Ancient Aliens is a ridiculous pack of lies

I've been meaning to write a longer post about the farcical "History" Channel show called Ancient Aliens. For now, though, I'll just post this brief note. I recently watched one of its most-viewed episodes, "Unexplained Structures", and having seen it, I want to make one thing perfectly clear:

Do not believe a single thing the people on that show say. They're lying.

While it's possible that some of them mean well and are just misguided, the overwhelming majority of them are deliberately misrepresenting the truth in order to sell you stuff. The genuine scientists on the show probably aren't lying, but frankly, I question the judgement of anyone who appears on that show and isn't a kook trying to sell you a magic healing stone.

Let's just take a few examples from that particular episode. Firstly, Göbekli Tepe, the prehistoric megalithic site in Turkey. It's a pretty impressive, even revolutionary archeological find, but that doesn't stop Alien Hair Guy and his buddies lying about it. For crying out loud, the Wikipedia page I just linked tells us that even though the show says the opposite, both flint stone-working tools and the quarry the rocks were cut from have been found at the site. So there's no mystery whatsoever to how it was constructed. By people. With tools. No extraterrestrials necessary for assembly.

Much of the rest of the episode is set firmly in woo-land, with the usual wild narrative hopscotch ("if so...") and straight-up nonsense like the vimana dude walking among the Carnac stones and talking about their mystical auras. The bit set in the Americas does contain one of my favorite Ancient Aliens lines ever, when one of the "experts" explains that some of the Inca stonework has been exposed to large amounts of "thermal heat". The best kind, really.

By the way, they seem to mean vitrified stone. In both this and a previous episode, Ancient Aliens seems to treat vitrification as something that happens when an alien shoots a ray gun at a stone block. In reality, it just means the stones were exposed to fire. It may have been done deliberately, although it actually weakens the stone. Now, stone age people might not know that, but surely the aliens would. In my mind, their suggestion that the Inca built using alien rock-melting technology is completely ridiculous. If you have what basically amounts to concrete and want to build a wall, certainly you'd build a mould of the wall and pour in the concrete, as opposed to molding thousands of different-sized stone blocks and fashioning a wall out of them. But never mind that, here's an Inca shaman with a censer, and he says woo.

But it's the already mentioned Carnac stones that bring us to the most fantastically stupid claim in the whole episode: Alien Hair Guy tells us they're one of only three objects on Earth that are visible from space. He lists the Carnac stones, the Nazca lines (a perennial Ancient Aliens favorite) and, of course, the Great Wall of China.

Now, once again, there's a Wikipedia page: Man-made structures visible from space. It will tell you, if you don't know already, that from any altitude where the Great Wall is visible, so are a whole bunch of other things. The same goes for the Nazca lines, and as for Carnac, well, look at them:

The individual stones are really quite small, and if they're that evanescent in an aerial photo, do you really think they're uniquely visible from space? The claim is totally absurd. Then again, that information and the picture are from Wikipedia, and if you're liable to believe Alien Hair Guy, you probably think Wikipedia is a reptilian disinformation operation. Like this blog. Boo!

In fact, I couldn't find any source for the notion that the Carnac stones are visible from space... except Alien Hair Guy. Mostly the claim appears in the exact same "one of only three objects" form he made it in. So he literally made that up. And that's really what this show is about: making stuff up. Specifically, inventing totally implausible claims with no regard for observable reality or even Wikipedia-level research. Since just about everything I've ever fact-checked from that show has turned out to be just lies, I frankly recommend no-one believe a thing that's said on it without double-checking it. Even better, don't watch the damn thing at all. Nothing they've ever presented has any merit, and the joke gets kinda old pretty quick. Real history is much more interesting, exciting and even, at times, mysterious than puerile "lol aliens" TV.

Ancient Aliens does take your mind to another dimension. Unfortunately, it's made up, and it sucks.

This blog on TV

Wow, I missed this. Earlier, I criticized Radley Balko for co-operating with Russia Today here. What I didn't know, and only found out just now, was that while Radley's response to my criticism was, well, underwhelming, Alyona Minkovski decided to address me on a video she published for her show on Russia Today.

It's strange to hear someone talk about my panties on television. What's stranger, however, is that Ms. Minkovski would bother to address my criticism on the air, by name and by showing a shot of my blog, but not actually talk about what it is that I said. In the video, Ms. Minkovski implies that I've said she shouldn't be allowed to criticize her government.

