K-Squared Ramblings

Clouds on the Horizon

Well, June Gloom seems to be over, and we’re now into the time of year when we get hot, sunny days with lots of clouds. Big, towering cumulus clouds, often with anvil heads, promising shade and rain to cool things down. The teases.

Yeah, we see those clouds most afternoons—on the horizon, just on the other side of the coastal mountains!

While it’s great for summer activities—beach trips, swimming, hiking, etc.—it can also be frustrating when you have to choose between running your electricity-guzzling air conditioner all day or leaving your window open all night. The clouds are right there, taunting you with relief from the heat—relief that will not come.

When I was in high school, my family took a vacation across the Great American Southwest^TM. We went to Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. We drove out to Mesa Verde, which wasn’t a canyon, but there were still a lot of cliffs. We came back through Arizona, where we stopped by Meteor Crater and Sunset Crater. We joked that it was a tour of all the big holes in the ground. (A few years later, I posted some photos from this trip online.)

The weird thing about it was that we went during August, and we got rained on at least briefly almost every afternoon—but only outside of California. Utah? Rain. Arizona? Rain. Colorado? Rain. I don’t think we got rained on during our three hours in Nevada (we stopped at Valley of Fire on the way out), but as I recall, the rain stopped about the time we crossed from Arizona back into California.

We don’t get summer storms much here in SoCal.

Chaos in a Bag

At the market today, we discovered that you can buy a bag of Chaos. Not only that, but you can buy a bag of wheat-free Chaos.

In actuality it’s a brand of chips from the makers of Pirate’s Booty, but the name reminded us both of a time we and a bunch of friends started coming up with lists of product names based on abstract concepts. It started with a pun, “Diet Spite,” and eventually filled an entire sheet of paper. I think Jason ended up with the sheet, and may even have HTMLized it, but from there it fades into legend.

Waiting for Beta 2

Well, I didn’t get around to downloading IE7 beta 1 yesterday, so I won’t be able to check it out over the weekend. But it’s become clear that, from a web developer’s point of view, all the action is slated for beta 2. Yesterday the IE team posted on Standards and CSS in IE, listing a number of CSS bugs they’ve fixed and a number of new features they’ve already implemented. It reads like a wish list:

• HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
• Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
• CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
• CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
• Alpha channel in PNG images
• Fix :hover on all elements
• Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

Fixed positioning! Child and Attribute selectors! Full PNG transparency (though we knew about that one already)!

Now if they’ll just implement min-width/max-width and fix the behavior of width, and add generated content via :before and :after, I think my wish list will be complete. (Assuming, of course, a low enough bug level.)

Mission Statements are utter BS

The member benefits section in the latest Golden Key newsletter features an announcement of a business partnership. Take a look at the first paragraph and see if you can figure out what the company does:

Owens Corning is a company with an unwavering commitment to delivering solutions, transforming markets and enhancing lives. It’s who we are. It’s why we are here. We do it by fully engaging our employees in support of growing our customer’s businesses. And when we do, we grow ours as well.

The second paragraph explains that they manufacture building supplies and provide construction services. The third contains a brief summary of the company’s history.

Now, tell me, what that hell is the point of the first paragraph? As best as I can tell its purpose is to make readers tune out before they actually get to the informative stuff.

Good-bye Global Frequency

Last year, a pilot was made for a TV show based on Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency, a series of one-shot stories about a worldwide organization of on-call specialists who take down threats to humanity. JMS would have been involved if it had been picked up. It didn’t make it to the air, though it was shopped around. And a few months ago, the pilot was leaked onto the internet, becoming wildly popular. This morning, Ellis posted the following remark in his email newsletter, Bad Signal:

It’s my current understanding that the bittorrenting of GLOBAL FREQUENCY has rendered it as dead as dead can get as a TV series. It seems that people in high places did not take kindly to the leak. I have no further details, so don’t ask.

Nice going, guys.

Sure, you can put the immediate blame on the suits who didn’t like being proved wrong about the show’s appeal… but it also reminds me of when the creators of Battlestar Galactica practically begged their fans to wait a few weeks and watch it on TV instead of downloading it off the net so that they’d get high enough ratings to be renewed.

For now, the only way to get Global Frequency remains the original, collected into two volumes: Planet Ablaze and Detonation Radio.

