All right, maybe this will drop your esteem of me a few points, but I found myself watching the second-season premiere of “Beauty and the Geek” the other night.
Worse than that, I also watched the first season, but up until now, I’d been too embarrassed to admit it.
The concept fascinates me. From strictly a sociological standpoint, of course. Ashton Kutcher, probably in an homage to his own geekdom, produces the show. In it, a bunch of geeky guys and a bunch of gorgeous, apparently airheaded girls are paired up in a house and over a number of weeks through a series of tasks, the girls are supposed to teach the guys to be less geeky and the guys are supposed to teach the girls…well…anything. Each week the couple who wins the task gets to choose the two couples who will duke it out to save themselves from elimination.
It had been a while since the first season, so I’d forgotten the techniques they use to establish the couples. It’s a choose-em-up sort of situation, where the guys and girls are paraded past each other and then put in are in different rooms with their backs to the entrance. One at a time, they alternate introducing themselves to the other group. Then, if it’s a guy who’d made the presentation, he leaves, and waits in this Aaron Spelling-ish lobby with a sweeping marble staircase (I think Kutcher grew up with Aaron Spelling dreams) for one of the girls to “claim” him. It’s really kind of cruel, because according to the guys, they can hear the girls talking and saying things like, “eww, I don’t want him.” But eventually one brave or compassionate soul will come out and take him on like a puppy from the pound. And the guys, while dazzled by the girls’ looks, make snide comments about their stupidity but one by one, gather up their courage and go out and claim their babe.
That part reminds me of dodge ball, high school dances and singles bars, all wrapped up into one horrible humiliating nightmare.
For the first task (this was probably designed not as an elimination but to show everyone what their partners are made of), they gather in the library of this over-the-top Trump-like mansion, and the girls chose three cards drawn from the card catalog (remember those?) and had to find the three books using the Dewey Decimal System. And bless these poor girl’s hearts (beating somewhere under a mountain of silicone), some of them could barely do that. But once the girls found the books, the guys were sent out on their own task: get someone to rub sunscreen on their backs, get a girl’s phone number, and borrow someone’s cell phone to make a call. Now that was amusing. Especially watching some of the guys who’d barely approached a stranger in their lives just quivering at the thought of asking someone to touch his back.
The guys get the bum raps in this show. Yeah, the girls aren’t very smart, but everyone knows what matters in this culture and it would be a pretty safe bet that when the post-show job offers come rolling in, it’s going to be the Hooters waitress and not the nuclear physicist from MIT who gets the calls. Which is a shame, because some of the guys seem pretty amazing. They’re stupendously smart, funny and genuine. Eventually some of the brighter girls figure this out, oh, say about halfway down the line.
Usually it takes me a few episodes to settle on the couple (or couples) I’m going to root for. The girls haven’t distinguished themselves to me yet. But so far my favorite guy is Mario, a writer who has a Master’s in theology, is into politics, has a wicked sense of humor and his “claim to fame” is owning 25,000 comic books (I know, H, you’re saying “big deal”). He also has a tattoo of a Nintendo control on his arm.
The fun for me is in watching how these guys get coaxed out of their shells and learn that they really can function socially in the world. And sometimes, I feel vindicated when one of the girls tearily admits that until now she’s slid by on her looks and is totally flummoxed when she can’t depend on them to get something done.
All in all it’s much more interesting than watching Congressional hearings. Or people eating Madagascar hissing cockroaches for money.
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3 comments:
25,000 comics is a lot of comics. Even back before the Great Moving/Deluge Fiasco, when I lost all the comics I had collected from childhood through 1997 (when I moved from Syracuse to Florida and did not have room in the Fabulous Fraternal Rescue Van for everything I wanted to bring, so the comics went into a friend's parents' basement for storage), I doubt I had 25,000 comics.
I badly miss those comics, mind you. But I doubt I had more than 5,000 or so.
Since then, I've spent probably $2,000 dollars over the course of several years substantially rebuilding the collection, but there are still very long runs of various titles I no longer have, and most likely, will never get around to replacing. Mark Evanier's DNAgents and CROSSFIRE, Scott McCloud's ZOT!, the Ostrander/McDonnell run on SUICIDE SQUAD, a lot of Paul Chadwick's CONCRETE stuff, a near complete run of the Baron/Rude NEXUS, a near complete set of the post-CRISIS FLASH up through Moessner-Loebs leaving the book... a big pile of 80s and 90s Marvel books and post CRISIS DC books I can't remember right now... I just don't have the money to get it all back again. But even with all that, I most likely only had around maybe 8,000 comics.
Nowadays, with what I've recovered, and what I've added on over the past near ten years, I probably still don't have more than, at most, 3,000 comics.
So, yeah... 25,000 comics is a lot. I doubt I ever had that many. So, yes, I'm impressed.
I'm impressed even by that many. BTW, I still have all my ZOT!s. Somewhere. I'm pretty sure of it.
I mostly miss the "Earth" stories. SuperFiancee has generously bought me replacements of the first ten issues set on ZOT's world, but I think Scott really did some fabulous stuff when Zot was stuck here on Earth.
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