Finally! An Interesting Game Show!
The wife hates it when I watch most game shows. Other than Jeopardy, most just suck, and I end up nit-picking intricacies of the show's workings and driving her to distraction. Well, it happened again last night, but in a new and interesting way.
Drew Carey's going game show host all over again, above and beyond his slated replacement of Bob Barker on The Price is Right. Power of Ten poses a far more interesting format than the typical answer-trivia-win-prizes format. Contestants on the show have estimate public opinion on the fly!
I walked in and watched a contestant try to pin down American opinion on the following question:
How many Americans agree that they are living the "American Dream?"
Right there, the game became interesting. I started rambling to the wife about what information the contestants are given about those who participated in the poll. For example, let's say you grab a bunch of clipboards and head down to LA. Were I a contestant, I would certainly want to know if the doorbells were rung in Beverly Hills or in Compton.
Just as I thought would happen, the contestant low-balled the estimate. Why? She was a black woman. Given her twenty-point spread, she initially supposed between 12 and 32% of respondents would agree. Her daughter (in the audience) agreed -- at first. Just to make the show interesting, the producers next revealed the audience opinion. I couldn't get a good read on the audience demographics, but it was fairly well mixed. Lo and behold, 45% agreed. Finally, contestant lady was given the opportunity to revise her estimate before "locking it in." Based on her daughter's urging, she raised the upper threshold to match that of the audience, changing her range of answers to between 25 and 45%. It was clear this new info shook her. Before the audience poll she seemed very confident of her original answer.
The answer: 47%. She was knocked out of competition.
Well, I aggravated the wife by not just shutting up and enjoying the show. I insisted this was Excellent Entertainment, but for reasons unrelated to the aim of the producers. I was in Unintended Humor Heaven. As I rambled a bit the show went on, arriving at a face-off between two new contestants. One man and one woman, both white, were asked:
What percentage of Americans get offended by fat jokes in movies?
I got interested once again. Have you ever heard the adage that the camera adds fifteen pounds? Well, it's very true. See folks you know personally on TV for the first time and you'd swear they put on massive weight. Those that appear "normal" on screen are rail-thin in person. . . and these two at the game were both what I would call "height-weight proportionate," meaning in real life they would both appear to be stick figures.
As I suspected, both of them guessed low, one at 12%, the other at 17% (IIRC).
The answer?
57%.
Swept along by the brisk pace and excitement attendant to competing on a national game show, both of these scarecrows failed to consider that there is a very real and very well reported obesity epidemic occurring in this age of high-fructose corn syrup, Super Sizing and $6 Grand Slam meals. Without any meat on their bones to speak of, both assumed most in the country would find The Nutty Professor and the rest of skinny-assed Eddie Murphy's recent tons o' fun movies to be just as funny as they did. "Oh, look," they might be thinking to themselves, "Lard Butt just broke the toilet at his future in-laws' house and shat all over the floor! What a dufe! No one I know would do that! Ha ha!" Off-camera, they could probably share awkward moments from their own lives when Big Bertha or Tubby McGee from school showed romantic interest in them and had to be let down, 'cause you couldn't be seen with them -- eww! What would the skinny crowd think!?! And so, just as the black woman failed to appreciate that advantaged and therefore dream-livin' white men might be among the polled in her case, both the scrawny contestants got a sharp dose of reality thrown in their nationally televised faces -- in front of Drew Carey.
I like to think he might have had a good laugh later at their expense.
This phenomenon involving the inability to relate was introduced to me by, of all people, Robert McNamera, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. He held the ignominious distinction of being the longest serving SoD until trumped by Rumsfeld so very recently. Given the two wars the two SoDs both oversaw, the punditry community simply basked in doling out the many piquant quips.
In Fog of War, McNamara relates his logic avoiding war during the Cuban missile crisis. He claimed that Khrushchev had more to lose than Castro, and thus urged Kennedy to appeal to Moscow. McNamara made a point of noting that all struggles lead to war when the opponents fail to understand the objectives of the other. He later contrasts this with the Vietnam War. . . what the Vietnamese call the American War. He does have a point. Ho Chi Minh, shortly after the end of WWII, appealed to Roosevelt for help by letter. He asked FDR for American assistance preventing the French colonial occupiers from returning to Vietnam now that the Japanese had retreated, thus allowing Vietnam self-rule and sovereignty. He even sent a short movie to FDR showing how pro-American the Vietnamese Communist Party was. The movie showed the party, in party uniform, marching through the jungle waving the US flag while the band plays "Stars and Stripes Forever!" (It's a striking image, not to be missed. It is truly the real reason YouTube was created.)
Unfortunately for Ho, FDR had just died. President Truman was not as forgiving of the sin of communism. Ho's appeal probably backfired. Years later, American forces entered Vietnam to assist the French.
McNamara's point: The Vietnamese were fighting against the return of colonial rule, not for the necessary spread of communism. Ho's forces regarded the entire fight (according to the equivalent of the SoD during the conflict) as a civil war against colonial allies, not a war of ideological domination. In his opinion, this disconnect between the participants made resolution nearly impossible.
I'm not sure if a lesson can be taken from this rambling. We Homo sapien sapiens have only so much cranium stuffing. We seem to have evolved the ability to relate to about 150 people, tops, at any given time. More than that, and our brains, evolutionarily-selected data centers designed to relate to a given number socially, simply reach their genetic limit. We can, in theory at least, relate to the fact that some of us are one way and some another. This is true. Putting that obvious difference recognition mechanism to practice, though, proves sticky at best. Individual communities, microcosms of humanity, recognize that the American Dream is a crock, that fat people are funny, or that commies want to take over the whole wide world.
