So it’s been storming lately, which has been, to be honest, kind of awesome. Because Yours Truly has decided not to chance driving on the highways. If it’s going to be winter, it should bloody well *be* winter, is my opinion on the matter. None of this dicking around with a long, cold, dirty November. Just BANG! HEY! IT’S FRIGGING WINTER! It’ll go away soon, and we’ll have another brief tryst with stupid autumn.
But enough about the weather. The point is, I’ve been a lazy bum the last day or two, and have been watching television rather than taking this opportunity to work on my writing or clean the house or, you know, bathe. I have discovered that, given the choice, I will most likely become a drain on society and will forget everything I ever cared about about art, culture, and knowledge. I’m perfectly happy to drone out watching Yankee judge shows, programmes about dog training, and the Space channel.
So there’s this Canadian programme called Canada’s Worst Driver where people nominate their loved ones as just precisely that, for whatever reason – inability to see stop signs, attempting to break the land speed record in a Yugo on a regular basis, being a general douche-canoe, whatever. It’s an interesting programme, as television goes. The deal is, every person who gets selected for the programme has to surrender his or her driver’s permit. The golden egg at the end of each season is that if you improve your driving ability and/or attitude sufficiently through the course of the show, you may *earn back* your permit.
And trust me, some of those mooks oughtn’t be allowed to drive at all. And, in some cases, that’s what the show’s producers and/or host and/or experts have told the drivers. Particularly in the case where the driver simply cannot be rehabilitated. That’s the thing – the people who participate in this programme are ostensibly there to be rehabilitated. They learn new skills, gain confidence, get an attitude adjustment, whatever. Sometimes, it’s quite entertaining, and sometimes it’s maddening. Case in point, one driver who probably spent more time applying false eyelashes and lipstick than she did paying attention to the potentially life-threatening exercise of driving. She also insisted on driving in platform shoes. She alone did her best to set back the cause of feminism by DECADES. Anyway, she was also a few bricks short of a load. Tammy Faye without the personality.
So I’ve got my arse glued to the couch yesterday, and I flip over to America’s Worst Driver. Which is, essentially, a game show. Their ‘contestants’ are chosen, similar to the Canadian show, by their friends and loved ones. They are, for the most part, pretty bad drivers (but not as bad as some of their Canadian counterparts). But. Get this. They are sent through a series of challenges that are loosely modeled on some of the challenges in the Canadian show, although the challenges in the Canadian show are really geared toward two things: teaching each driver how truly terrible they are behind the wheel; and teaching them how to drive well and properly and be in control of their vehicle.
So the Yankee contestants show up, do some of these challenges, which are timed, and one by one, the losers in each challenge have their cars destroyed. Because the whole goal of the Yankee programme, the golden egg in this case, is a new car.
I watched this, and the incongruity of it all (or maybe it was the irony) caused my eyebrows to knit and wrestle around each other like a couple of horny caterpillars. These people aren’t learning anything except that greed and excess are cool and funny. All they think about – all they’re *programmed* to think about is how cool it would be to have a new car. A NEW CAR! That they DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO PAY FOR! Because their other car got blown up or shot or squashed or dropped off a cliff or whatever.
Then I thought about ranting about this, and then I thought, ‘dude. Just turn the television off’. But I didn’t.
Maybe I *will* try National Novel Writing Month this year. And I’ll do it by unplugging my gorram boob tube.
Stupid Yankee ripoff of Canadian programs.
i make squee noises when you tell me stuff.