Archive for January, 2008

Did anyone from Fox watch Moment of Truth before it aired?

January 31, 2008 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Gripes, Moment of Truth, Television, Waaah! I'm a whiner!

I like reality shows. I don’t watch them all. I’ve never seen Amazing Race, Dancing with the Stars , Big Brother, but I do regularly watch Survivor, Apprentice and American Idol. One new show that piqued my interest this season though was “Moment of Truth,” where contestants are asked potentially embarrassing questions and their answers are verified (or not) by a previously administered polygraph test. Sound cheesy? Definitely, but I thought it would be at least somewhat interesting.

Unfortunately for Fox, this show must have been rushed to air. After just two episodes, I don’t think I’m going to watch again. It’s not that the concept itself is bad (i.e., a pseudo-scientific game of truth or dare, without the dares). It is sort of interesting to see how some of the contestants answer various questions. The first guy, a football player, admitted to checking out other guys in the locker room and to questioning whether his wife was truly his “life partner.” Seeing what people will admit to to win money is interesting, in some weird voyeuristic way.

But MOT has substantial, glaring problems in its delivery.

First, the show is edited with way too many long pauses, apparently intended to create drama. When the question is read, usually the contestant hems and haws a bit, then answers the question. That part is ok. But then, this female computer-ish voice comes on and says, “That answer is………<long pause>…………true (or false, as the case may be.)” This delay might add some drama when the contestant denies something pretty bad and seems a little unsure of himself when he does. (Even in that case, the delay is too long.) But when the contestant admits to the bad or embarrassing thing, are we supposed to be sitting on the edge of our seats wondering if he lied when he admitted to something shameful?

This problem is worst during the first 6 or 8 questions. Like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” the contestants are allowed to leave at any time, taking the money they have thus far earned with them. To warm things up, the show starts with a few softballs: “Have you ever called in sick when you really weren’t?” kind of questions. Sure, it might be somewhat embarrassing to answer that,but the audience is just going to laugh, because they have done the same thing. No one is going to be shocked–shocked!–at such a revelation. So why not rush through those questions and get to the good ones, already?

The second problem is with the rules. The money is awarded based on the number of questions answered. The contestant has to answer a certain number of questions truthfully to get to $10,000. Then $25,000, then $100,000, and so on. If the contestant is deemed to be untruthful, he loses everything. They would be smart to tweak the rules to let the contestants have at least one mulligan. I don’t think many people will risk 100,000 bucks to try to answer the harder questions. It’s not so much that most people wouldn’t reveal bad-ish stuff for tons of money, but most people realize that polygraphs aren’t completely reliable and a lot of the questions involve a judgment call. That kind of uncertainty means that most contestants will quit when they get to a someone big level rather than risk losing everything. The result will be rarely getting to the (presumably) really hard/good/titillating questions at the higher levels. It would be like Millionaire, only everyone quits at $32,000 and answers only the gimme questions.

What surprises me is that no one involved with the network or show must have previewed it in its final version. This show was hyped up big-time by Fox and given a lead-in by American Idol no less. With that much invested, it might have been a good idea to actually watch the show a time or two to see if it’s entertaining.

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Helpful parenting tips

January 25, 2008 at 4:50 pm · Filed under funny, parenting

I am a father of a 4 year old boy and a nearly 6 month old girl. While I think I’m a pretty good father, everyone could use some help honing their parenting skills, so I occasionally check up on the internet to make sure I’m doing it right. I found these really useful tips that I wanted to pass on to you:

Bonding with BabyPutting Baby to Bed

I found these on this funny blog, which has a link to this book with the original pictures. It would make a great gift for good parents with a good sense of humor or for really, really bad ones that need to improve their parenting skills!

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Celebrity Apprentice is surprisingly good

January 11, 2008 at 5:01 pm · Filed under Apprentice, Celebrity Apprentice, Gene Simmons, Television, The Apprentice, Trump

I really liked The Apprentice (Donald Trump’s ego-piece reality show) for the first few seasons. I’m not terribly athletic, though I enjoy watching and participating in sports, so Survivor type reality shows, while fun to watch, don’t really let me put myself in the shoes of the contestants. But when TA first aired, I enjoyed watching because I thought, “I could do that.”