That's absolutely ridiculous. My actual criticism, which you can read from the link in the first paragraph, was directed at Radley Balko. This was the gist of it:

In my view, working with Russia Today, and even more so in letting Russia Today's employees broadcast themselves through his blog, Radley Balko has put a big question mark next to his name and his integrity as a journalist. To me, it's profoundly unethical to blithely co-operate with the propaganda organs of one of the most repressive states in the world and simultaneously cultivate an image of oneself as a libertarian human rights advocate.

Another quote, this time more directly applicable to Ms. Minkovski herself:

Furthermore, I don't believe the people making shows for or otherwise directly working with Russia Today are exactly pursuing an agenda of human rights. Surely if they were concerned with police brutality and human rights, they wouldn't be working for the Russian government. So either they have a very limited definition of human rights that excludes, say, the Russian opposition parties and sexual minorities in Russia, or then they have a different agenda. What's certain is that the channel they're working for is pushing the Russian government's agenda, not a human rights one. And by letting its employees promote themselves and their channel on his blog, Mr. Balko is also taking part in the Russian government's information warfare, to the direct detriment of human rights in Russia.

I don't see how it's possible to read my post as implying that I think Ms. Minkovski shouldn't "dare" criticize her government. What I'm trying to say is that it's more than a little dishonest to criticize the United States for police brutality while working for the Russian government. Surely the two are different things.

When Ms. Minkovski says I should be concerned that US mainstream media isn't reporting on police brutality, I can only say that I am concerned. I've written about SWAT teams and the war on drugs plenty of times on this blog. But what I was trying to say in my previous post is that I'm also concerned that her network isn't reporting on similar stories from Russia. Why is it okay to downplay and ignore police brutality in Russia? For that matter, why is it okay for Russia Today to distort the truth in their country, while it isn't okay for American mainstream media to do the same? That seems like a double standard to me.

Seeing this video was a little bizarre. On the one hand, Ms. Minkovski and, presumably, her producers, felt a need to address my criticisms of her appearing on Mr. Balko's blog. However, they couldn't seem to bring themselves to actually answer my questions, but instead attacked a bizarre strawman. If anything, this would seem to confirm to me that my criticism of her and RT was well-founded. If her reply to a question on journalistic ethics is to distort the question beyond recognition and mock me for asking it, I guess that's all the answer I need.

Not to mention that me and this blog are much more famous than I thought!

We like Detroit 1-8-7

No, seriously, we like the show, it's just that I think if you're going to call a show 1-8-7, how can that not be the theme song?

It's a competently-made cop show, and we're big fans of Michael Imperioli as Fitch. But I'm an even bigger fan of Natalie Martinez, who is incredibly hot. Evidence follows.

Hell, I'd watch her in anything. On that note, I'll check out Death Race.

Happy birthday Jwoww!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's Jwoww's birthday. You remember her. Real name Jenni Farley, famous because she's on Jersey Shore, the MTV show almost all of you have watched but won't admit it. I do.

Last year, she posed for Maxim:

Hell, she's cute. And as I'm writing this, I find out she made an appearance in pro wrestling; to be specific, on TNA Impact last October, creating a nice ratings spike for them. Here's a picture:

At the end of the day, any chick who punches the Situation is okay by me.

Happy birthday!

Glenn Beck!

Remember last summer when Israeli commandos stormed a couple of Turkish ships in international waters and murdered people on them? Or, in other words, what Wikipedia euphemistically calls the Gaza flotilla raid? Of course, as you know, Wikipedia has "a strong liberal bias", according to The Trustworthy Encyclopedia, so that's hardly surprising.

Anyway, I got into a sort of Facebook mini-discussion about the flotilla incident, and I was sent links to some Youtube videos that would explain to me exactly what happened. Those videos were clips from Glenn Beck's show. I'm not going to link to them because they're too asinine to be believed. Instead, while I was listening to music on YouTube, I ran into a video somebody put together of Glenn Beck explaining why the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen are, in fact, communists. In my opinion, the level of insight and presentation here should give everyone a fairly good idea of what Beck's show is like. Remember that this is an edited version; in the actual show, he spends around a third of the entire time staring at his blackboard and repeating what he said before. But anyway, here's Glenn Beck on music.

