Category Archives: Boob Tubery

Baseball, Boob Tubery

Take Me Out to the Nuthouse

As you’ve probably heard, Glenn Beck is leaving FOX News to spend more time with his tinfoil hats. There was a very interesting article in New York recently about how Beck made everyone at FOX very rich but probably cost the Republicans the next presidential election with his special brand of divisive wing-nuttery. The article basically said his conspiracy theories and apparent belief that he is a vessel for the word of Jebus got so out of hand that even Roger Ailes had enough and told Beck to hit the bricks.

In truth, Glenn Beck won’t be going anywhere. He was already a superstar on talk radio and will remain one. He was already doing sold-out, weepy live events about the fall of America and Christmas sweaters and will presumably continue to do those, too. He’ll even be expanding his empire with a new online endeavor called GBTV. (Yes, that looks very much like it should stand for gay/bi/transgender or something similar, but please, nobody tell him. Let’s just laugh about it behind his back for several years.) It sounds it will be mostly Beck doing a variation on his FOX show for a nominal fee; $4.95/month to watch just his show, $9.95 for the full array of GBTV (teehee) programming.

None of this would be remarkable to me if I didn’t know that GBTV (snicker) will be powered by MLB Advanced Media. Yup, the same outfit responsible for creating online clips of Major League Baseball games (but not responsible for allowing you to embed them anywhere) will now help make sure the special angel-monkeys in Glenn Beck’s brain have their message heard. I can’t see how this makes any sense for MLB, business- or publicity-wise, unless they just want to carry one show worse than Intentional Talk.

Granted, MLB is not the smartest outfit in the world (see: idiotic anti-replay stance, the WBC, the aforementioned refusal to make video clips of their sport embeddable). However, I think even Bud Selig and Co. have to recognize that they’re treading on thin ice here. Getting into bed with a guy like Beck–however tangentially–is virtually guaranteed to bring nothing but trouble.

I’m not saying it’s a risk because Beck is a conservative and I am not. I wouldn’t even call Beck a conservative because he’s anything but. A conservative, by definition, wants to conserve, to keep things the way they are. Beck wants to blow up everything up to and including the Magna Carta. This is not so much a right/left split as it is a crazy/not crazy split.

As I already said, he became so toxic that Roger Ailes–who cut his teeth as Richard Nixon’s media guru, and who can stomach Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity–wants nothing to do with him. As gross and disingenuous as FOX News is, the majority of programming is light years more fair and sane than Glenn Beck. Wal-Mart withdrew sponsorship from Beck’s program when he called President Obama a racist. If any business has the economic and political power to withstand public pressure over such issues, it’s Wal-Mart, and yet even they decided they’d rather not be associated with such a person.

But obviously, there is a sizable segment of the population that likes this guy. Why pass judgment on that, if you’re MLB? Fine, let’s look at this in cold, hard terms. From a pure dollars-and-cents standpoint, there is virtually no way that this GBTV (chortle) venture will become lucrative.

Why? Because if the internet has proven anything…well, I guess the number one thing the internet has proven is that people like porn. But the second biggest thing it’s proven is that nobody wants to pay for something they used to get for free. The Internet Graveyard is filled with the tombs of kooky ranters who captivated audiences on YouTube, then decided to try and monetize their nuttiness and fell off the face of the earth.

Not to mention, GBTV will not be the only way people who like Glenn Beck can get Glenn Beck; he still has his radio show, which costs virtually nothing to listen to. And yet you’re asking people to plunk down as much as 10 bucks a month–more than a basic Netflix subscription–to watch him do a show you used to be able to see for a sliver of your monthly cable bill?

Put it this way: If Howard Stern couldn’t get people to buy satellite radios en masse, Glenn Beck will not get people to pay for internet TV in significant numbers. It doesn’t matter if the fee is relatively affordable; people hate subscriptions. They especially hate them for anything online. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for The New York Times or 24 uninterrupted hours of Bababooey or an internet channel dedicated to hoarding your gold.

When Beck has his inevitable on-air meltdown–not if, but when–it’s going to be carried by the same online engine that brings you clips of America’s pastime. Bud Selig will be praying for the carefree days of the Mitchell Report and failed drug tests when that happens.

Boob Tubery

Mancation Is the Name of Two Actual Things

1 Comment

In addition to seeing the worst show in the history of time this weekend, I also saw a boatload of ads for a show that debuted Sunday on The Travel Channel called Mancations. This is apparently a show for men who hate both women and puns that make sense. I haven’t been confronted with “wordplay” so forced since I heard David Cross tell tale of encountering a Mexican restaurant that sold something called The Taco-erminator.

I’m never going to watch Mancations. Even if I stumble upon it while channel surfing, I will not linger. I know exactly what this is: Two bros who are kind of shlubby in an acceptable-for-TV way broin’ out. You could not create a show with less appeal to me if you tried, and I hate the implication that dumb women ruin men’s vacations, and their lives.

We do not live in the world of lite beer commercials. Women of the 21st century do not actually drag their poor, suffering boyfriends to the opera, or to the mall so you can watch them try on clothes. More than ever, the lives and interests of men and women intersect. We no longer live in a society where men go off and do Their Thing and women do likewise, usually in the kitchen.