Then the show took turn for the worse. The beginning of the end was the live three hour finale of the second season when Donald Trump started asking audience members and surprise celebrity guests (Donald’s good friend Regis!!!) who they thought he should hire, insisting that he hadn’t made his mind up. Unfortunately for the blonde-female runner-up (whose name escapes me), the audience and celebs overwhelmingly supported the ultimate winner (whose name also escapes me.) You had to feel kind of bad for the runner-up, sitting there on live television while everyone talked about how she was terrible compared to the other guy. The whole affair was bloated, self-congratulatory and boring. I thought, “This show is played out.” I kept watching, but not many other people did and the show was briefly canceled after last season’s debacle where the losing team had to sleep in tents outside (seriously…).

I didn’t plan to watch the (pseudo)Celebrity Apprentice. I generally dislike celebrities when they get a chance to strut on tv. I heard that one of the contestants was going to be reality-villain “Omarosa” from the first season, who was coming back for redemption. That was strike two. So, I didn’t watch the first episode when it aired.

But I was bored while eating lunch in my office last week, so I went to NBC.com and watched the first episode, which is posted in its entirety without commercials (thanks, no doubt to the Writer’s Guild strike). It was actually pretty fun to watch. The task was to sell hot dogs on a street in NYC for charity. (Frankly some of the “celebs” are so washed up I suspect they could use the money themselves, but charity causes on celebrity reality shows are mandated by some unwritten network edict.) The women, headed up by Omarosa put on cheesy looking matching outfits and tried to sell as many $5.00 hot dogs as they could. The men’s team easily flanked the women when team member Gene Simmons (the surprising star of the show) got on the phone and started telling his friends to bring $5,000.00 in cash to buy a hot dog for charity. I’m not sure most of my friends would pay $5.00 for a charity hot dog, but Gene Simmons pulled it off.

Last night, the second episode aired and it was even better than the first. The task was to come up with an ad for some dog food company’s pet adoption program. Gene Simmons took over for the guys and he and Stephen Baldwin really nailed it for the guys. The women, on the other hand, turned the task over to a woman that I recognize but don’t know, who insisted that she knew how to produce television, etc. The women’s commercial was amazing amateurish.

The best part of the show, though, is Gene Simmons absolute disregard for Trump, his spawn, his own teammates, and the “executives” from the dog food company. Trump’s daughter came prancing in to see what the guys were up to and Simmons pretty much dismissed her. He said, “she’ll wait” then asked her if she was going to tell her “sisters” on the women’s team what the guys were up to, since daughter-Trump is of the female persuasion.

Gene Simmons also comically blew off the executives that were judging the task. One of the unwritten rules of TA is that the first thing a team has to do is have a sit down with the executives of whatever company is providing the task to get an idea what they want. Most of the guys wanted to do that, Simmons rejected it and called it a waste of time. Then, when it came for the presentation, Simmons showed up in sunglasses and when the exec said he was disappointed they didn’t consult with him at the beginning of the task, Simmons essentially said, “Whatever….”

The sheer audacity of Gene Simmons makes this show. They’re replaying both episodes on Saturday night, so watch it if you get a chance.

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Is Tim Tebow Florida’s Quincy Carter?

January 10, 2008 at 9:37 pm · Filed under College Football, Football, Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

Am I the only one getting tired of hearing about Tim Tebow?  It seems like you couldn’t watch a game this bowl season, especially on ESPN, without hearing about Tim Tebow, seeing Tim Tebow highlights, or (worse yet) seeing Tim Tebow’s parents in the stands.  My Gator friends are convinced that despite his 9-4 record (so-so by Florida standards), Tebow is the greatest player ever.

