Reality
There’s a new reality show looking for some contestants over in Great Britain. Read the application (in particular question 4 amuses me).
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Lapdance Island. (Thanks to Static Zombie for the link.)
[Edit: it’s a hoax . But of course, the hoax is part of its own TV show.)
Quebec has its own reality show going. Canadian Idol too derivative? (Although what child of a president would host a reality show and show everyone he wears boxers? It’s somehow not surprising this is a Mulroney and not a Trudeau.) How about Pornstar Academie? (You can find the link on your own. Warning: it’s more x-rated than you are imagining, unless you know what Quebec TV is like, in which case it’s less x-rated than you are imagining.)
I don’t generally watch reality TV. It’s sometimes fun, but mostly it’s too much effort to keep characters separate. I watched the first Survivor, which I liked. I watched a few parts of episodes of Joe Millionaire, which I didn’t. I’ve been half-watching Race to the Altar, which I find almost actively offensive at times (although at least these couples were engaged *before* they went on TV). I just don’t understand why you’d sign up to be on one of these.
But then I never understood The Real World, either (I never watched it and it never made sense why people would go on it). When Dave Eggers described how he tried out for it (in that book he wrote which I absolutely, full on despised — I have nothing good to say about it and do not want to hear anything good about it) I thought that if it’s full of people like him, I couldn’t understand how it was even vaguely popular. But then his book did extremely well and is being suggested as summer reading in high schools somewhere.
I liked Invisible Adjunct’s ideas about having academic reality shows a while back. Is it interesting to people? There are books about people’s experiences in law school (at least 1L), and I read one this year about someone’s experience in med school — are there similar ones about grad school? (Yes, I have thought about writing one. No, I have decided not to. But it’s tempting.)
Where was I going with this? Oh well. I’ll claim sickness and slow crappy computer (and slow blog-city — moving to typepad is tempting, especially since my rent’s decreasing and it’s only 5$/month) and say I have no idea where I was going. To buy shoes! Yay shoes! Shoes are more real than television.