While Justin offers you a TV show that can grasp your attention for half an hour every week, I thought I’d deliver an alternative that is sports related AND exhilerating: The Winter X-Games! Four days of psychotic skiiers, crazy snowboarders, and nutso snowmobilers flying, spinning, grabbing their way to a gold medal and king of the mountain status for the year. Superstars Tanner Hall, Shaun White, and Blair Morgan, Tucker Hibbert, Antti Autti, and Gretchen Bleiler just to name a few have dominated the hills in the past, but will they be the ones to bust out the big tricks and fastest runs in Winter X 12? Watching these people go for the big air is like watching Evil Knievel jump a row of 20 buses over and over again. It’s great TV everybody, so check it out on ABC and ESPN…here’s a schedule.
Oh my God…I really can’t find anything else sportsy to talk about?! I could talk about the NBA All-Stars…but fans only screwed up one starter (Allen Iverson…is it still 1999?). Baseball is less than a month of way from pitchers and catchers reporting, and football has pretty much wrapped up. I apologize folks…I guess that’s all you get from me tonight. I will find something more meaningful to talk about tomorrow. Until next time America.
The reason I’m writing this so early is that it’s about 20 below zero this morning and my car really didn’t feel like starting. Normally I’d be about half an hour into my History of Africa class, but since I just got on campus I say F*** that. This may have been the last straw in my patience for a winter that has been completely brutal. It seems like every weekend we get another batch of snow showers that makes even sober driving a task, let alone the drive home from the bars. I’ve already put my car in the ditch once due to in-climate conditions and now this. I swear one of these days I’m heading out to California and never looking back. If I can’t get my car started later today I am probably going to have some kind of emotional breakdown on par with Hillary Clinton before the New Hampshire primary. I mean, shit, I’ve got things to do you know?
The only good thing to come out of the last 24 hours was the Real World/ Road Rules Challenge. If you’ve never seen this show then you’re really missing out. The basic premise of the show is grabbing some of the craziest people off of MTV’s reality shows the Real World, and Road Rules, putting them on an exotic island and having them drink copious amounts of alcohol and compete in challenges for a large sum of money. I’ve been watching this show pretty religiously for what seems like a decade now and I’ve never been disappointed in the product, which is pretty much drunk people fighting with each other for half an hour.
That’s the key to reality television. I don’t want to watch people just compete with each other i.e. American Gladiators, because sports fill that niche in my life. I also don’t want to watch ordinary people toughing it out in the wilderness and having tribal consoles i.e. Survivor, because ordinary people tend to be boring and I’m not a big fan of the wilderness. No, what I need are people who are completely bat shit crazy, and preferably drunk going at it with each other… in every sense of the word, and starting as much drama as humanly possible, then sometimes maybe do a competition or two. Now that’s a show I can get behind.
Last night was the premiere of this years iteration of The Challenge, The Gauntlet 3. The hook to this years challenge is that The Veterans, people who have been on the at least two previous challenges are taking on The Rookies, people who have been in one or no other challenges. This creates an interesting dichotomy of the bat shit crazy Veterans who know the only way to win is to lie, cheat and steal, with the general naivety of The Rookies who will try to win the game straight up for a while then will eventually become tainted by the veterans. It’s deliciously evil and something I can really get behind. I mean in the first episode of the show we saw people sleeping with each other, a few tears, and our first big fight where Veterans player’s and long time challenge competitors CT and Coral almost came to blows over the teams strategy. It seems like the guys on the Veterans team are going to try to get all the girls off the team so they will have the best shot of winning the final contest for the 500 K.
If you haven’t given this show a look yet I suggest you do. I’m not really a fan of anything on TV these days, but this is appointment viewing for me. Hell, if it was up to me I’d have hockey removed from the big four of sports and plug The Challenge in and not look back.
Well that’s about it for me, I’ll leave you with a youtube video that has caught the world by storm. It really needs no explanations just watch and enjoy it’s greatness.
