Tagged: Humor

The Idiot Box


There’s a reason why TV is called the [[wp>Idiot_Box|Idiot Box]] — its not because its like a “dumb terminal”, its because these days a lot of what comes on TV is either dumb, or is making us dumb, or we are already so dumb that we can’t help but watch it.

I haven’t really watched much TV in the last 10 years or so. There are occassional bursts when I’m at home, or an extended stay at a friend’s place or a hotel and so on. On a day to day basis, my only TV experience usually happens in the gym. I’m always more intrigued by what people choose to watch than what is actually on TV.

This one time, I saw what was being called the [[http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/show_cc/text/0,2495,FOOD_20077_40801,00.html|Food Challenge]] on … you guessed it, the [[http://www.foodnetwork.com/|Food Network]]. This particular episode focused on Italian chefs. The contest involves things like “Highest pizza dough throw”, “Highest number of shoulder to shoulder pizza dough rolls”, “Largest pizza base” and “eXtreme Pizza”. Infact, IIRC it was actually affliated with the [[http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/|Guinnes Book of World Records]]. Bear in mind that I have full respect for what these Chefs do and their profession. I’m just saying that the intellectual content of that program was abysmal. I was not funny, it was thrilling, it was not educational, it was not insightful. And yet, I could see that people were actually paying money to be at these events, and clearly some people didn’t mind watching it on TV either. Why? What does this kind of content have to offer?

Then just yesterday I chanced upon an episode of this new(?) game show called [[http://www.nbc.com/Deal_or_No_Deal/|Deal or No Deal]] — its essentially like gambling showed on TV. Its purely a game of chance, there’s absolute **NO SKILL** required whatsoever (unlike some other game shows). And yet, I saw people actually getting excited as each contestant advanced. The makes of the show have put in all the glamorous elements in the show. There are lots of beautiful women, there are mysterious callers, there’s lots of screaming and yelling, and they build up a lot of these crucial moments where the silence of audience is punctuated by the orchestrated background score. And you know these high tension moments involve? //The opening of a suitcase// — the contestant makes the choice of which suitcase to be opened, and it is then opened. Thats it. One would imagine this should be a fairly simple affair. But no sir, it is accompanied by audience cheering; the contestant is portrayed as if he/she has some inherent qualities that led him/her to make this wonderful decision; the girl who opens the suitcase acts as if she is somehow responsible for the contents of the case. And so on and so on, you get the point.

I couldn’t help but conclude that if these are the kinds of things that are selling and people are watching, then the TV is definitely not the Idiot. We are.

Meet the PM


Hi, my name is Manmohan Singh. I’m the Prime Minister of India. Not only that, I’m also a doctor. Now isn’t that cool?! You can find a lot more similarly interesting information about me on [[http://pmindia.nic.in/|my website]], for instance, that I [[http://pmindia.nic.in/cv.htm|"have three daughters"]]. Here are some of the highlights of my website:

* As everyone knows, India has demonstrated significant technical competence — infact, superiority — in the IT industry, both in the products and services sector. Needless to say, the websites for the Indian government are of highest quality, and of those, the Prime Minister’s website, //clearly// has to be the best, wouldn’t you agree?
* Since the vast majority of the Indian population is already on the Internet over broadband connections, our website has been designed for a rich experience. The total size of the home page is around **420KB**, and includes around **90 images**.
* We adhere to the strictest web standards possible. However, running the [[http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpmindia.nic.in|home page through the W3C validator]] will tell you that our home page is **NOT VALID**. What kind of an idiotic response is that? I mean, clearly we do have a home page. How can it not be valid? Seriously, these people call themselves the standards body of the Internet? I think they’re just being bullied by the US (like some [[http://un.org|other international bodies]]).
* We also put a lot of emphasis on accessibility and usability. For uniformity and to avoid confusion, our website doesn’t render at all in text based browsers. We also use some great features such as [[http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/special/iframe.html|inline frames]], which might not work on some ancient browsers. Hence we also recommend our visitors to use the best-of-the-breed browsers (”Best viewed with IE 5 & above 800×600 resolution”).
* We’ve tried to make navigating the website content extremely easy. For instance, on the home page, the top header contains two menu entries while the left menu contains a whole bunch of items. From there, if you go to the Profile page (top header please), you’ll find some menu entries relocated to the top header, while the rest have been eliminated to avoid confusion. We really want you to spend some time on the profile page, so there’s no link back to “Home” on that page – the only way back is to, you guessed it, hit the back button!
* We love consistency. So you’ll see that on some pages (such as the [[http://pmindia.nic.in/pmo.htm|PMO page]]), we have bullets in the left menu, but no text and nothing to click on. Whats a website without some element of surprise eh?
* We believe in stimulating the minds of our intellectual readers. Therefore we have intentionally left several typos in the [[http://pmindia.nic.in/speeches.htm|transcripts of speeches]].
* Finally, we believe in code reuse. You can see that our [[http://pmindia.nic.in/guestbook.htm|guestbook]] (Note however, that at this time we do not permit the viewing of the guestbook for security reasons) and our [[http://pmindia.nic.in/write.htm|write to the PM form]] look suspiciously familiar. We’re all about high productivity and the [[wp>DRY|DRY philosophy]].

I hope you enjoy our website. Don’t forget to leave a comment (or, write to the guest book). Thanks!