ESPN America sucks

Okay, so we didn't get to see the Winter Classic live; that isn't their fault, as the game had to be rescheduled because it was held in a Mickey Mouse town. What is their fault is that when they eventually broadcast it on Sunday evening, the picture and sound quality in the third period was so bad that we barely saw two minutes of the first half. It wasn't even a live broadcast. This kind of stuff is inexcusable, considering that we pay money to get that channel.

Overall, the quality of service you get from ESPN America is pretty abysmal. I especially like the unannounced last-minute changes in programming, most usually from hockey to something riveting like college basketball. Not that you can go online to find out what's on, either, because their online TV schedule only works properly on Internet Explorer. On Opera, you can't tell when anything is actually on, because as you scroll down the program listing, the time bar moves with it. Picture and sound quality in the broadcasts are regularly poor, if not downright bad with the signal breaking up or just disappearing. That is, when you get a broadcast at all. Special thanks for two weeks of nearly uninterrupted FSN Pittsburgh games, too.

If there was any other affordable way to get NHL broadcasts on TV, I think I'd take it. The problem is that there are a couple of other channels in Finland that offer live NHL games, but they always ditch the original commentary and intermissions in favor of a Finnish-language play-by-play. I've yet to hear one that isn't totally inept. So because there seems to be no other choice, we're forced to stick with ESPN America. We wish we didn't have to, because it really does suck.

Tent city

Yeah, so I watch TV. I realize it's very much in vogue these days to disavow the boob tube completely and pretend that reading vampire novels or blogs is somehow decisively more intellectual and desirable, but I won't lie: I like my TV.

The only things I can usually be bothered to watch are documentaries, á la History and National Geographic, and sports. Generally speaking, the two don't overlap. This summer, amidst the most boring NHL off-season ever, it looks like they might, and in a totally unexpected way.

**

Last February, Edmonton Oilers goaltender Nikolai Ivanovich Khabibulin was arrested for drunk driving in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he was recently convicted and faces a minimum 30-day sentence.

Khabibulin won the Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning back in '04.

Here's what TSN has to say:

The Russian was convicted on three counts last month and received a minimum 30-day sentence. His lawyer immediately appealed but didn't say on what grounds. The appeals process could last months or even a year.

If jailed, it's possible Khabibulin could serve his time at Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Tent City prison in the Arizona desert.

Ah, Tent City. The National Geographic Channel has run Lockdown quite a few times, and I think I've seen pretty much all of it. I find all these prison shows fascinating, especially now that I'm an ex-con myself, and I do admit I particularly remember the Lockdown episode on "Sheriff Joe's" Tent City.

Lockdown is just like any other prison documentary on the Discovery/National Geographic channels: scenes of prison life that the editors probably imagine are harrowing, prison guards speaking law enforcement jargon and most importantly, a heavy, dramatic voiceover. In the "Tent City" episode, they made a point of finishing each and every segment with the words "...in Tent City." I imagine it's done for dramatic effect, but quite frankly, it's ridiculous. We totally lost our composure after the third time, and probably spent the next week finishing every conversation with "...in Tent City."

**

None of this should distract us from the fact that there's actually nothing funny at all about Joe's tent city. To be specific, Tent City is an outdoor extension of Maricopa Jail, where Sheriff Joe mostly houses inmates suspected of crimes and awaiting trial. They live in primitive conditions on a yard where summer temperatures regularly exceed 40°C.

Here's TSN's summary of one inmate's experiences:

Shaun Attwood, a recent inmate from Britain, has written a book on his experiences and told The Guardian newspaper heat-related health problems are the mild part of the punishment. He wrote of toilets clogged with yellow-brown waste, mouldy sandwiches and prisoners shooting up crystal meth or heroin.

The bugs, he said, were the worst.

"I couldn't believe all the cockroaches," Attwood told The Guardian. "I couldn't sleep with them crawling on me. They tickle your hands and limbs and go in your ears to eat your earwax. You can cover yourself with a sheet, but it's so hot, you sweat all day and you get skin infections and bedsores, especially on your buttocks.

"Having the cockroaches crawling on me gave me a nervous breakdown."

Of course, where Khabibulin's from, they have some experience of these things, but it still seems a little harsh.

**

Harsh, however, is exactly how Joe Arpaio likes it. He's an obnoxious, hateful man who shamelessly promotes himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff". Arpaio is the embodiment of the "tough on crime" approach. In addition to his outdoor prison, Arpaio has re-introduced chain gangs and other public humiliations for prisoners.

