The Onion A.V. Club sums up what’s wrong with 21st century game shows:

There’s something about Deal Or No Deal that’s more insidious than its molasses-pace and spotlit emptiness. Like 1 Vs. 100—like our culture, increasingly—it neither encourages nor rewards actual intelligence and talent. It rewards hope, self-regard, and blind persistence.

Idiocracy, here we come. Really, when you consider the success that game shows like Deal Or No Deal and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire have enjoyed recently, it’s a tribute to ABC that they’ve kept Jeopardy on the air for so long without dumbing it down.

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While the story about Toronto Transit Commission chair Adam Giambrone accepting a challenge to let the public make suggestions for the TTC website revamp was in all the Toronto blogs last week, it’s finally seeped into the mainstream media. This story makes my inner geek all warm and fuzzy. Congratulations to Robert Ouellette of Reading Toronto for getting something done, and well done Adam Giambrone.

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The Doha round of World Trade Organization talks may still have some life, though the clock (on President Bush’s “fast-track” authority, specifically) is ticking. Ultimately, this is a case where a lame-duck president could come in handy; if Bush were facing re-election in 2008 there’s absolutely no chance he’d cut $20 billion in farm subsidies.

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The Canadiens are now mired in what can only be called a slump. They’ve lost 3 straight, partly because of the flu bug that’s floored half the team, and partly because New Jersey just has their number. The Habs need to locate their scoring touch, and soon, because the Senators and the Rangers are turning on the jets.

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Last night we watched Everything Is Illuminated (imdb | rotten tomatoes), the movie adaptation of a book I read a few years back. I wondered how director Liev Schreiber would deal with the third, most fantastical storyline; it turns out he ignored it altogether. It was the right choice, if also the boring one; there was no good way to put that on the screen and still hold the other storyline(s) together, and yet that storyline was the only thing that made the book stand out from the rest of the story which had been told hundreds of times before. What remained in the film was good, but not new.
[tags]deal or no deal, 1 vs 100, who wants to be a millionaire, jeopardy, ttc, adam giambrone, robert ouellette, wto, doha round, canadiens, everything is illuminated[/tags]