How To Halve Your I.Q. In 1 Hour

This afternoon I wrote about George Bush Jr., meaning that my blogging today couldn't sink to a lower level of intellect, right ?

WRONG !!!!

As I was eating my rice and various other things tonight, the Finnish version of Big Brother started on TV. I don't think there is anything in popular culture (including R 'n B music and even celebrity gossip magazines) that makes my jaw drop at the sheer idiocy and pointlessness of it all. I think the difference between Big Brother and the celebrity gossip magazines (because after all, they are both forms of escape from normal life to live someone else's life vicariously for people with no imagination to do anything else) is that, while people will religiously buy their gossip magazines every month and read them from cover to cover, that's all they do. It's quite sad, granted, but there's a limit to it. I have found the following interesting facts on the readership of Hello! magazine which, I would imagine, is typically representative of this type of magazine.

Hello! readers are 71% more likely than the average female to choose a car mainly on looks.

Only 4% of Hello! readers buy tomatoes, as of February 2003.

Hello! readers are also 64% more likely to vote for an electoral candidate based on his or her hairstyle rather than policies

I've found them unreferenced on Wikipedia and as such I'm not sure if these facts are actually true or not, but it's quite funny anyway and I'd say it's quite representative even if it is satyrical. There's a song by French singer Jean-Jacques Goldman which describes the desperation of the life of a woman who lives her life through the celebrities in these magazines.

Big Brother, however, is a different affair entirely. It is the ultimate in mental escapism yet, unlike watching travel programmes or documentaries, offers absolutely no interest of any sort, as far as I can see. Psychology PhD students aside, who seriously takes anything useful from Big Brother ? And what's more, it's not one nation's stupidity - from its inception in Holland in 1999, it has spread to nearly 70 countries (that's seventy countries where people sit on their sofas, watching other people sitting on sofas) as diverse as Montenegro (where it's called Veliki Brat), the Philippines (Pinoy Big Brother), Nigeria, Somalia and the Middle East (where it's known as Al-Rais), Albania and Colombia (where, predictably, it's called Gran Hermano). Not content with watching the "most interesting" parts on TV, some (and I know someone who does this) even pay money to access the cameras 24/7 via the internet !! It's quite amazing to my mind that people should pay money to sit on the internet at 2am in order to watch people they don't know sleeping. There are many things I don't like or I can see are brainless - hard rock, teen movies, Greek party islands - which I would never enjoy myself, but can see in a way how other people enjoy it. Watching Big Brother's 24/7 camera is something I just cannot understand.

From what I saw of the Finnish episode it's similar to shows I've had the misfortune of allowing my eyes to see in other countries - people sit around discussing brainless topics before doing some idiotic task, occasionally having a nervous breakdown and occasionally having sex (probably on the orders of the networks after even the most die hard airhead fan is considering switching off). At the end of this, someone wins a large amount of money and becomes an instant celebrity for having done precisely nothing of use.

Now, "people are stupid" is a line that I do like to repeat from time to time and (even though it's a massive generalisation) I do feel that there is some kind of pattern - the human population as a whole (or rather the "developed" Western population, living in places where life is so outstandingly boring that we sink to immense depths to "entertain" ourselves) comprises largely of sheep who follow trends and fashions for no other reason than "others are doing it". This leads me to one of the small problems I've been thinking about for a while. Namely the following :

Why is it that I, as someone who reads the news every morning, can access information on Jane Goody's personal life far more easily than I can on the war in Darfur, the development of cures against AIDS or the looming environmental threats which are poised to start destroying us all ?

Two facts are obvious to anyone who reads the news on any regular website - people read more about irrelevant celebrities' lives than they do about the battle against AIDS, and there are more frequent stories about irrelevant celebrities' lives than there are about the battle against AIDS. One of these two facts has engendered the other, although I'm not sure which. In either case, it's quite sad that life has reduced people to this. As I write this another reality show has just begun and I've realised that if I write everything I feel about the overly-emotional made-for-TV-spectacle tear-jerking reality shows I would probably overload the blogger.com servers. So with this in mind, it's probably about time to stop. I'm off to read a book.