As an additional humiliation, he makes male prisoners wear pink clothes:

In my opinion, it tells you everything you need to know about a man if he considers wearing pink a punishment.

**

It's not only Sheriff Joe's jail that attracts attention. Just this July, his department conducted a high-profile sweep for illegal immigrants (story), featuring 100 men and truck armed with a .50 cal machine gun.

Just as well he didn't bring a Warthog.

I can't, for the life of me, imagine how a Sheriff's Department can possibly need a .50-caliber machine gun. The .50-caliber rounds have enough penetrative power to make using a weapon like that in any built-up environment a serious hazard, and if they're out in the desert catching illegal immigrants, surely their personal weapons are enough? There's a throwaway quote in the article about illegal immigrants having AK-47s, but even if they do, bringing a heavy machine gun is just ridiculous.

He also has an APC, shown in action here:

The action in question is causing $4,000 worth of damage to a car during a botched SWAT raid on a suburban home. SWAT team members raided a house, set it on fire, and lost control of their APC, which ran into a parked car. As the inhabitants of the house came out, the SWAT officers stopped their puppy from leaving the house and forced it back inside with a fire extinguisher, where it died in the fire. According to the original news report, they later laughed about killing the dog.

As a side note, the dog killing isn't specifically a Sheriff Joe issue. As Radley Balko keeps pointing out, it's becoming routine in America for police officers to shoot dogs for no particular reason.

The purpose of Sheriff Joe's raid was, officially, to look for "a stockpile of illegal automatic weapons and armor-piercing pistol ammunition". They found one handgun and one antique shotgun, both of which were properly licensed. The theoretical justification was that one of the inhabitants had failed to appear in court on traffic citations.

That's being tough on crime: if you don't show up for a court date on a traffic case, the police murder your dog.

His most visible police actions have been massive sweeps for illegal immigrants, before Arizona's controversial new immigration law even comes into force, reminiscent of the 1997 Chandler Roundup.

**

Arpaio's philosophy is that prison needs to be made so unpleasant that no-one will ever want to come back. In his mind, this will decrease crime, as will being "tough", as seen above. This approach once made him wildly popular in both Arizona and around the US, and now it seems that his methods are bearing fruit.

According to lobby group America's Voice, violent crime in Maricopa County has increased dramatically under Sheriff Joe. In case you think that sounds suspiciously liberal, here's what the Goldwater Institute's paper, Mission Unaccomplished, had to say about Sheriff Joe:

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is responsible for vitally important law-enforcement functions in one of the largest counties in the nation. It defines its core missions as law-enforcement services, support services, and detention.

MCSO falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission in all three areas. Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions. It has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally, and to extensive trips by MCSO officials to Honduras for purposes that are nebulous at best. Profligate spending on those diversions helped produce a financial crisis in late 2007 that forced MCSO to curtail or reduce important law-enforcement functions.

In terms of support services, MCSO has allowed a huge backlog of outstanding warrants to accumulate, and has seriously disadvantaged local police departments by closing satellite booking facilities. MCSO’s detention facilities are subject to costly lawsuits for excessive use of force and inadequate medical services. Compounding the substantive problems are chronically poor record-keeping and reporting of statistics, coupled with resistance to public disclosure.

Simply put, Sheriff Joe's regime doesn't work. Studies show that his "sweeps" don't work. In 2008, the mayor of Phoenix drew attention to the fact that there were 40,000 outstanding felony arrest warrants in Maricopa County; while Sheriff Joe's posse was rounding up Hispanics, wanted felons weren't being arrested.

In general, routine police work is being seriously neglected in favor of Arpaio's publicity stunts. The 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting was awarded to two journalists, for an article on precisely that. It can be read here.

Response times, arrest rates, investigations and other routine police work throughout Maricopa County have suffered over the past two years as Sheriff Joe Arpaio turned his already short-handed and cash-strapped department into an immigration enforcement agency, a Tribune investigation found.

