Todd A is pondering the Worst. Band. Ever.

Who would you say is the worst band in history?

I’m leaning toward Slipknot, but that’s mainly because they’re snot-nosed punks who hate Iowa, can’t sing, hide behind masks and for some reason can’t get the job done without three drummers and four vocalists.

But it’s hard to say that for sure when the category includes bands like Cold, Nickelback and House of Pain…

Here’s who I’d like to see there:

AL East - Yankees
AL Central - Tigers
AL West - Angels
AL Wild - Twins

NL East - Mets
NL Central - Whomever
NL West - Dodgers
NL Wild - Marlins

The Yankees, Tigers, Mets and Dodgers are just good teams; they deserve it.

The Angels and the Marlins may need miraculous intervention, but I hope that happens because they are interesting teams and would make for a good story.

The Twins are there to prevent the White Sox and Red Sox from returning this year; and they’ve got a handfull of good folks like Joe Mauer, Johan Santana, Justin Morneau, Michael Cuddyer and Joe Nathan.

I’m disgusted with the NL Central and I don’t care who takes it.

I didn’t get up in time to make it to weigh-in today, but according to my home scale there was no change this week, as I expected. It’s not that I’m against drinking six glasses of water, two glasses of milk, and eating five servings of fruit and vegetables every day… I’m just one person who likes warm rolls. Or as we in Weight Watchers call them, Satan stones.

Meanwhile, I understand my Verizon body double has experienced some significant weight loss on the Katie Couric diet:

Good for him.

CNN’s crack news team has finally gotten around to reporting what most of us have known for weeks, months, years… that “Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the source who revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in 2003.”

In other words, it wasn’t Karl Rove.

But take a look at CNN’s special report links in the sidebar; one of them focuses on the “key players” of the investigation.

These “key players” include: Matthew Cooper, Patrick Fitzgerald, Lewis Libby, Judith Miller, Robert Novak, Valerie Plame-Wilson, Karl Rove, Joe “Dirt” Wilson and Bob Woodward.

Notice anyone missing in that lineup?

Like say, perhaps, the guy who did it?

Six years ago we were just starting out as newlyweds in a new city with our first “real” jobs making about minimum wage and with no real friends to speak of (yeah, I know, of which to speak). We had some time on our hands, but we didn’t spend very much of it in front of the tube. We had gotten a TV as a wedding gift, but without cable we could only get two or three stations to tune in correctly, depending on how you balanced the antenna and where you applied the tinfoil. The hot new show that summer was Survivor: Borneo, on CBS, which happened to be the station with the weakest signal. But the premise was intriguing enough that we eventually figured out when it came on and made the effort to suffer through the static; the night scenes were just terrible — you couldn’t see anything. But before long we were hooked on the show, and thirteen seasons later it remains one of our favorite programs.

This year Survivor is back in the news because of the producers’ decision to split the contestants into four tribes of four, divided by race.

Is this the most stupid idea of the year or the most brilliant? Maybe somewhere inbetween? I’ll leave that to smarter people to figure out; Professor Tung Yin at Iowa is a fellow Survivor fan who has some thoughts and links that might shed some light on that question. He does note that previous seasons have had the tribes divided by gender, or by age and gender both. But Survivor has pushed the diversity button from the very beginning, always adding equal numbers of men and women to the “cast,” being sure to include the “token” (to use Yin’s term) minorities and players with various disabilities (the deaf woman, the guy with one leg, etc.), and attempting to include contestants who will play to the stereotypes or push various agendas. After all, this is the show that gave us Richard Hatch as its first “Sole Survivor,” a man who gave himself the nickname “fat, naked fag.”

Now everyone is asking how Survivor’s audience will react. Will we get caught up in the racial clash on screen and cheer on only “the home team,” so to speak?

I don’t think so. Most fans have and will appreciate the great players, the interesting players, the dynamic players despite their race, gender or socio-economic status.

The most popular contestants have been people like:

Rudy, the 72 year old retired Navy seal who was in better shape than most of the other people a third of his age. This cranky and seemingly bigoted old man ended up striking an alliance with Richard, one of the “queers and homosexuals” that otherwise made him shake his head. That alliance would take him into the final three of season one.

Rupert, the grizzly redneck whose warrior growl was matched only by his big tender heart. His great physical strength took him far in back to back seasons, and though he was never voted Sole Survivor, he was the first (and, to date, only) player to receive a separate $1 million prize awarded to him by fans of the show.