Other microcosms? Not so much. It seems to all depend upon whom you ask.
Drew Carey's going game show host all over again, above and beyond his slated replacement of Bob Barker on The Price is Right. Power of Ten poses a far more interesting format than the typical answer-trivia-win-prizes format. Contestants on the show have estimate public opinion on the fly!
I walked in and watched a contestant try to pin down American opinion on the following question:
How many Americans agree that they are living the "American Dream?"
Right there, the game became interesting. I started rambling to the wife about what information the contestants are given about those who participated in the poll. For example, let's say you grab a bunch of clipboards and head down to LA. Were I a contestant, I would certainly want to know if the doorbells were rung in Beverly Hills or in Compton.
Just as I thought would happen, the contestant low-balled the estimate. Why? She was a black woman. Given her twenty-point spread, she initially supposed between 12 and 32% of respondents would agree. Her daughter (in the audience) agreed -- at first. Just to make the show interesting, the producers next revealed the audience opinion. I couldn't get a good read on the audience demographics, but it was fairly well mixed. Lo and behold, 45% agreed. Finally, contestant lady was given the opportunity to revise her estimate before "locking it in." Based on her daughter's urging, she raised the upper threshold to match that of the audience, changing her range of answers to between 25 and 45%. It was clear this new info shook her. Before the audience poll she seemed very confident of her original answer.
The answer: 47%. She was knocked out of competition.
Well, I aggravated the wife by not just shutting up and enjoying the show. I insisted this was Excellent Entertainment, but for reasons unrelated to the aim of the producers. I was in Unintended Humor Heaven. As I rambled a bit the show went on, arriving at a face-off between two new contestants. One man and one woman, both white, were asked:
What percentage of Americans get offended by fat jokes in movies?
I got interested once again. Have you ever heard the adage that the camera adds fifteen pounds? Well, it's very true. See folks you know personally on TV for the first time and you'd swear they put on massive weight. Those that appear "normal" on screen are rail-thin in person. . . and these two at the game were both what I would call "height-weight proportionate," meaning in real life they would both appear to be stick figures.
As I suspected, both of them guessed low, one at 12%, the other at 17% (IIRC).
The answer?
57%.
Swept along by the brisk pace and excitement attendant to competing on a national game show, both of these scarecrows failed to consider that there is a very real and very well reported obesity epidemic occurring in this age of high-fructose corn syrup, Super Sizing and $6 Grand Slam meals. Without any meat on their bones to speak of, both assumed most in the country would find The Nutty Professor and the rest of skinny-assed Eddie Murphy's recent tons o' fun movies to be just as funny as they did. "Oh, look," they might be thinking to themselves, "Lard Butt just broke the toilet at his future in-laws' house and shat all over the floor! What a dufe! No one I know would do that! Ha ha!" Off-camera, they could probably share awkward moments from their own lives when Big Bertha or Tubby McGee from school showed romantic interest in them and had to be let down, 'cause you couldn't be seen with them -- eww! What would the skinny crowd think!?! And so, just as the black woman failed to appreciate that advantaged and therefore dream-livin' white men might be among the polled in her case, both the scrawny contestants got a sharp dose of reality thrown in their nationally televised faces -- in front of Drew Carey.
I like to think he might have had a good laugh later at their expense.
This phenomenon involving the inability to relate was introduced to me by, of all people, Robert McNamera, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. He held the ignominious distinction of being the longest serving SoD until trumped by Rumsfeld so very recently. Given the two wars the two SoDs both oversaw, the punditry community simply basked in doling out the many piquant quips.
In Fog of War, McNamara relates his logic avoiding war during the Cuban missile crisis. He claimed that Khrushchev had more to lose than Castro, and thus urged Kennedy to appeal to Moscow. McNamara made a point of noting that all struggles lead to war when the opponents fail to understand the objectives of the other. He later contrasts this with the Vietnam War. . . what the Vietnamese call the American War. He does have a point. Ho Chi Minh, shortly after the end of WWII, appealed to Roosevelt for help by letter. He asked FDR for American assistance preventing the French colonial occupiers from returning to Vietnam now that the Japanese had retreated, thus allowing Vietnam self-rule and sovereignty. He even sent a short movie to FDR showing how pro-American the Vietnamese Communist Party was. The movie showed the party, in party uniform, marching through the jungle waving the US flag while the band plays "Stars and Stripes Forever!" (It's a striking image, not to be missed. It is truly the real reason YouTube was created.)
Unfortunately for Ho, FDR had just died. President Truman was not as forgiving of the sin of communism. Ho's appeal probably backfired. Years later, American forces entered Vietnam to assist the French.
McNamara's point: The Vietnamese were fighting against the return of colonial rule, not for the necessary spread of communism. Ho's forces regarded the entire fight (according to the equivalent of the SoD during the conflict) as a civil war against colonial allies, not a war of ideological domination. In his opinion, this disconnect between the participants made resolution nearly impossible.
I'm not sure if a lesson can be taken from this rambling. We Homo sapien sapiens have only so much cranium stuffing. We seem to have evolved the ability to relate to about 150 people, tops, at any given time. More than that, and our brains, evolutionarily-selected data centers designed to relate to a given number socially, simply reach their genetic limit. We can, in theory at least, relate to the fact that some of us are one way and some another. This is true. Putting that obvious difference recognition mechanism to practice, though, proves sticky at best. Individual communities, microcosms of humanity, recognize that the American Dream is a crock, that fat people are funny, or that commies want to take over the whole wide world.
Other microcosms? Not so much. It seems to all depend upon whom you ask.