**

What about jail, then? According to a report by Amnesty International, "it is clear that the tents provide serious environmental hazards which make them unsuitable for inmate housing." In addition:

A major concern is the security of both staff and inmates in the tent areas. There are no video cameras in the tents and no sight lights, and if the flaps of the tents are down guards are unable to see into or through the tents, putting them into a potentially hazardous situation if they need to go in to check or respond to an incident. Although MCSO officials told Amnesty International that the tents were "low maintenance", others have said that the In-Tent facilities require greater security than hard cell facilities because of their open design, ready availability of materials that can be used as weapons (including rocks, tent poles, etc) and lack of segregation between violent and non-violent inmates. Amnesty International was told that there were regular bouts of inmate-on-inmate violence in the tents. Yet, alarmingly, the tents have no mechanism to alert prison staff in case of an emergency. Traditional facilities would have some form of alarm system to ensure a swift response.

(...)

The security risks are increased by the fact that the In-Tents facilities are chronically understaffed.

Just for his sake, I hope Nikolai Khabibulin doesn't end up in Tent City. Frankly, I hope no-one does. For Sheriff Joe, treating inmates inhumanely isn't a by-product of his budget or anything else at all; it's entirely intentional. Here's what the ACLU had to say on one particular publicity stunt of his:

Sheriff Joe's Inhumane Circus

His latest taxpayer-financed media stunt involved the "forced march" of undocumented inmates who are serving out their criminal sentences. Sheriff Arpaio closed down the city streets so that everyone could witness their public humiliation as they walked in chain gangs from a "hard" jail to the infamous Tent City, where they will be forced to endure unsafe conditions including summer months with temperatures of upwards of 120 degrees.

Not only was this inhumane, but violated international human rights principles — not to mention American values — that require us to treat people who are incarcerated with dignity and respect. But Sheriff Arpaio has absolute contempt for the dignity of the people in his custody and demonstrates this by treating people like circus animals.

Though he claims otherwise, Arpaio wasn't motivated by budgetary or security concerns to march shackled immigrants to the Tent City; he was motivated by the opportunity of self-aggrandizement and the promotion his anti-immigrant agenda. For those reasons, and for those reasons alone, he chose to re-route traffic and waste dwindling law enforcement resources.

So far, a study has showed no difference in recidivism rates under Joe Arpaio's regime. So when this is combined with the rising crime rate, it seems that Sheriff Joe's program of systematic humiliation and ill-treatment isn't achieving any ulterior motives at all.

The more one reads about Sheriff Joe, the more one comes to believe that these policies aren't in place to prevent crime. They seem to be ends in themselves. Here's another ridiculous example from the ACLU.

ACLU: Let's Do Some Math, Sheriff Joe

Yesterday, I argued in Maricopa County Superior Court about whether Sheriff Joe Arpaio, "America's Toughest Sheriff," can block inmates' access to abortion. The specific issue is whether the sheriff can demand that inmates who seek abortion care prepay $300 a day in transportation and security costs. If an inmate can't come up with the money, she will be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. Of course, Sheriff Arpaio doesn't require inmates seeking other medical care to prepay for transport and security costs. We argued it is unconstitutional to make access to the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy conditional on the ability to pay hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, the judge agreed.

(...)

But the most telling part of yesterday's argument came when the judge asked us to do some math. He asked both parties how many hours since June each of us worked on the case - we agreed it was at least 40 hours each. He then assumed an hourly rate of $250 an hour and asked us to calculate the total. The answer? A lot of taxpayer money is being spent on a policy that may cost the Sheriff a few hundred dollars a year given how few women request abortion access.

Then the judge asked the question that sums it all up - he asked the sheriff's attorney to explain "the real reason" behind the policy. Clearly, it can't be that the sheriff is really worried about $300 a year.

The sheriff's attorney didn't really respond.

The same question could be asked of Arpaio's immigrant sweeps, or his advocacy of barbaric prison conditions. Does he really believe these policies are going to bring about positive results, or is he doing this for its own sake?

**

Inefficiency and dubious ends aren't the whole story, either. During Sheriff Joe's time, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has become embroiled in a number of controversies. They're currently under investigation by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations, and by the FBI for abusing his power to attack his political rivals. Sheriff Joe has started several investigations against politicians and media representatives who have criticized him. Only one investigation resulted in a conviction, when the former school superintendent of Maricopa County pleaded guilty to the crime of patronage: namely, getting her daughter a summer job.

I re-iterate that Sheriff Joe has time to investigate an improperly acquired summer job, but not the 40,000 felony arrest warrants.

