I happened upon a marathon of The Surreal Life last night on KTLA Los Angeles the WB station that we inexplicably receive as part of our digital cable.

In case you have missed the show, or the PR surrounding it, it’s basically “urban Survivor for failed celebrities.” Or, as the show’s website puts it, “when the stars fall from sight … this is where they crash.” Or as their PR says “[a] tongue-in-cheek, yet surprisingly human, take on the lives of celebrities whose stars aren’t exactly burning bright these days.”

Among the cast are musician MC Hammer, former teen star Corey Feldman, former 90210 geek Gabrielle Carteris, Mötley Crüe’s lead singer Vince Neil and TV’s “Webster,” Emmanuel Lewis. In other words people whose name you know, but who haven’t heard about for a while.

Somehow — I haven’t quite figured out the rules of the game, or even if there’s a game — these people all live in a swanky house in Hollywood together, and perform various Survivor-like tasks. It’s bawdier than Survivor, and because of the location, less isolated from “real life” (which, in this show, is a difficult thing to put your finger on).

The programme is one of a new crop of “reality TV” shows that includes I’m A Celebrity ? Get Me Out Of Here (starring, among others, Robin Leach and Joan Rivers’ daughter Melissa) and Celebrity Mole: Hawaii. Each places a group of has-been stars in a house (or jungle) together for some period of time, without makeup (or dignity). And we watch. Presumably our appetite for watching regular everyday people do this has waned, and we’re now in need of a new level of “reality” to entertain us.

Aside from the rather depressing tawdriness of all of this, I think there are some interesting lessons to be learned, chief among them is that the people we venerate as “stars” are, without their makeup, just as screwed up as regular everyday people.

While I was growing up, the only time we got to see stars in “realistic” situations was on game shows like Match Game and Hollywood Squares.

Except on those shows, the stars were in more of a “hyper-reality,” reading scripting jokes, and acting like buffoons. Think Charles Nelson Riley or Paul Lynde if you need your memory jogged.

Today’s shows, while certainly much less like my everyday regular “reality” than not, do give us some insight into the condition of being a star. And it’s not a pretty site. Listening to Corey Feldman grouse with his fiance on the phone, or argue with MC Hammer about the time he’s spent in the bathroom, or witnessing a blow-out about the proper location in their remote Australian locale to go and take a pee in the middle of the night on I’m a Celebrity doesn’t exactly replicate “real life,” but it does do an effective job at showing us how thin the “fourth wall” really is.

After watching two hours of The Surreal Life, I was ready to sign up for duty as a full time iconoclast, for I was forced to reason that if these Gods could so easily tumble from grace, surely all of the others that we venerate — police, politicians, priests, judges, parking metre cops, teachers — must be equally as fallible. And not deserving of our mindless respect.

For a crop of television shows to so effectively drive home that point, night after night, can’t be an entirely bad thing.

This robot came calling here yesterday. Apparently NameProtect is a “Digital Brand Asset Management company.” Hmmm.

Perhaps one of the greatest unsung marketing success stories of the past 25 years has been that of the Jaws of Life.

Take this story about an accident on the Confederation Bridge for example: “The bridge was closed for about two hours while rescue crews used the jaws of life to free the injured.” Or this story about an accident on the Charlottetown bypass: “Firefighters used the “jaws of life” to cut the youths out of the vehicle.” Or this story. Or this one.

Jaws of Life is a registered trademark of Hale Products Inc.. Originally developed by Hurst Performance as a race track tool, the products’s history page says “Because the tool reduced the time to extricate a victim from a car crash, literally snatching them from the ‘jaws of death’, the tool earned the name Jaws of Life.”

What’s odd about the Jaws of Life is that whenever they are used to rescue someone in an accident, this fact is mentioned in news stories. It’s almost like the company has an product placement deal with media outlets. Imagine if every product, from ladders to hoses to stretchers, was mentioned, by its trade name, in accident reports.

While I can understand the novelty of mentioning the Jaws of Life when a fire department originally purchases them, or when they were a novel product, this has been going on for a long, long time.

Perhaps my friends in the media can enlighten me?

The How Stuff Works site has a good page that explains how the Jaws of Life work, by the way.

