ginandtacos.com - shut up and drink the gin

SO IT HAS COME TO THIS - AGAIN

Welcome, No Politics Friday (tm). We need you.

My roommate and I have a running joke at the moment. Whenever we see a TV commercial for a new (obviously half-baked) reality show, we pause and say, "Goddamn you, writers' strike." TV was already loaded to the gunwales with horrendous cheaper-than-original-scripted-programming reality shows. But even my jaded ass was horrified to see that the cupboard of ideas is so unbelievably bare that NBC brought back American Gladiators. American Fucking Gladiators. Again.

I make one basic assumption about media - if something (music, movie, TV, whatever) struck me as abysmal and puerile when I was 9 years old, it is very, very unlikely that it will strike me as less so as an adult. This is not an exception. But I'm sure this will be as popular as the original. Which makes me wonder - what's wrong with me? What's wrong with any of us? I have a hard time believing I am of the same species as people who like this - and most of America seems to do so.

I must reeeeally be out of touch. How anyone can watch these HGH-sweating mongoloid retards hitting each other with plastic sticks - and like it - is simply beyond me. Half a minute of it is enough to put me down on my knees, praying to an assortment of deities that a comet will strike the Earth and wipe out humanity. We have clearly failed and need to hit the reset button.

See? My reaction is atypical. I'm a bad American.

I'd like to identify the exact point of divergence at which I parted ways with my WWF/American Gladiators-loving countrymen. In my more cynical moments (i.e., when I am awake) I wonder if that moment was when I learned how to read.

Goddamn you, writers' strike.