**

All in all, Sheriff Joe's "tough on crime" regime looks more and more like an elaborate joke, driven by the attention-seeking megalomania of one man. It's a sad indicator of the state of public discussion on crime and law enforcement that a buffoon like Arpaio remains popular, despite the rather obvious fact that none of his methods work. Sheriff Joe isn't the only example of the general public preferring macho posturing to effective policy.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with crime and law enforcement policy.

Most beautiful women on TV

I admit, I watched a fair amount of TV over the past ten years. Here's some highlights from the hot chicks department.

10. Shana Hiatt



The highlight of every episode of the World Poker Tour, Shana Hiatt is cute, sexy and charming, making her by far the best hotel-named woman in America. Bonus points go to her parents for being able to come up with an actual first name instead of calling her Shanghai Hiatt or something. Seriously though, she's lovely, and I daresay she had a place in every poker watcher's affections while she was still on the WPT. The sheer disappointment of having her replaced by run-of-the-mill blondes was testament to her appeal.

9. Laura Prepon



I'll start with the bad news: she's a Scientologist. Learning that someone thinks Tom Cruise's scientology promo video and Battlefield: Earth are a perfectly reasonable expression of religious sentiment is enough to dampen anyone's sex appeal. For an antidote, check out one of the episodes of That 70's Show where she wears a Catholic school uniform. Even if she believes that Xenu is imprisoned under a volcano somewhere and that the Marcabian battlefleet is coming for us in space DC-9s, she's still hot.

8. Isabelle Mercier



O Canada, there's something good about you after all. On the face of it, it would be easy to totally dismiss this faux nation of North Americans even more pompous than their southern neighbors; after all, they're not even a real country. But then they come up with someone like the beautiful and undeniably talented Isabelle Mercier. She caught our eye on the WPT when she was still working at the Aviation Club de France, and when she started playing, we were fans from day 1.

7. Gail Kim



Another drop-dead-gorgeous pro wrestler, Gail Kim made a brief appearance in the WWE just before the demise of the women's division. She was an impressive athlete, and how can you argue with those looks?

6. Alyson Hannigan



Ah, the phenomenon that was Buffy. I remember liking the original movie back in the day, and while the TV show was fun at first, the repetitive nature of the episodes and Josh Whedon's "clever" writing got so boring that I didn't manage to keep watching past the first season. The strongest condemnation of Whedon that I can think of is that even Alyson Hannigan playing a lesbian witch wasn't enough to get me to watch the show. I mean, look at her.

5. Miley Cyrus



Oh boy, if you thought Emma Watson in my hot actresses list was wrong, you're gonna love this one. She'll be 18 in November of this year, though, and even before that, she's legal in Finland, so she still makes the list. One day, I decided we're going to watch an episode of Hannah Montana, just to find out what it's all about. Everyone who contributes to this blog may be old, but at least some of us try to keep up with what's going on. Surprisingly, it turns out Hannah Montana is a decent show, and Miley Cyrus is a cute, sympathetic lead. Maybe my strangest Hannah Montana experience was finding out that several of my fellow inmates in prison were fans of the show. The first time I saw her she was really just a cute little girl, but after seeing her on the Ellen Degeneres Show, of all things, almost wearing a very short skirt, it's harder to think of her as just a little girl. Nice legs, by the way.

4. Kari Byron



Everyone's favorite Mythbuster was a great reason to watch the show even after it got stale. No "myth" was too implausible nor any experiment too silly if she was on screen. Not only is she gorgeous, but she can do science and build things. How sexy is that? Luckily for all of us, she was also kind enough to pose for FHM.

3. Kara Dioguardi



I freely admit I had no idea who she was before she started judging on American Idol. Since then, though, she's been growing on me, until this season, when I have to fess up to having a horrible crush on her. Even some of her questionable dress choices, like the results show a few weeks back when she appeared as, seemingly, a Bajoran intelligence officer, can't shake the sheer pleasure I get from seeing her on TV. In addition to that, she's now embracing the spotlight, with a bikini shoot for Maxim and a nude pictorial (done tastefully, of course). If she keeps this up, I'll start hoping to see her in Playboy. Hef, give her a call!

2. Christy Hemme



If you've been following my series of "best of the 2000's" posts, you've already met the Hooters girl turned pro wrestler. She is simply fabulous, and each of her fairly rare appearances on TV was a highlight in itself.

