Steaming Turd

Ah’m a givin’ ya one second to draw a gun.

On a side note, they’re already coming out with a remake of 300.

I know that in recent years, game shows have gone nearly to the point of reality shows in their assumptions of stupidity on the part of the audience and/or the contestants. “Deal or No Deal”, in particular, removes all semblance of reason and intelligence from television and extends a simple guessing game into an hour-long dentistry session. I mean, sure, Wheel of Fortune has had some boneheaded contestants over the past few decades, but are Americans really that dumb in general?

Well, a new offering in game shows might just answer that question, and give it in percentage form, to boot. “Power of Ten”, hosted by Drew Carey, started a limited run last week and gave away a million buckazoids on its first episode. Since then, the contestants have been a bit less lucky. And yes, it uses the WWTBAM formula of letting the contestant stew for an inordinate period to fill time until the next commercial. But there’s just one thing about this show.

It’s actually interesting.

Sure, Jeopardy, the game show for people with brains too big to fit through their doorways, has a lot of trivia, but you get the same thing from a game of Trivial Pursuit: a series of rapid fire questions that simply focus on regurgitation of information. In contrast, Power of Ten resurrects the old Card Sharks “how many Americans said X” game, and asks some pretty fascinating questions, presented in an unprecedented fashion.

For example, how many Americans think that polygamy should be permitted under the First Amendment?

This was one contestant’s second question, for $10,000 - it starts at $1,000 and goes up to the next, er, power of ten for each subsequent question - and on the second question, contestants get a 30-point range (between 0% and 100%) to try to capture the actual amount. While the contestant mulls over their estimate, the audience is polled for their own estimates, and after the contestant makes their first rough guess of where to place their range, the audience’s responses are displayed in histogram form, binned in what looks like 2% increments.

The answer? A whopping 28%. In this case, it would have been hard for the contestant to lose, since it’s impossible to put the 30-point range fully below 28%, but it gets tougher - the $1,000,000 question has a 10-point range.

My point, though, is that the questions are actually interesting. They don’t just ask you to vomit up some long-abandoned minutia - they actually make you think, and they give you plenty of time to do it. (On a side note, this is probably the only game show where the term “bimodal distribution” will ever be used properly in a sentence by a contestant.)

On top of that, Drew Carey as host is an excellent choice - he’ll also be fronting The Price is Right this fall - he gets along great with the contestants, pokes just the right amount of fun at people, and offers insight about the questions to give you one more thing to “hmm” about.

Anyway, I highly recommend watching at least an episode of “Power of Ten”. It airs Wednesday nights on CBS. Set your PVR so you can skip all those commercials

Edit: I can’t believe I missed this opportunity:

Chief Justice Myrtle Fu: Also, in a rare double-whammy decision, the court finds polygamy Constitutional.
Audience: Boooooo!

Okay, I’m probably the last person on the planet to hear about this, but it eventually came my way. Mika Brzezinski, news anchor on MSNBC’s Morning Joe (hosted by Joe Scarborough, and a better morning news show than Fox & Friends), was given by the show’s producer a stack of news reports to read at the top of the hour back in June. The producer had decided to lead with some nonsense Paris Hilton story on the same day that Senator Lugar’s change of heart regarding the Iraq war was a hot topic.

Brzezinski, formerly a reporter and anchor on CBS, refused to read the story at the 6:00 hour, attempted to burn the script at the 7:00 hour but had to resign herself to just tearing it up, and ran another copy of the script through a paper shredder at the 8:00 hour. Scarborough and other host Willie Geist gave her a bit of needling about it, mainly making fun of the fact that their producer had expected her to lead with such a frivolous story.

YouTube has the footage.

Anyway, had I heard about this when it happened, I would have probably written about it then. However, the show I probably would have heard it from - Fox News Watch, a half hour weekend panel show that discusses the coverage of the news (i.e., a metanews show) had been pre-empted multiple times in the past couple months by Geraldo Rivera, who was offering sensationalist coverage of news stories that had stopped being news once everyone had heard about them all morning long. Ugh.

I can has cheezburger?

Yes, it’s just like that. As of right now, the posts go on for 101 pages. As Made of Meat says,

CAN’T. STOP. LOOKING!!!11!