IE7 Reactions

There’s timing. Microsoft has released the first IE7 beta, and Opera has released a security update. (The latest Firefox update was last week.)

Reaction to the IE7 beta has been… less than enthusiastic. I can’t install it at work since we’re standardized on Windows 2000 (IE7 requires Windows XP or newer), and I can’t download it at home since this version is only available through MSDN. Anne van Kesteren is not impressed. Neither is CNET. Asa Dotzler is trying to start a new round of Firefox marketing. Dean Edwards (author of the may-need-a-new-name IE7 standards compatibility script) is eagerly awaiting his copy. KuraFire has compared several reviews and summed up the response:

I guess that, yes, this was a disappointing first step for IE7, but even so, we should’ve expected no more than that. As much as we may all want IE7 to be a sign of great improvements in the Microsoft camp, reality once again points out that time and patience is necessary in dealing with this dinosaur of browser.

With any luck the next beta will show more improvement.

Edit: More reactions from Mezzoblue, mainly on trying to install it and what’s changed in CSS, and from WaSP’s Molly Holzschlag, focused on what comes next.

75m Firefoxes!

Whew! The Mozilla Foundation has logged 75,000,000 downloads of Firefox!

Take that number with a grain of salt, of course. At least some of those are manual upgrades (from people who don’t want to wait for the auto-update to kick in), and some are one person downloading it in three places. But it can’t count the copies pre-installed with Fedora Core or Mandriva Linux, or downloaded via P2P—and some of those downloads are immediately pushed across a LAN or stuck on a USB keychain to be installed on a dozen or more computers.

It does show that Firefox continues to hold people’s interest, and the continuing rise in Gecko percentage in web traffic stats shows that, Bill Gates’ comments notwithstanding, people do use it.

(via Mozillazine)

Back in Space!

NASA Returns to Flight as Discovery Reaches Orbit.

Rather than getting my hopes up, I’ve been taking an “I’ll believe it when I see it” approach to this. And now, we’re finally back in space!

Here’s hoping the shuttle will be able to tide us over until the next-generation ship is ready. IMO we should have had another type of launch vehicle five years ago at the latest. That way Columbia never would have gone up, or if it had, we could have kept the newer fleet flying and just grounded the shuttles.

On a more personal note, I’m reminded of the time I went to see a shuttle landing. My mom took me and my brother out of school for a day, and we drove up with a family friend to Edwards Air Force Base where we set up camp with a zillion other people on the dry lake bed. We slept in the car, and the next morning everyone tried to get as close as possible to the chain link fence that marked the edge of the public viewing area.

Somewhere in a closet, I’ve still got a roll of slides from that landing. Of course, they had us so far away from the runway that I could barely catch the shuttle with a telephoto lens. I made an 8×10 print of the best slide in my grandfather’s home photo lab, and the shuttle was barely 1½ inches.

And the shuttle that I watched land? It was Discovery, and it was the first flight since the Challenger disaster.

Now if someone can just convince NASA to give Hubble its 120-zillion mile checkup instead of just throwing it away…

Poorly Targeted Advertising

If you have a website, you’ve probably seen link swap spam. People running link farms search for a keyword or phrase, then fire off a zillion emails to the contact addresses about how they’ve looked at the site, their site is clearly relevant to yours, they’ve already linked to you and they want you to link back to their site.

All this without bothering to actually look at the sites in the search results.

For example: last Saturday I posted picture of the marquee in front of San Diego’s Ghirardelli Chocolate shop. By Monday someone had asked me to link to their website about chocolate, because our sites were clearly related.

Today I got one that trips the irony-meter. I’ve made four posts over the past year about targeted—or mistargeted—advertising. Just four. This morning I received three copies (one to my webmaster address and one to each DNS contact) of this message:

Hello,
I have found your website hyperborea.org by searching Google for “targeted advertising”. I think our websites has a similar theme, so I have already added your link to my website.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comic-Con Quotes

I have just posted quotes collected from Comic-Con.

This Way to the Egress

Whenever I see this sign, I always think of the story about P.T. Barnum trying to get his visitors out of an exhibit so that new customers could come in. He eventually put up a sign saying “This way to the egress,” figuring most people wouldn’t know the word just meant “exit.” According to the legend, it worked.