Tim Tebow could be the all-time great Gators QB (which would really be saying something) or he could be Florida’s Quincy Carter. I remember Georgia people defending QC’s stats to death, in spite of the fact that his performance steadily declined each year. Tebow has already had a better season performance wise (though not W-L wise) than Carter ever had. But despite Carter’s individual promise, he couldn’t consistently win the big games against our biggest rivals: Florida, Tennessee, GT and Auburn. Some realized QC’s limitations early, some didn’t (UGA spent money on a Junior season “Quincy for Heisman” media campaign.)

I’m not bashing Tebow. Florida has a great QB and should be proud of his accomplishments. He seems like a really classy kid, he works hard (obviously) and has an enormous amount of talent. But until he starts consistently winning the big games, I’d keep my eyes wide open if I was a Gator fan.  Suggesting that Tim Tebow is less than “Superman” is a grave offense amongst Gator fans.  But when you stop looking at results objectively and making guys prove it on the field, with wins, you can regret it later.  Good example:  since super-talent QC was the “no-brainer” choice for Georgia’s QB, a guy named Nate Hybl transferred to Oklahoma where he led the Sooners to a 2002 Rose Bowl win, winning MVP honors for himself.

Only time will tell whether Tim Tebow is a great player that wins 9 games a season, or a great player meshes with his team and wins 14. It’s never a good idea to bash your own players, but if I was  Gator fan, I’d also be careful putting him on too high of a pedestal too early.

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Hillary makes a race of it

January 9, 2008 at 4:14 pm · Filed under Politics, polls

Well, the big news out of New Hampshire is that Hillary isn’t done for, after all. After her big loss in Iowa, Obama got a big-time polling bump in New Hampshire and by Monday he was expected to win by double digits. Drudge had a siren headline suggesting that Hillary may be considering quiting the race altogether since she was nearly out of money (and likeablity). What a difference a day makes! Today Obama is licking his wounds and trying to stay unruffled at is slim, but entirely unexpected, loss.

Pollsters are scrambling to figure out what went wrong. All the polls showed Obama with a commanding lead. ABC News blogger/pollster Gary Langer put his two bits in, which is pretty interesting. He concludes:

In the end there may be no smoking gun. Those polls may have been accurate, but done in by a superior get-out-the-vote effort, or by very late deciders whose motivations may or may not ever be known. They may have been inaccurate because of bad modeling, compromised sampling, or simply an overabundance of enthusiasm for Obama on the heels of his Iowa victory that led his would-be supporters to overstate their propensity to turn out. (A function, perhaps, of youth.)

    Personally, I suspect the days of accurate polling are long gone, due mostly to technology. Years ago, pollsters wrongly predicted that Dewey would defeat Truman based in part on telephone polling data. The pollsters then didn’t take into account, though, that telephones were not necessarily in every home in 1948 and that the homes that didn’t have phones were lower income voters that would likely favor Truman.Millions of people (including me) have given up their landlines in favor of cell phones. Fifteen years ago, nearly everybody had a landline and even an amateur pollster could get a decently random sample just by opening the phone book and selecting names with a proverbial dart. Would voters that have forsaken the landline telephone skew towards Hillary Clinton? Who knows. But I wouldn’t really trust any poll based on landline telephone surveys at this point.

    But the most disturbing part of Langer’s blog is this:

    Prof. Jon Krosnick of Stanford University has another argument: That the order of names on the New Hampshire ballot – in which, by random draw, Clinton was toward the top, Obama at the bottom – netted her about 3 percentage points more than she’d have gotten otherwise. That’s not enough to explain the gap in some of the polls, which presumably randomized candidate names, but it might hold part of the answer.

    Am I the only one bothered by the notion that the leader of the most powerful nation in the world might be decided, in part, by whose name appears at the top of the ballot? Are people really so dimwitted that they would simply vote for the person whose name gets top billing?

    Then again, I suppose that notion is no less disturbing than the fact that any of the current candidates from either party will, in fact, be President of the United States next year. Watching the debates and news coverage so far has led me to believe that this election cycle is some kind of cruel joke. How can there be no decent candidate of either party running?

    When thoughts like that depress me, I console myself in the knowledge that it could be worse: At least we don’t allow the Bowl Championship Series committee to derive a “fair” way to choose the chief executive…

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