Fox, France, and fatties

This past week, I learned that Fox News has yet ANOTHER show trying to use the novel concept of "humor" to appeal to a less geriatric audience. Red Eye consists of the four youngest people they could find at the Fox News studio (which presumably means they're in their late forties or so) making jokes about current events. At least, that's presumably what it's SUPPOSED to be. But, well, I don't want to stereotype here, but I get the impression that many of the FNC employees and viewers grew up in households where every possible effort was made to squelch any possible signs of a sense of humor, along with their senses of decency and compassion, logical reasoning abilities, and libido (although that last one is hard to kill completely, so it often surfaces in weird and distrubing scandals). You know, TRADITIONAL families.

Hmm, what else do I have to report? Well, this past weekend, I put in some overtime at work, and watched the rest of Amelie with bethje. Since that was a French film, I'm sure that was un-American of me. Okay, you know how people don't like the French because they're a bunch of cheese-ending surrender monkeys, and we (meaning "the United States") had to save their sorry derrieres in World War II? And now we're mad at them because they didn't help out in the War on Terror? But, well, if they're such wusses, why would we WANT them helping us? It doesn't seem like the Freedom Fry eaters have really thought this one out.

But I'm getting way off topic here, the topic being that Amelie was one of the best movies I've seen in some time. But I'm sure everyone already knew that; I'm coming late to the party here. And since I don't really have anything specific to say about it, I'll move on to something else that I enjoyed, namely the most recent Simpsons episode.

Yes, perhaps surprisingly, I actually did like last night's show. Yeah, it was another "Homer gets a wacky new job" episode, with a plot that was sort of a mixture of "Guess Who's Coming To Criticize Dinner" and "When You Dish Upon a Star," but I thought it was funnier than either of those. The family trying to recreate the family photo album was great, particularly the Voyager farewell party and the Tracey Ullman Simpsons ringing in 1987. There were also some good gags involving Springfield's celebrities (the excesses at the club and Rainier Wolfcastle's rant about sushi come to mind), and we got to see Gabbo again.

I didn't think last night's Family Guy was that great, and Peter really seemed to be even more of a jerk than usual. I don't think that's WHY I didn't like the episode that much (the fact that FG is a few steps further removed from reality than The Simpsons means that Jerkass Peter can never really be the concern that Jerkass Homer was), but it was something I noticed. I was glad to see American Dad back, and while this episode wasn't one of the better ones, it was still pretty good.

There's also a new episode of Bullshit!, which is about how ridiculous the media's "obesity epidemic" hysteria is. Penn pointed out that the whole Body Mass Index thing was created by a nineteenth-century Belgian mathematician in an attempt to tie together sociology and statistics. Yet it's still published in modern health textbooks as if it's really relevant to anything. There was also some discussion on how a lot of studies on obesity are sponsored by the weight loss industry. There wasn't anything all that novel in it, but I'm glad it was made, because I find our society's obsession with skinniness to be really disturbing. The main point seemed to be that there isn't necessarily any direct correlation between weight and health, which I've pretty much figured for some time. And I think the basic attitude of the episode was more positive than that of some others they've done. I prefer it when they go after the exploiters rather than the exploited, you know?