Now, given that every other freeway sign I’ve seen says “exit,” I have to wonder why they phrased this one the way they did. My best guess is that it’s because it’s marking an exit from the carpool lane (it’s on the Santa Ana Freeway, heading north between the 55 and 22) instead of an exit to surface streets or directly to another freeway—but even that doesn’t make sense, because every place where you’re allowed to leave a carpool lane is marked as “exit!”

Cellular Palm Tree

The drawback of cellular phone technology is that you need to have transmitters everywhere. In a big city you can probably mount them on buildings, but in the suburbs, you just have to put up towers like you do for power lines and land-line phones. Every once in a while, someone decides to pretty things up a bit.

I’ve been meaning to catch a picture of this one for weeks, but I’ve just never been on the right stretch of freeway with a camera before. Katie almost caught it last week on the way back from San Diego, but the lighting conditions were poor and the picture came out way too grainy.

It’s not a bad approximation of a palm tree, but it’s too straight and the fronds are too regular. Still, if most people are only going to see it from their cars, it’s enough to blend in.

Terrorist Hunting Permit

Spotted on the back of an SUV that also sported a US Marines sticker:

I have to admit I rather like this one!

Halfway to Infinite Crisis

When DC Comics first announced the quartet of miniseries leading up to Infinite Crisis, I figured I’d take a look at Day of Vengeance (the magic corner of the DCU) and maybe Rann/Thanagar War (the Sci-Fi corner), and that was it. Countdown to Infinite Crisis got me excited about The OMAC Project, though, so I figured I’d pick up the first issue of each mini and see what I thought.

At first I found OMAC and Rann/Thanagar the most interesting, and Day of Vengeance just enough to get me to try issue 2. Villains United didn’t impress me at all.

After three issues of each (plus Day of Vengeance #4 out this week), my impressions have more or less reversed. On a whim I picked up Villains United #2 and enjoyed it much more. OMAC and Rann/Thanagar are both bogged down, and Day of Vengeance reminds me a lot of March of the Wooden Soldiers (my least favorite Fables arc): some nice moments, but a bit slow and not particularly exciting.

Right now, I could probably leave OMAC and Day of Vengeance, and the only things keeping me on board Rann/Thanagar War are the L.E.G.I.O.N cameos and trying to figure out what’s going on with Blackfire. Part of the problem is that none of them seem to be six issues worth of story. Sure, there’s a cliffhanger at the end of each issue, but they just still feel padded.

Well, we know DC is planning for big changes in the Crisis’ wake. I can only hope they have good reasons for what they end up doing, rather than just doing something like “Let’s kill off the Flash and Supergirl again because we did it 20 years ago!”

Forget GTA: The Sims is the real danger!

Well, now that people have successfully gotten Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas reclassified as Adult (18+) instead of Mature (17+)—since we all know that sex scenes that you can only get at by hacking the game are far more damaging to 17-year-olds than interactive sequences in which they shoot people, commit carjacking, and run over prostitutes—they’re going after The Sims 2.

Yep. The Sims.

Apparently you can modify the game so that the sims appear nude. OMGSEX!

Jeff Brown, vice president of corporate communications at EA, in response to the accusations, told GameSpot, “This is nonsense. We’ve reviewed 100 percent of the content. There is no content inappropriate for a teen audience. Players never see a nude sim. If someone with an extreme amount of expertise and time were to remove the pixels, they would see that the sims have no genitals. They appear like Ken and Barbie.”

Thompson doesn’t buy it. “The sex and the nudity are in the game. That’s the point. The blur is an admission that even the ‘Ken and Barbie’ features should not be displayed. The blur can be disarmed. This is no different than what is in San Andreas, although worse.”

Yes, he actually said that The Sims is worse than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

What is wrong with these people?

First they came for the violent games…

Who needs version numbers, anyway?

Just a day after Firefox decided to jump from 1.1 to 1.5 (triggering far more discussion than the numbering change really deserved), Microsoft has announced the official name for Longhorn: Windows Vista.

Okaaay. Yeah, I can see the connection: a vista is something you see through a window. But at that point, why not just go for broke and call it Ventanas or something?

Yeah, no one wants to use numbers anymore. It’s kind of like in the mid-1990s when it was taboo to tack a number onto the title of a movie sequel. As if having a 7 on Star Trek: Generations or a 4 on Alien: Resurrection would have scared off more viewers than the movies themselves.

