I really hate it when a network advertises “all new episode”s. It would be acceptable if they did it after a break like the Christmas/New Year break, or something, but to do it for each and every episode, or even worse to do it at the beginning of the season is just riddiculus. Those damned promos make it sound as though they are doing us a favor by airing a new episode instead of a rerun or some other crap when actually they must run a new episode, it’s the freaking beginning of the stupid season; airing a new episode isn’t noteworthy, airing a rerun would be! If anything, it displays a picture of the network’s mindset, that they air so much crap and so many reruns, they have to make a big to-do about any new episodes that manage to slip through the cracks.
Day: February 7, 2007
Last-Second Bus-Cord Dinging
I’ve ridden the bus a lot (not by choice), so I’ve seen a lot of people and a lot of human behavior. One thing that has always bothered me about is that many people seem to wait until the last second to pull the stop-request cord. Don’t they realize that if they wait until the bus is only a couple of feet from their stop that the driver may not be able to stop in time? Don’t they realize that if they are too close, the driver may have to slam on the breaks to stop in time which could cause an accident, especially in the winter? Worse still, most of these same, stupid people actually have the nerve to get mad if the driver does miss it and they have to walk back one stop. Use your brain people!
Then What Do We Need You For?
Here’s something that you won’t find American networks—or any network run by people with brains—doing.
It’s no secret that Canada is behind many countries in many shows. We get a lot of shows the same time that America gets them, but there are plenty of shows that we get much later, after even non-North American countries (no we’re not still stuck in the 80’s—unfortunately.)
A couple of years ago I was watching an early season two episode of The Shield on Global. After the first act the first commercial break began and I was shocked by the first commercial. It was an advertisement for the DVD box set of season two of The Shield. I could not wrap my mind around it. Why on Earth would they advertise DVDs of the season of the show that they just began airing? Don’t they realize that if the commercial works and their viewer go out and buy them, then they no longer need to watch the show on the network? Unless the money per capita from the ads for the DVD were at least as much as the cumulative revenue of ALL of the ads per capita from that point on to end of the season, then they would be LOSING money. Duh!
Later on Space did the same thing, except worse. In this case it was with Stargate Atlantis. We get most Sci-Fi shows between six months and two years after they air in America. With Stargate Atlantis we got it more than 1½ years later, so imagine my surprise when Space began advertising the season one DVDs (which were just released in America at the time). This was even worse than Global’s blunder. Did they really expect us to watch Atlantis on Space if we get the DVDs? Did they really expect to make any advertising money from the commercials of Atlantis when they finally aired two years later?
[Canadian] networks are quite good at screwing up, but this was a particularly amusing idiotic behavior.
Jeopardy Questions Not Hard, Obscure
I don’t watch Jeopardy anymore; I got tired of it a year or two ago. This was partly because after Ken left, the excitement was gone, sort of like playing a game where you spend a lot of time building up, then lose and have to start all over again; it’s just not fun anymore.
The main reason however is that I noticed something about the questions. A lot of them are too easy, and the “hard” ones are actually just obscure. Most of the questions that I don’t get aren’t important questions that I should know but don’t, but rather questions that are irrelevant and only a few people in the world would know anyway. For example here’s an admittedly exaggerated, but similar example of such a question:
This woman was my sixth grade teacher.
Who the Hell would know that? I do, my teacher might remember me, and perhaps a classmate or two. Or a closer one:
This was the only animal that Elvis visited the first time he went to the zoo.
Unless that was somehow a noteworthy event like being the trigger for his musical career (I don’t believe it was) or had some other significance that would justify public knowledge, only a few people would know that—assuming they can remember it.
Why on Earth would questions like this be on Jeopardy? Sure they’re “hard” and the contestants will probably not get them, but there’s no purpose to having them. They aren’t knowledge, they are trivia. Trivia isn’t usually appropriate for a show like Jeopardy, it’s more suited to quotes-of-the-day.
Missing English Words
The English language has it’s benefits such as being loosely ruled, which makes communication with it easy since the only important rule is that the other person understand what you say. Unfortunately, it also has it’s disadvantages as well. One such problem is that same fact that it’s rules are loosely enforced since it also makes it hard for foreigners to learn it. An even bigger shortcoming is the lack of vocabulary. Because it is a relatively young language, and despite the fact that it expands faster than any other language, there are still many words that other languages have but which English does not.
- Many languages have different second person pronouns, including a formal (polite) and an informal, as well as a plural; English however has a single one “you”. The lack of a polite form is not too limiting, but the lack of a second person plural is extremely inconvenient. What’s interesting is that there are at least two words that have been created to fill that gap, ya’ll and you’s, but are considered to be illiterate and low-class.
- Another word that Farsi has but English does not is mennat, that conveys the idea that one person is trying to take credit or pass off as a favor something that they did, when it is in fact something that they had to do anyway, something that is their fault in the first place, something minuscule, or other irrelevant action. It is sort of similar to the prank where you “save” someone’s life by for example pushing them off a ledge and immediately pulling them back.
- Some languages—Farsi for one—have a word for the state of being where a person is angry with someone else and among other things, does not speak with them (ghar in Farsi). The closest analog in English is “giving the silent treatment” or “giving the cold shoulder—not quite as eloquent.