TV shows

Well yesterday was my weekly day off and either all of my readers know that by now, or none of them care. No one emailed to ask if I had uploaded it to the wrong directory, which has happened quite a few times, both me doing that, and me getting emails about it.

As I mentioned in my last blog thing, yesterday was also my wedding anniversary. It went about as well as could be expected when she got up at 4:30 in the morning to go to work while I slept until about 9:00 not needing to be to work until noon. I didn’t get home from work until about a quarter after eight, and she had to be in bed asleep by 9:30. I had left out a card for her before I went to bed the night before, and she left out two cards for me before she left for work, so it is not like either of us forgot the date, it was just not an opportune day for us to really make a big deal out of it. We will likely go out to eat and watch a movie on Sunday as a celebration.

We did both watch the latest South Park episode. It was not one of the funniest ones thus far this season, but there were still a few times when a normal person would laugh out loud. There were also a few times when only a sick, demented son-of-a-bitch like myself would laugh, but isn’t that exactly what we have come to expect from the show? I do wonder how any network would let a show (even if it is animated) get away with having a a child put a supposatory into another child, or let a child dressed like a robot give sexual pleasure to a movie studio exectutive, but if I question it, won’t it be banned? Best not to think about it.

•Watched the latest episode of Survivor just before I started to write this. It was sort of an introspective episode with not a lot happening other than the big ass reward/immunity challenge thing. I was extremely disappointed that they did not show how the picking of the teams went, as they were divided into groups of four before the challenge started. The thing that I found a bit interesting is that it really looked like the team that won the initial challenge is exactly the same four that are kind of the power people there right now.

Boston Rob won the challenge, of course. Now that Lex is gone there is no one there that can match his speed, dexterity and stamina. To be fair the final challenge, for individual immunity, was a puzzle challenge that required only intelligence. Now to be brutally honest. Two of the girls that were trying to solve this puzzle have children that are old enough that they must have been born while the mothers were in their teens. I am not going to go look at the profiles to see if that is true or not, I am just going to say that the average woman who gets pregnant when she is fifteen is not exactly a Rhodes Scholar, if you get my point.

The only saving grace is that it is now following a path that will lead to Shii Ann being voted next week. If you have never watched any of the other seasons of survivor, you should know that the second the votes become predictable, the game gets changed. They have always used new and unique ways to throw a mokey wrench into it in the past, I am expecting them to do something similar with the show next week. If Boston Rob actually wins the immunity challenge he will just have to start shooting the fish in the barrel. I am sure hoping that they will set up a challenge that will really show off the skills of Rupert and Big Tom, if there were an endurance challenge for them to hold a heavy load, say 50 pounds, in front of them, that would be where Rupert and Tom could really win, yet that wouldn’t be fair to the women. Hell, maybe someone should steal Rob’s beloved BoSox hat, maybe that is where he draws his strength.

I have no doubt that they are going to do something to really mix up the strategies with the players in the next episode. I don’t know how they are gonna do it, but I do know that each episode that we watch is actually three full days. I am sure that once they see that it is all getting a bit to predictable they throw in challenged that are geared for the strengths and weaknesses of certain players. That is why they call it “reality t.v.”, because there is nothing real about it.


• While I was writing that little bit about Survivor up there, I went to look for the official site. Once I got to google, a thought occured to me so I just typed in survivor.com. Now, what I thought I would get was the site for the still performing band Survivor, who had their only real breakthrough hit with the song “Eye of the Tiger”, which was featured in one of the “Rocky” movies. Not so, that site can be found Here if you really want to see it. I figured if that was not the site that it loaded that it would obviously be the official CBS survivor site (linked to above) which was also not the case. I am not going to put up a link for what you get to if you simply type in survivor.com because it doesn’t deserve one.

If you go to that address there are pop-ups galore. You feel like you are playing a video game trying to close them as fast as they come up. It tries to get you to download program files and likely gives you tons of cookies (unless you have your browser set to prompt for adding them). That site has been in business for about five years, while the t.v. show survivor has been going a couple of years longer, and the band was popular back in the eighties. This is where I am going to go well away from my normal views of government interference and say that there really should be laws about this.

I watched a show on PBS some years ago (so many years that I can not find it in their show listings at all). There is a practice called “cyber squatting” that people do. They find a name, or a term, or a typo for a name and register that domain. That is all well and good, right, but then what they do is put up tons of Malware, porn and other nasty stuff on a site that is likely to be hit by typing the name in the address bar. That is wrong!

I went to look for a solid example of this and found it in spades. I am not going to post any of the links, since I think this practice is simply atrocious. Just look at any college athlete who is getting a lot of press coverage, then type in that name .com and you will find these ‘cyber squatting’ parasites.

What they do is register that domain name, for less than twenty bucks a year, then put all of the scumware on it. They then offer to sell the domain name back to the person/company who has that name for 100-1000 times the price the registration actually cost. If that is not illegal it should be.

The question that I have is; CBS has a ton of money. They should know that a lot of people, a lot of children in particular, are going to type in survivor.com and expect to see information about the show. Wouldn’t it be in their best interest to go ahead and pay the person trying to extort them to make it so that parents won’t put the word “survivor” onto the list of things that their kids can’t look at?

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