Stephanie, the young lady who by sheer force of willpower alone nearly won the game, twice. She probably would have won the first time around if she hadn’t been seen as such a great threat to the other players; her best attribute was also her downfall. Also appearing in back to back seasons, Stephanie took runner-up in Survivor: Guatemala.

Cirie, the cheerful city-dweller who started last season literally afraid of leaves, having never gone camping or spent any time outdoors. She roughed it out and ended up making it into the final four. Cirie was always witty in her diary sessions, keeping a level head and a positive attitude, and her resiliency was nothing short of remarkable. Toward the end, she even learned how to start a fire on her own — something she thought she’d never be able to do.

Survivor has been won by six men and six women, ten of them caucasian, one African American and one Hispanic.

I’ve turned Mediabistro’s images into an animated gif:

Fugitive polygamist Warren Jeffs or Connecticut Democrat Ned Lamont?

My take on the Everlast song “What It’s Like” continues to drive a good deal of traffic to Fishkite. It’s a pretty lengthy post that deconstructs the song and reveals the absurdity of Erik Schrody’s lyrics and shows how they don’t even come close to meaning what he thinks they mean. The intended message is that we shouldn’t judge people until we’ve walked a mile in their shoes; it’s a Biblical concept, as Casey pointed out, and in fact Jesus commands us to walk not one mile with someone but instead two (that’s why we call it “going the extra mile,” I suppose). The Wikipedia entry describes the song this way: “each character [is] presented in a sympathetic light as something of a victim of circumstance and as being an object of derision.” But Schrody muddles the message by failing to maintain a consistant standard for all the individuals in his song, and what we at first assume are stereotypical victims in need of understanding and support turn out to be entirely more sinister characters.

The poor man “beggin’ for your change” isn’t looking for a hot meal or a warm place to spend the night but is instead a bold alcoholic who’s simply looking to score another 40oz bottle of beer; the pregnant teen isn’t just a desperate girl crying out for help but rather a foul-mouthed hoodlem who is prone to violence — threatening to mutilate her boyfriend’s genitals and deciding to abort her unborn child; and finally the “kid named Max” isn’t an at-risk youth just trying to get by but is actually a grown man with a wife and children who prowls the streets at night selling drugs, getting “sh*t-faced,” talking smack and threatening people with handguns.

According to Schrody’s morality tale, we’re expected to feel guilty for the way these three protagonists have been treated, so that next time we’ll just give a handful of cash to the dude at the liquor store, simply turn our heads when the promiscuous teen takes the life of her baby and blame ourselves each time some drug-dealing thug gets killed in a midnight shootout. This, instead of caring enough to offer treatment to the alcoholic instead of perpetuating his self-destructive habits; offering counseling, adoptive services and/or medical care to the pregnant teen and speaking up on behalf of her unborn child; or reclaiming our streets from the drug dealers, pimps, thugs, gangs and criminals — and making them safe for children, families, local businesses and places of worship.

Quite by accident, I recently found something that adds an extra little twist to the mix. According to a Wikipedia contributer, the character “Max” is actually a reference to Max Green, described as “a Jewish Australian lawyer who embezzled millions of dollars and was later murdered in Cambodia” the same year “What It’s Like” was written. If true, the song’s point becomes even more bizarre: the “kid name Max” who sold drugs on the street and was killed in a shoot-out is now a 42-year-old man who committed some pretty major white collar crimes and ended up getting killed by some of the people he screwed over; I’m supposed to feel sorry about that? Hmm… I don’t know. Somehow it doesn’t add up for me — why exactly do we need to walk a mile in this dude’s shoes?

On another, somewhat related, topic, I’ve got an “enclave” update:

(more…)

1. The Silence of the Lambs
2. Walk[ing*] the Line
3. The Firm
4. Cast Away
5. (tie) 21 Grams (tie) The Rainmaker

*inside joke, sorry

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I guess Weight Watchers is right — drinking milk speeds up weightloss. With those three glasses of milk burning the fat for me, I lost more this week than I did the previous two weeks combined. So now my combined weight loss is 13.6 lbs., which is the equivalent of 54 sticks of butter or this chainsaw. According to the PBS Kids program Zoom, that’s also the average amount backpacks weigh on Mondays.