Meanwhile, we’re left with yet another version name that does nothing to help you keep track of which version is newer. XP? 2003? Vista? MX? CS? Tiger, Leopard and Jaguar?

On Comic Con and Baseball

The Beat remarks that maybe Padres games during Comic-con WASN’T such a hot idea. [archive.org]

Having had to skip several trolleys that were indistinguishable from large moving sardine cans, I have to agree. On the other hand, the fireworks display over Petco Park on Saturday night was breathtaking.

Too bad they’ll never read this because they disabled both comments and trackbacks on that entry. I wonder if they ever look at Technorati?

Update (April 2007): It seems The Beat never transferred their archive when they moved from Mile High Comics to Publishers Weekly in 2006, and the old site finally deleted their posts. So much for “permalinks,” and hooray for the Wayback Machine.

Command and Control

Apple Matters has posted What OS X Could Learn From Windows, a short wish list of features that Windows already has. The first one is to move keys around so that Command on Macs and Control on PCs are in the same place. When I first read it, I thought “Yeah, that’s tripped me up a lot!” Then I thought about it, and realized that it only causes me problems when I’m using Unix apps on OS X, either directly or through a SSH connection, or on those rare occasions when I’ve booted the PowerBook into Linux. I can’t remember the last time I fumbled over this while using Mac software. It’s only when there’s a conceptual conflict—and then I really stumble!

Maybe it’s because laptop keyboards are already different from standard keyboards. Except for occasional browser testing and iTunes importing, I haven’t used a desktop Mac in years. Or maybe it’s harder for people switching the other direction.

Anyway, I would’ve just posted this in the comments over there, but they require you to register before you can comment. I consider that rude, and I usually refuse to register on a site just to be able to post one comment. If I’m going to come back as a regular reader, that’s one thing, but if not, it’s not worth setting up yet another account with yet another username/password/etc.

(via Slashdot)

Edit: And just to prove that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I just tried to close a tab in Opera using Alt+W instead of Ctrl+W. (Alt on a PC being where Command is on a Mac.) I guess all that writing about the Apple keyboard had me thinking differently.

Useful warning labels

Forget “Coffee is Hot!” and its variations. What they really need is a warning on iced blended drinks that anything larger than about 12 ounces may separate and require frequent re-mixing unless drunk rapidly. And those are the ones that are mixed well. Let us not speak of the ones you get at the café downstairs from the office, or at rush hour when everyone else in town wants a Frappucino NOW and the baristas are just trying to get through with the blenders as fast as they can. You know, the ones that end up like a coffee-flavored snow cone with a straw.

For some reason, coffee just doesn’t seem to blend with ice as well as fruit does.

On Google Moon

Google Maps has been extended to the moon, with all the Apollo landing sites marked.

Be sure to experiment with zoom for full effect.

Controlled Substance

A few months ago I discovered that medications containing pseudoephedrine were labeled “restricted quantity items” at the local Sav-On because it can be used to make meth. Today I found that the shelf space that used to hold both brand-name Sudafed and the store brand now holds cards which direct you to the pharmacy. The boxes aren’t actually in the pharmacy in this store, they’re in a case up front, but the cards are pre-printed, and they say to go to the pharmacy.

Meanwhile, Sudafed has come out with a new formulation that isn’t based on pseudoephedrine. Yes, I know. I mentioned it to Katie and she asked whether they called it “…” We started trying to come up with names like “Sudasudafed” or “Quasifed” or “Notfed.”

They’ve got too much invested in the name, of course, so it’s the less-creative “Sudafed PE.” The store brands have caught up already, but it’s new enough that I could not find any reference to it on Pfizer’s website [archive.org: July 12, 2005]. A quick trip to Google turned up the Sudafed FAQ, though, which is currently all about the new medication.

June Gloom! Extended Tour!

With luck the people complaining about the “unseasonable” morning cloud cover have all realized we get the same thing every year. Although I don’t think it usually lasts this far into July. We were standing at the America Plaza transfer station on Thursday morning, watching the fog roll in past the buildings at the south end, but by the time we hit the Gaslamp district for lunch, it was all cleared away.