In the next seven days, there are 8,473 television programmes available on my television set. Of those, there are 1,868 uniquely named programmes, starting alphabetically with with 100 Huntley Street and ending with Zoom.

After Paid Programming (445 airings), the most frequently broadcast programmes are Real TV (58 airings), WBZ 4 News (42 airings), Daily Planet (38), The Simpsons (37), Judge Judy (37), Martha Stewart Living (35), Blind Date (35), The Decorating Challenge (34) and M*A*S*H (34).

There are 20 programmes with “sex” in the description, 32 programmes with “love” in the description, and 64 programmes with “war” in the description.

The channel airing the most number of individual programmes this week is the children’s network Treehouse (468 programmes); our local Eastlink Cable 10 airs the fewest number of programmes (42) followed by MuchMoreMusic (146), CNN (152) and A&E (158).

The West Wing airs Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. on NBC.

I find this Common Errors in English page very, very useful. It cleared up both the jerry-built/jury-rigged confusion and the whole tenterhooks question.

I direct my little brothers^* to alot and it’s/its; they are both afflicted with blind spots regarding these two.

^* For the record, I have three brothers, Mike, Johnny and Steve. Johnny and Steve are “my little brothers” as a collective noun because they are twins, and six years younger than me. Mike is simply “my brother” because he’s not a twin, and we’re very close in age. “My brothers” is a reference to all three of my brothers. And Johnny and Steve are “my brother Steve” and “my brother Johnny” individually. Complex, no? I have no idea how my brothers refer to me.

From Alan comes this interesting story from the Whig, titled “Lights out for festival that brightened fort,” concerning Kingston, Ontario’s shutting off of their “Festival of Lights,” with the gear being sold off to Regina (Lord help them).

Who are the people who go on Anna McGoldrick’s Musical Tours of Ireland?

Here’s a handy tool to assist candidates aspiring for the leadership of a political party. Select one action verb, one connector, and one destination and, blammo!, you’ve got yourself a political campaign.

• Action Verbs — Building, Grasping, Tumbling, Energizing, Leaping, Hunkering Down, Aiming, Leaning, Tilting
• Connectors — towards, in the general direction of, into, at, on top of
• Destinations — the Future, the Past, Paradise, Hell, getting Organized, Winning, not Losing, Absolute Power, Recognition

Potential candidates are welcome to make use of this tool at no charge.

Leaping into Hell.

Steven Garrity raises an interesting point about news reports of tragedies, and how numbers of dead are reported.

Having worked in a daily newspaper, albeit at the slicing and waxing end, not in any reportorial capacity, I have some feel for how this world works.

I think it’s best to imagine the world of facts reporting as a spectrum that starts at the daily newspaper (or, today, the web or CNN) and ends with Encyclopaedia Britannica.

As you move across the spectrum, additional layers of accuracy are overlaid on the factosphere as additional reporting is available. If you imagine “truth” to be a sculpture, you can imagine the first early whiffs of news as a rough outline of a finished work — enough to give you the idea, the proportions, the scale. As time passes, and we learn more, shapes emerge, details get filled in, and “truth” emerges.

The interesting thing is that the opportunity for insight probably occurs somewhere after television and daily newspapers are finished reporting the facts, but well in advance of the history books. I’d site this sweet spot at somewhere near the appearance of commentary in weekly newsmagazines (like Weekend Magazine and The New Yorker) and weblogs.

At this point in the journalistic cycle, enough of the facts have emerged to give us a fairly accurate picture of the situation, but the images of the event are still fresh enough in our minds to be visceral. Its news on the way from the stomach into the intestines.

Reading about a disaster in a weblog or weekly two years after the fact is of little use or interest, for the context of the time and space are missing and difficult to fill in. Both are ephemeral, and that’s what makes each, for my money, the most interesting of media.

The CBC, says its employment equity policy, is “committed to equality in employment and career opportunities for people who have been underrepresented in the Canadian labour force.”

Apparently this spirit of reparative generosity extends to the multi-gendered among us, as their employment application, in the section for “Sex,” contains checkboxes for “Female” and “Male,” both of which can be checked at the same time.

The CBC should be lauded for this overwhelming spirit of inclusiveness.