Recovering Baptist

Actually I want my house back. House house has 5 bedrooms (four bedrooms and one office), 2 dens, a living room, a kitchen, a dining room and three bathrooms. Right now we have three bedrooms which are usable for their intended purpose. Everything else in our house is a disaster.

The kitchen is in progress. It looks good, but we’ve got a ways to go. The dining room is full of stuff from the kitchen, as is the living room. At least this stuff was of our own choosing.

Our dens and my office have no floors thanks to a pipe backup. I had to take the toilet out of the bathroom on that level so a guy could put a video camera down our drain. The toilet is in the shower. If you’re at my house, please, just go somewhere else. I recommend the ivy out back.

My other toilets need to have their internals replaced. One runs all the time and the other won’t flush.

Right now from my temporary office I hear four kids. Ours are playing just outside my door and our neighbor’s kids are crying outside. I don’t know why I’m bothering to pretend to work today. I need a weekend and the Scotch tasting that comes with it.

I must have been a sophomore at GT when it started. And my friends thought I was nuts; I was embarrassed to tell them about it. Actually, I’m embarrassed to write about it now. I was a fan of the first few seasons of MTV’s The Real World. All of my friends thought I was crazy. Who would want to watch a show that consisted of following people my age around their everyday lives? But that first season, and actually the first three or so, were better than everyone thought. As this article shows (hat tip to digg; I don’t normally read this site), back then the people involved viewed it as a sort of documentary. And those of us watching it kind of thought of it that way, too.

Back in 1992 there was nothing like it on TV. MTV was in its transition from actually playing music to doing anything but. None of us had heard of reality TV, and the closest thing to it were “talk” shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer. Cops did come first, but it offered a series of vignettes rather than any sense of story or characters. As for “normal” programming, The Simpsons was making Fox a “real” network, but honestly, the only other Gen-X (a phrase none of us knew then) show on TV was Mystery Science Theater 3000.

It’s easy to overlook the importance of that first group of seven strangers, but consider that everything from Survivorman to Trading Spaces in some way traces its roots to that show. Of course, we also have it to blame for the awfulness of Wife Swap, Super Nanny, and Hannah Montana. Who knows if the networks would have had the guts to air Survivor if MTV hadn’t taken that risk eight years earlier.

Today’s version of the show bears almost no resemblance to the first few seasons. Like so many other shows on that network, The Real World now borders on soft-core porn. It’s hard to remember that there was a time when the plot centered around something other than who was sleeping under whose covers. And it was everyone’s hopes, dreams, and personal struggles that drew me to the show. That, and I saw the future of television. Honestly. It had nothing to do with having a crush on Julie. Nothing at all. Nor that I had a thing for girls from Birmingham. Nope. I just knew how to spot a twenty-season running show from the start. Yeah.

I think she was a dancer…

A second week of American Idol covering Beatles tunes shows why Apple Corp is in desperate need of ending its long running feud with Apple Inc. Last week’s finalists could get by on their cursory knowledge of the Fab Four, but this week required a better knowledge of the band’s material. And never has an age gap been more apparent on Idol than this week when the CD generation (who can legally buy Beatles music in this country) showed that they knew their stuff while the iPod generation really had no idea who they were.

Apple Inc. and iTunes really don’t need the Beatles catalog. Sure, it would be nice to have the top selling band available, and it would bring in some older customers. But let’s face it, a full 1/3 of the customers will be buying the proverbial White Album for the fourth time. The stewards of the Beatles music, however, needs to wake up. While their albums are great and literally changed music for generations, there is no compelling reason for kids to go out of their way to get it, either through legal or illegal means. And the result is that the Beatles, dare I say it, are at risk of quickly becoming footnotes in music history. The argument (before it became blatant that the real issue is money) has always been that the classic albums were meant to be enjoyed as entire works (try getting Revolution 9 in a random mix to understand why), but the greater loss is that without some serious marketing and easy availability, the legacy might soon be lost.

Last week of Idol gave us a few nice performances. This week was just plain awful. Let’s hope that AI doesn’t bother to try extending a theme for two weeks again in the future. And it would be nice for the contestants to get to perform music that is relevant to them more than once or twice in a season. But for the sake of us music buffs, let’s hope that the Apples can put their grievances behind them.