Dave Hester — of silly Storage Wars YUUUP! infamy — is of one of those odd, and sadly self-serious, folk who happen to wind up on “reality” television and are then routinely surprised when people like us, who have never met them in person before, yet still know precisely who they are just by watching how poorly they treat others on television. This phenomenon is uncommonly known as “The Kardashian Effect” or, less routinely, perhaps, as “The Mark of Dave Hester.”
Growing up, I had mixed emotions when I saw that a television show that I liked had a celebrity guest star. On the one hand I really enjoyed seeing the celebrity, whether it was Mr. T or Nancy Reagan. On the other hand, there were quite a few negatives that came with the thrill of getting to see our favorite celebrities on the television shows we enjoy.
Continue reading → My Love and Hate Relationship with Celebrities on Scripted Television
I do not like image filtering services like Instagram and their ilk, because the purpose of those services is to change reality and alter in situ facts. Why bother preserving in image if you don’t want it saved and displayed with the highest possible, non-filtered, quality? I recently mentioned my concern in the comments flow for this article:
Here’s what I don’t get about services like Instagram — we always want better cameras with higher megapixel counts and clearer optics — and then many of us “dumb down” those crisp and beautiful images with predefined filters from services like Instagram. Why? If you are preserving a moment in history — why are you coloring that moment, and inherently changing it, to look like a 1970’s Polaroid? Why are you losing all the magnificence of the original shot that your camera is able to create?
Continue reading → Against Instagram and Other Filtering Agents
I grow increasingly distressed that there is a genre of television called reality that is anything but reality, and that there is far more reality to be seen in scripted television than current reality television shows. Case in point — Breaking Amish, a program that shows a group of men and women in their late teens and early twenties that have left their respective Amish communities in order to visit New York City. The reason they are visiting the city is to explore it and to see what life is like outside of being Amish as they have been Amish since birth.
Reality Television bores me now, but what really angers me is when television shows pretend to be honest contests when they’re really all a pre-determined setup from the get-go, just as we have indelibly learned this week with Bristol Palin’s horrible — but she’s staying! — routine on Dancing with the Stars; as well as Nicki Minaj’s fake meltdown with Mariah Carey on American Idol… which hasn’t even officially aired yet!
Websites like Vote for the Worst tend to take credit for contestants like Bristol Palin beating the odds and staying when it is really all about contractual agreements set in stone before the first dance begins:
They said it was impossible… She’s by far the worst dancer; She’s has the personality of a rock; She’s as likeable as the plague. But it doesn’t matter as VFTW and The Tea Party have done it once again as not only was Bristol safe, she wasn’t even in jeopardy! Meanwhile, VFTW and Bristol knocked off Joey Fatone, who even as the worst dancer in N’Sync can dance circles around Bristol.
I am quite far from being anything remotely close to a handyman. Despite having a keychain that resembles a handsaw proclaiming me to be a member of a handyman association (Truth — my stepfather was giving me a key and it came with the keychain that he got as a member of that association, I am really not that handy. Having gotten into a number of HGTV shows in the last few months, I am quite interested in the people that take the houses on the show and transform them from horror shows to amazing living spaces using tools and construction material.
Continue reading → What I Learned from All American Handyman
It really makes me a happier person to see that in a world full of mothers like the Octomom and mothers trying to commit suicide publicly, and even the most obnoxious mother I have ever seen, there are mothers who not only take care of their own children but also reach out and take care of other children — children who have been abandoned and left for dead. They do it because it is the right thing to do, not because the panopticonic camera will be following them wherever they go, snapping photographs of them as they wander through airports and go grocery shopping and pick up their dry cleaning.
Chick-fil-A — a mainstream fast food restaurant and sponsor of a major football bowl game — believes it is a fundamental Christian enterprise first…
I’m not sure how old I was when I first saw the movie When Harry Met Sally — it certainly wasn’t when it first came out as I was only twelve years old at the time and not interested in romantic comedies at all. I do remember exactly how I felt after I finished watching it, however, and that was full of hope that one day I would meet someone with whom I would want to spend the rest of my life.
With every presidential election, the insanity that seems to permeate the air and is transmitted across the country in an almost memeingful manner gets more and more out of touch with reality and goes further and deeper into its own outer space. One candidate bashes the other about an issue while conveniently sweeping under the rug the issues he or she has had with that very issue in the past — and despite how quickly information is disseminated, e-mails seem to be used now more to spread lies than truths. Just this last weekend my father forwarded me an e-mail claiming that there would be a sales tax on all home sales as part of the new healthcare laws and asked me to verify it — and I managed to debunk it fairly quickly.
Continue reading → What Can Be Done about Election Year Insanity?
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