciding who gets the boot, they are all (and this is not even slightly exaggerating in the episode I saw) bawling their eyes out to such an extent that if I had just flipped to the channel I'd have thought that they all lost their children in some freak accident. Tears rolling off their cheeks and off their chins. For what?! Just because you have to now vote someone off for losing less than you did? It's just a weight loss program, it's not that important. Not only that, but this is supposed to be a competition, in competitions you are trying to defeat your competitors. The point is to win the quarter million is it not? I think if they had their way, they wouldn't boot anyone and split up the $250k between all 20 of 'em. Simply put, I just don't understand why these people would even want to be on this game show.

The thing that really threw me for a loop from all of this was what Rebecca and I were flipping to during commercials. It was a documentary on KVIE about the Apollo VIII mission. The first manned flight around the moon. This was, in my mind at the time, the complete polar opposite to what the Biggest Loser is. These were Manly Men who were actually accomplishing something. They were doing STUFF. And I don't just mean the Astronauts who actually put their lives on the line, but also the flight crew in Houston. What they did mattered and there was no blubbering about what they had done. They just did it. I was sad whenever Rebecca flipped back to see if Biggest Loser was on, but I was spending time watching what she liked, not the other way around.