I watch too many shows on Thursday nights

[bredalot]

Community continues to be excellent, and Outsourced is getting ever closer to getting me to stop watching. The only character I actually like is Asha, and she's too much of the Voice of Reason to be a realistic character, so I'm even getting sick of her. Oh, no, wait: I forgot Madhuri. SHE'S my favorite. But Todd grows ever more frustrating and

Comments

[bredalot]

To be clear, Caucasoid and Negroid are the official, actual, scientific terms. (The third is Mongoloid, referring to all of Asian and Native American populations, which are fascinatingly similar. And there are only three "regions", because variation is so wide within populations that this is as fine a distinction as you can get.) So while the terms themselves are kind of horrifying and old-fashioned, we can't really blame her for that. (God, I hated saying "Negroid" and "Mongoloid" in that class I took.)

And they totally have Angela doing that at least once a season. I still like it. And yeah, the hairstyles are totally made up: I'm always annoyed when the hairstyle she draws matches the one in the missing persons database, because there's no way for her to know that.

I'm confused about the thing with Cam, too. I don't know if it was supposed to be her ACTUAL great-grandmother, or if they just had the same first name? It was pretty unclear.

PS: I have never liked Michael. I have occasionally felt bad for him, but mostly I just want him to go away. However, this doesn't mean I think the show can survive without him.

Re: really long comment

[bredalot]

Ok, totally fair point. I wasn't sure exactly what you meant from that one sentence. And I agree: I remember at one point being really annoyed because Brennan spent about 15 seconds looking at a skeleton in situ (not all laid out on the specially-lit tables) and said, "Mid 30s, female, has borne a child," which is especially frustrating considering that age is hardest to determine between 30 and 50. They do this sort of thing ALL THE TIME and it both undermines the scientific process and really skews the public perception of everything they're talking about, as you said. It's less important socially when it's a person's age than race, but it just shows how widespread it is.

I do remember one episode when Brennan found mixed Caucasoid and Mongoloid features and it turned out the woman was Eastern European, which I thought was interesting. No idea how accurate that is, but still: an example of population blending rather than "obvious mixing", as you said, so they get one point for that. (Also weird, because that's where the Caucasus IS, but that's the problem with using "Caucasian" indiscriminately to mean "white". My ancestors haven't been anywhere near the Caucasus in at least 500 years, but hey, let's go with that. I don't have any better suggestions, considering how much bigger Russia is than Europe and how much variation in skin tone there is among the population it describes. There's a similar problem with "Asian", considering we use the term to describe about a quarter of the actual population of Asia.)