I don’t know about any other fellas out there, but I prefer hanging out in mixed company, rather than with all dudes. Because when it’s just dudes in a room, they tend to do idiotic things like text pictures of their junk or write episodes of Two and a Half Men.

Also, if you’re in a relationship where you have to get away from your partner for an extended period of time and do things s/he wouldn’t “let” you do in a million years, that’s an unhealthy relationship. You should get out of that situation before one of you brains the other with a rolling pin. Or, you may actually be Ralph Kramden, and you gotta sneak out of the house to hang out with the boys so’s Alice don’t find out about it and call you a fat slob.

However, Mancations did bring me one good thing, because when I tweeted about it, @kickthebobo responded with a link to the following video, from an outfit that calls itself ManCation Nation. The fact that the video opens with a full 15 uninterrupted seconds of someone shooting a machine gun should give you an idea of the intended audience. As should the fact that it also contains footage of someone waterskiing while brandishing an enormous firearm. From what I can gather from this video, the non-shooting recreational options are limited. Sounds like a trip made in Class Action Lawsuit Heaven!

Part of ManCation Nation’s mantra? “Get your sack back!” Yeah, get away from the ol’ battle axe who won’t let you fire an uzi in the living room!

In the wake of the Anthony Wiener mess, I saw a lot of online commentary from women along the lines of All men are pigs, pervs, etc. My first impulse is to refute that, because as you all know men are an embattled minority–we only control 98 percent of the planet now! Because I’m not the type of person who would engage in Wiener-ish behavior, nor are the vast supermajority of men I know. Maybe it’s not the condition of being male, but possessing the kind of personality that wants to rule others, which can border on psychosis, that drives guys like Wiener to sociopath behavior.

But then I see stuff like this and have to wonder if I’m the minority. Is the rest of the country really filled with cave trolls like this, who hate women (consciously or not) and wanna spend their vacation with other dudes spraying hot lead in the desert? You know what? Don’t tell me. I’m going to plug up both my ears, crawl under the covers, and pray for a swift, brutal Apocalypse.

Here’s hoping The Travel Channel and ManCation Nation sue each other over the term Mancation, the case drags on for decades, and everyone winds up broke and alone, never again knowing the love of a good woman.

Or man, which is a possibility, since the whole point of both endeavors, apparently, is to separate yourself completely from women, go into the wilderness, shoot stuff while wearing very little clothing, and stare longingly into the sunset with your dude guy bro-hams. A Project Runway marathon followed by a RuPaul’s Drag Race marathon isn’t as gay as that.

Boob Tubery

Extreme Couponing Induces Extreme Vomiting

6 Comments

This weekend I saw TLC’s Extreme Couponing for the first time. It may be the worst show on TV. By that I mean, the worst for humanity. It is simultaneously the saddest and most infuriating thing I’ve ever seen. If you told me Werner Herzog directed this thing, I wouldn’t bat an eye.

I concede that other people may not feel the same vitriol when viewing Extreme Couponing that I do. Because when I heard the phrase “extreme couponing,” I thought of my mother and grandmother.

In my childhood, both of them obsessively clipped coupons and shared them on a daily basis. My mom did it because my dad drank himself into unemployment and money was scarce; if we did not have a coupon for something or it was not on sale, we did not buy it. My grandmother couponed because she had the prototypical Survivor of The Depression/World War II’s view of saving money, combined with the need to stretch every cent in retirement. She had two pantries in her house filled with non-perishables, each item bearing ballpoint notation of the retail cost, with careful subtraction of how much she saved. Mom and grandmom* both had little coupon boxes they would take to Shop-Rite, organized with alphabetic tabs, so an appropriate coupon could be located at a moment’s notice.

* We actually called her Nanny, but I thought that would appear precious when written down and would also cause the reader to confuse her with the faceless caretaker from Muppet Babies.

But it turns out my mom and grandmother were rank amateurs. They are put to shame by the people on Extreme Couponing. Actually, I think the Extreme Couponers put themselves to shame.

Here are the five worst things about this show, other than everything:

  1. There is virtually no such thing as a coupon for decent food. There are no coupons for “bananas” or “organic chicken” or “fresh vegatables”. These extreme couponers are stocking up almost exclusively on packaged or frozen food, loaded with preservatives, salt, hormones, and a billion other horrible things. It’s all Franken-food, the absolute worst shit imaginable. Not a lot of salad in these people’s shopping carts, but a whole lot of things stuffed with cheese and/or skewered on sticks.
  2. The goal for most of these people appears to be not feeding/supplying their families, but accumulating the most stuff for as little money as possible, then shoving those things into every corner of their house, then building more corners in their house into which things can be stuffed. The line between “extreme couponer” and “hoarder” is extremely thin–if such a line exists.
  3. Many of the people featured on the show credit God with giving them this extreme couponing “blessing” or “talent.” If you’re in a situation where extreme couponing is an economic necessity, thanking God for giving you this “gift” seems like thanking God for not burning down your house.
  4. The use of “rockin” incidental music that stands in sharp contrast the banality and sadness of the deeds actually performed. There are few things sadder than watching someone dump 60 jars of mayonnaise into a shopping cart, except when it is accompanied by some sweet guitar riffs.
  5. A disturbing number of people on this show pronounce coupon as “cyupon,” which goes through me like a knife.

Continue reading Extreme Couponing Induces Extreme Vomiting →