February 21st, 2009
My wife watches those news commentary shows like Nancy Grace and (occasionally) Showbiz Tonight on CNN. I get exposed to them regularly, though I generally can’t stand them.
Through this exposure, I have managed to distill their content down to four words. One of these four words will be mentioned every two minutes for the length of the broadcast:
- shocking
- outrage
- bombshell
- breaking
What amazes me about these shows is their ability to stretch virtually nothing into an hour of commentary. Showbiz Tonight last night, for example, really had one main story — the picture of a beaten Rihanna leaked to the media.
They spent at least 20 minutes with a panel of commentators, discussing the image. Then they did something else for 10 minutes (”breaking news tonight…”), then they came back to this story, and essentially talked about the exact same thing for another 10 minutes. Then something else (”shocking revelations tonight…”) then back to the Rihanna picture, where they said absolutely nothing new.
But there was outrage, oh man, was there outrage. When breaking news like this reveals a shocking bombshell, what else could there be?
Postscript: I visited the site of Showbiz Tonight to get the URL for the hyperlink above. The main headline? “TONIGHT: Rihanna photo outrage!”
February 20th, 2009
Nothing else really needs to be said about the octuplet Mom, but this CNN article reveals some very interesting information about the fertility business.
Saleh and other fertility experts say they think they know why Kamrava [the Octuplet Mom's doctor] chose to implant so many embryos. The CDC keeps statistics on fertility doctors and their success rates, and Kamrava’s is significantly below the national average.
Nationally, when doctors implant embryos, they manage to achieve a live birth 38.7 percent of the time, according to the CDC data. But Kamrava achieved a live birth 10 percent of the time, according to CDC data for his clinic.
“He has terrible statistics,” says Miller. Other doctors say he had to put in a large number of embryos to get any success at all.
February 18th, 2009
Excited to learn that there is an actual definition of “Broadway,” “Off-Broadway,” and “Off-Off Broadway.”
- Broadway: a theater of greater than 500 seats in the theater district of New York.
- Off-Broadway: a theater of between 99-500 seats, not necessarily in New York
- Off-Off Broadway: pretty much anything else
Annie and I saw Les Miserables on Broadway back in 2002. Totally uncultured, otherwise.
February 17th, 2009
This CNN article has the most surreal beginning I’ve read in a long time.
A married Chinese businessman who could no longer afford five mistresses held a competition to decide which one to keep.
But the contest took a fatal turn when one of the women, eliminated for her looks, drove the man and the four other competitors off a cliff, Chinese media reported.
The spurned mistress died and the other passengers were injured, the reports said.