We noticed an interesting coastal climate zone, though. On the trip down Wednesday afternoon, the clouds came in somewhere around Mission Viejo or San Juan Capistrano and stayed locked in all the way through La Jolla. It finally started clearing up just as we were reaching San Diego. Then on the trip back, a bit later in the afternoon on Sunday, the clouds rolled in as we reached La Jolla and didn’t break up until we reached Mission Viejo. We stopped in San Clemente for coffee (it was a long weekend with lots of walking and not much sleep), and the barista asked us if we’d been to Oceanfest, adding that it wasn’t really a good day for it. We explained we were on our way back from San Diego, he asked whether it was better down there, and we told him that it was warm and clear—but only south of La Jolla.

Familiar Footfall

Years ago, I put the Niven/Pournelle novel Footfall in my to-read box. I finally started reading it today. After a prologue that takes place mostly at the press conference for the 1980 Voyager 1 encounter with Saturn, the first chapter opens (years later) with a drive up Hawaii’s Kona coast and inland to the observatories at Mauna Kea.

Now there’s timing. If I’d read it when I first picked it up, I could only imagine that sequence. Now I know exactly what it looks like. Well, aside from the fact that there are twice as many observatories now as there were when the book was written.

V for Visceral

Late lunch today (there’s a news flash). Heard the last bit of an interview with Rob Zombie about The Devil’s Rejects, which was all over Comic-Con. Interesting perspective on the MPAA rating process, where he actually had to contact the MPAA directly to negotiate down to an R. Apparently after going back and forth on cuts with the studio as a mediator, he got to the point where toning down the villains made them seem less evil. Instead of making a film with violent villains, it was heading toward becoming a violent action film. After another round of calls directly with the ratings people, he apparently managed to get them to agree with him.

Also interesting: The MPAA will let filmmakers show much more graphic violence with a known celebrity than a B-list, cult, or unknown actor. With any commercial film, you know intellectually that the actor isn’t really being killed. But with someone you recognize, you have the added sense that there is no way that (for example) Brad Pitt’s skull is really being ripped open. With an actor you don’t know, your brain doesn’t have that extra disconnect layer and (in theory) takes it closer to face value.

Missed Haunting

I was looking for info on the “Haunted Hotel” sign I snapped the other day, and discovered that the Whaley House in Old Town San Diego is supposed to be the most haunted house in America.

And it was just down the street from our hotel. We walked past it every morning on our way to the trolley station and every night on the way back. I’d thought about visiting it just out of historical interest, but our days were pretty much taken up by Comic Con.

At least that explains why people were wandering around the place with flashlights and cameras at 11:30 last night.

Only in San Diego? Volume 2 Part 2

If you’re in danger of losing your religion, try…

We saw this by the side of the road in Old Town, and both of us immediately thought of cake topping. Not something you’d want to use this for.

There was just something inherently amusing about seeing Xena standing at Mrs. Field’s.

You know, ever since the new VW Bug came out, Katie’s said that the yellow ones looked like Pikachu. Well, the Pokémon people fixed one up and were raffling it off at the con.

This probably belongs in with the hall costumes, but the cardboard thought balloon was a nice Farscape reference.

One oddity we didn’t manage to catch on virtual film was mixed into the city’s graffiti. In two places (one visible from the Blue Line trolley, one on a freeway on-ramp), someone had spray-painted the word Enron on the wall.

The last two were actually in San Clemente, where we stopped for coffee on the way back. We picked an exit and got off, looking for a Diedrich’s, Starbucks, or other coffee shop. We found a Starbucks (with a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf across the street that we didn’t notice until we got back in the car), but we passed two odd signs on the way to and from the freeway. We couldn’t get decent pictures from the car, and neither of us was in the mood to find a parking space and take the photo on foot. But I did find photos on Flickr by Brian Mitchell, under a Creative Commons license that allows me to repost them here under the same license. The first: Taste of China…in the shape of a hot dog. And practically across the street was a place advertising the Pastrami Love Burger.

(Continued in Volume 3.)

Cosplay Photos are up

I’ve just posted our photos of hall costumes that we saw at this year’s Comic Con. And of course there’s Katie’s own pirate costume:

I’ll post more photos later this week. Right now I want to finish the “Only in San Diego” series and then go to bed. It’s been a looong weekend!