1. Amy Dumas



The queen of pro wrestling has admittedly appeared in this blog quite a few times, but I'm not ashamed to say I consider her something of a pinnacle of womanhood. On the topic of this list, she made a brief foray into TV drama with an appearance on the final double episode of Dark Angel, where an inept stuntwoman broke her neck in the final fight scene. Thanks a million, dumbass. Unfortunately she seems to have pretty much dropped off the TV map since. I miss her!

A guilty confession

Okay. My theory is that pretty much nobody really reads this blog. Frankly, I even doubt the guys posting links to what looks like an Asian dating website (but could be something much more sinister) actually read my posts here. So I think I can post just about anything.

When I was a kid in Finland, our house didn't have cable, so we never had MTV. The first time I really saw any MTV was when we moved to Denmark in the very early nineties. Heck, I remember people like Ray Cokes, who's apparently since turned into a Belgian. The first and only time a cartoon really blew my mind was when I first saw Beavis and Butthead. So MTV has a certain place in my heart, even if it's become rather silly since. Watching "MTV Finland" is usually quite painful. But because I still sort of care about MTV on some silly level, I kind of keep up with what's going on. I've even seen a couple of episodes of The Hills; enough to know that I don't understand why anyone would actually watch that show, let alone marry Spencer.

Having seen the Hills, when the next big reality thing came along, I did my best Jeremy Clarkson voice and asked myself: "How bad could it be?" And so I was watching Jersey Shore.

My initial reaction was that someone at MTV found out that rampant stereotyping of American-Italians sort of ended in the 1920s, and decided that it's high time it came back. Not only has the show pissed off just about every American-Italian advocacy group in the world and the residents of the Jersey Shore, but it has that same sense of astonishing unreality as The Hills. Every episode leaves you wondering: do people really live like this? And even more scarily: do young people watch this, and then get the impression that one is supposed to live like this?

Given that my generation doesn't spend all its time sitting at home and watching music videos in AC/DC shirts, I'm not really too worried. Maybe the most worrying thing I've taken from MTV is that on some level, I really do feel that the best possible summation of the political and human rights situation of Finland is "in my country, we have no bunghole". I can live with that.

Now, all things being equal this would just have been another post with me going on about what's wrong with TV and today's youth and so on, making me look middle-aged. But all things are not equal. At all. In fact, they're so unequal and in such a way that only my deep conviction that no-one will actually read this blog post permits me to actually get to the point of all this.

Ordinarily, I would have watched one or two episodes of Jersey Shore and then dismissed it all from my mind. However, I can't, because I'm in love. Now, when I say love I really mean the kind of strange attraction that a person sometimes feels for someone they see on TV or out on the street or wherever. In teenage terms, a crush. As I watched Jersey Shore for the second time it dawned on me that I'm in love with Jwoww.

I can't explain it, but there it is. I think she's kind of cute, but other than that? She has giant fake tits, a voice like a man and she gets drunk and punches people. Apparently, that's what I like!

I'm being uncharitable, as I could post a far better picture of her:

According to MTV, she's a 23-year-old New Yorker, who's "a party girl with zero self control". That's actually being polite, based on the first season... For whatever crazy reason, I think she looks lovely, and there's something about her that just pushes my buttons.

They'll start showing the second season soon in the States, so that means I'll be watching MTV Finland again this fall... Here's a gratuitous bikini picture.

So there, I've admitted it. Not only do I watch Jersey Shore, but I've fallen in love with Jwoww. That's the kind of person whose blog you're reading. A Jersey Shore fan's!

Oh, brother!

Catharsis feels good, and so do those pictures. I'll go take a cold shower now. We'll be returning to our regular pseudo-intellectual programming soon, but I'll still be thinking about her.

Taking risks the safe way

There is an inherent contradiction to an artistic contest like The American Idol. On one hand, it is a singing contest, the purpose of which is to find a recording artist. To win it all, you have to showcase your artistic talent and range, which requires taking risks and putting it all on the line. On the other hand, to get to the final you have to survive from week to week, which encourages playing it safe and going with what works.

I propose: each results night, give one contestant immunity from elimination for the following week. This would free them from the pressure of threat of elimination and allow them to do one performance without other considerations than how they want to do things as an artist. I believe this would benefit the show.

As judge Kara DioGuardi said in a recent interview it's "about taking a risk and showing people a side of me they never have seen." Granted, she wasn't talking about American Idol.