Monday Fragments

Zheng Xiaoyu: Dead
OK what I need to hear, just to give me a little bit of confidence is the phrase 'convicted of murder', but I don't think I'm going to hear that. What everybody is hearing loud and clear is that the former director of China's State Food and Drug Administration has been executed. Maybe they made him eat the dog food.

Live Commercials Comeback?
Roger Schlesinger does live commercials, almost. But every day on KRLA he has a different story to tell about how his company might be able to save me money on my home financing. They are some of the most informative commercials available anywhere, and it's a great way to do business.

I don't know who was the guy who suggested it, but it seemed a brilliant idea when I first heard how the networks might be able to beat Tivo. Live Commercials. If we had some idea that something new and spontaneous might be said during a commercial break, we might not fast-forward past them. Now the people I talked to about this the other day said not in a million years. Money spent on television commercials has to be reinvested. If you can't run it twice, it doesn't make sense to air it. I don't agree. I think there is a new kind of spokesman in the making in the mold of Roger Schlesinger, the mortgage minute guy. This is somebody who is capable of going straight to the geek level of a product in 30 seconds and tell a different aspect of the product or service on a regular basis.

You know who else does this on TV? Computer Professor.

Butch Grrlz
I've been noticing the trend for some time now and I must say it's just about to get on my nerves. It starts with the eSurance chick. What is it with ballsy chicks?

If the term 'ballsy chick' offends you, then you're probably the kind of confused pseudo-feminist I want to poke in the chest. I think this portrayal of dramatic gender-bending is a little bit too twisted to be normal, and as an alternative view of 'empowerment' I think it's not as useful as some people may think. Now on the one hand, there's nothing wrong with comic book heroism, and quite frankly if the graphic artists at eSurance weren't peddling something so stupid, it might be a halfway decent anime. What concerns me is the extent to which we see stuff creeping into sitcoms.

So the thing that irks me are two, and the first was some dumb sitcom I saw the other night in which the teenaged girl challenged the teenaged boy to a wrestling match. 'Naturally' the girl won. That's just wrong and stupid, not to mention how obvious it was during the filming that they used a stunt double.