06.10.2003
Speaking of Frank Rich, Andrew Sullivan’s Salon column this week demands an apology from Rich (and you would assume others) for jumping all over the looting of the Iraqi museum story a little while back, when the number of lost priceless artifacts, according to The Washington Post, is being drastically revised down as most of the collection has been accounted for. But in arguing for perspective, he himself swings too far the other way. He seems to be saying that losing only thirty-three priceless objects isn’t so bad. Um, weren’t they priceless? If this loss was preventable, then it’s still terrible, and still worthy of criticism. It’s typical of much defense of the Bush administration - the bar is set so goddamn low all the time, and we’re always expecting such catastrophic failure from their incompetence, that they get points when they’re merely mediocre, and things don’t go completely to pot. It’s so bizarre. How dumb are we?
Luckily, FOX is here to help us find out. In case you missed a chance to catch FOX’s National IQ Test last night (Test the Nation: What’s Your IQ), it was, to their credit, an ambitious experiment in live interactive TV (and another U.S. remake of a successful British show), but unfortunately, remarkably stultifying in execution. It’s the format of an IQ test that hurts them here - you can’t have a valid test without it being pretty slow-paced, and very, very dry. Commercial interruptions became a welcome entertainment break, and made me wonder if they shouldn’t try sticking some into those slow moments between segments of the old SAT. Even though FOX tried to liven things up as much as they could with sections of celebrities, “blondes” and “construction workers” in the live subject audience, presumably to use their IQ results to confound stereotypes at the end of the show, even I couldn’t sit through over an hour of Leeza Gibbons slowly reading off questions and answers like a substitute teacher to get to the payoff of all the fun stats at the end, which, a TiVo fast-forward told me later that night, was that Chantilly, VA, had the smartest viewers in the country that night, and that scientists and teachers really are smarter than blondes and bodybuilders.
The test was clearly flawed…
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06.08.2003: the day of the subgenius
link - short film by Chris Hopewell, director of the new Radiohead video for There There.
06.10.2003: follow-up
Details are out on independent labels and the iTunes store.