Autograph/Sketch Total

• 1 rough sketch of Aahz and Skeeve by Phil Foglio.
• 1 finished sketch of the Flash by Scott Kolins.
• Mick Gray signatures on Chase #1 and Promethea Vol. 1.
• Wendy and Richard Pini signatures on Elfquest Archives Vol. 1.
• Phil Foglio signatures on Girl Genius Vols. 1 and 2.
• Pre-signed Powers print by Michael Avon Oeming (from the CBLDF booth).
• Almost got Marv Wolfman to sign his novelization of Crisis on Infinite Earths. I left it at the hotel on Friday, and he wasn’t there when I went back to the table the next two days. But at least I got to talk with him briefly about The New Teen Titans (which was what got me into comics in the first place, back in the mid-1980s).

Only in San Diego? Volume 2 Part 1

Some more strange sights from around San Diego (continued from last year’s series).

First, a modern Stonehenge from the UC San Diego campus, all made with stone (or cement) cubes. Update: Found some info on USCD’s Stonehenge.

Then there was this cactus in Old Town, which looked like it was made up of feet!

Something about the phrase “Vegetable Garage” just sounds funny. (This is at Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego.) There’s also a Fruit Garage.

Sam Adams Smoothies? Where’s Lister from Red Dwarf? Someone needs to tell him he can get those beer milkshakes here!

We weren’t entirely sure just what was supposed to be haunting this hotel, but it’s next to Hooters. Make of that what you will…

And finally, here’s a movie-style marquee from the Ghirardelli shop.

(On a side note, I really miss having a Ghirardelli shop in South Coast Plaza. After shopping overload, I could just stop in there, get a milkshake, and be able to face another store or two. Plus I actually had a reason to go to South Coast Plaza on occasion.)

(Continued in Part 2.)

News from Comic Con

Ah, Comic Con! The show doesn’t seem much bigger than last year (and they’ve already filled the convention center floor), but there are more people. Last year, Friday was quite comfortable, but this year it was more crowded than I remember.

Let’s see… News from panels so far. Serenity and Mirrormask are apparently opening the same weekend (September 30), so I’ll be spending an entire day at the movies. Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier are working on a script for a CGI Groo the Wanderer film. They apparently held out for years for a deal that gave them enough creative control to satisfy them. And early next year they expect to release the 4-part comic book, Groo vs. Conan.

The Jim Henson Co. 50^th anniversary panel was great fun. In addition to seeing some early experimental muppetry, we learned that they will be producing a sequel to The Dark Crystal that takes place several hundred years later, and a prequel anime series.

Katie went to the big Warner Bros. movie panel, featuring Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, V For Vendetta, The Fountain (from Darren Arenofsky), and The Corpse Bride, all of which look promising.

And if you have a chance while in San Diego, don’t miss Fellowship!, a musical parody of The Fellowship of the Ring. With the exception of one running gag that got old very fast, it was a great send-up of the movie (and it was also fun looking for tropes and in-jokes from musicals).

This year is absolutely crawling with Jedi costumes. So many that we didn’t bother to take pictures, except for one Anakin & Obi-Wan pair where the former actually looked like Anakin. There’s also a booth selling high-quality light sabres with removable, light-up blades that are sturdy enough you can duel with them. The cheap ones run for $120.

Reality TV and Remakes

On seeing an ad for the upcoming Dukes of Hazzard movie, I started thinking of other 70s and early 80s TV shows that Hollywood might remake. Then I started thinking of late 80s and 90s shows. I’m certain that, 10-20 years from now, there will be a Beverly Hills 90210 movie.

But what about the big hits of this decade—the reality shows? Will Hollywood want to release Survivor or Fear Factor movies for 2025? Or would it be like producing a Jeopardy movie?

One of the big draws for shows like Survivor or American Idol is watching the contestants’ stories unfold over time. You can’t do that in a two-hour movie as effectively as you can over a 10–20–week season. On the other hand, not every reality show is about the long haul. Assuming the public’s taste doesn’t change, I’m sure Fear Factor could be made into a movie. (Though one could argue that it already has been.)

Later in my drive I heard a story on the radio about Iraqi reality TV. Apparently the genre has become quite popular there, particularly the helpful sub-genre (like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition). There’s a show that helps people navigate government bureaucracy, a show that rebuilds homes destroyed in the war, one that gives couples dream weddings, one that takes people to foreign hospitals for medical procedures, etc.

Who knew what else we’d be exporting?