Are you tired of trying to find your mother that perfect Mother’s Day gift?
Aren’t you sick and tired of always sending her the same old flowers and singing telegrams, thanking her for being your mother for all these years?
Why not send your mother what she really wants to have from you: A BIG GIANT HUG.
Continue reading "Just in time for Mother’s Day: the HUG-E-GRAM"
Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill
According to a STUDY ON TELEVISION VIEWING HABITS by A.C. Nielsen, by the time a child fnishes elementary school, they would have watched over 8,000 murders on TV. By the time they reach 18, that number grows to over 200,000 violent acts.
If it helps, the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV every day. If that person lives 65 years, they would have spent at least nine years – about 13% of their life – simply watching TV.
Esquire’s A Man’s Guide to Life: The Rules
Esquire’s book, A MAN’S GUIDE TO LIFE is just like THE MODERN MAN’S GUIDE TO LIFE or Denis Boyle‘s A MAN’S LIFE: THE COMPLETE INSTRUCTIONS - books filled with rules and helpful instructions to let any man prove that he is, in fact, A Man. Web Watch highly recommends offering any of these three books to graduating high school seniors (or even as bar mitzvah gifts, since that is when A Boy Becomes a Man).
Continue reading "“50 things that every person should learn in life” can be applied to reality TV"
Web Watch admits that we watch a lot of TV. And frankly, we’re willing to watch practically anything that the networks and various cable channels decide to fill our TiVo automatically-recorded suggestions queue with.
Which is why we don’t understand what all the kerfuffle is that some have about the types of characters that TV anf film writers and producers decide to use on their scripted shows. Web Watch doesn’t care about the sexual orientation of the characters on the shows or films we watch – we just want what we’re watching to be good in the first place.
Continue reading "Can You Name the Top Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Characters of All Time?"
Earlier this month, Web Watch posted about parodies of the Discovery Channel’s BOOM DE YA DA commercial.
How could we not include THIS TRIBUTE TO WEB COMIC xkcd featuring online favs like Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton, which was based on THIS xkcd cartoon, based on the Discovery Channel commercial (shown below). Whew!
Web Watch knows that it’s wrong to laugh at other people’s medical situations.
However, Web Watch can recommend laughing at the questions that can arise from some of the more unusual medical issues that can crop up from time to time.
Because let’s face it – some folks have either some amusing medical problems or they don’t mind asking in public what are normally private conversations that one should have with their personal physician.
The UK’s Channel 4 embraces this philosophy wholeheartedly, to the point of making an Internet television program that serves just that purpose. EMBARRASSING BODIES and EMBARRASSING BODIES LIVE are a TV program and companion website that allows viewers of all shapes and sizes and of all ages and educational backgrounds a platform to ask just those questions — anonymously — that they just feel uncomfortable asking a doctor, family, or friend about.
Continue reading "Have an embarrassing medical question? Check out EMBARRASSING BODIES (yup, it’s NSFW)"
In a previous post, Web Watch mentioned how GAME THEORY plays an important part in the reality TV show SURVIVOR.
The key to understanding what that means is to know what GAME THEORY is all about. Luckily, Web Watch has found a way to boil it down into some bite-sized chunks for our faithful Web Watch readers.
Continue reading "How to win at SURVIVOR or succeed in the real world — it’s all about game theory"
Regardless of whether you’re a sports fan or not, chances are that you’ll be watching at least a portion of the Super Bowl game on Super Bowl Sunday, whether it be during a SUPER BOWL PARTY, at a bar, or just sitting home and watching it on TiVo with your family.
And the Super Bowl is a 4+ hour long extravaganza of commercial excess. This led the WALL STREET JOURNAL to sit down and figure out exactly HOW MUCH ACTION ACTUALLY TAKES PLACE DURING AN AVERAGE TELEVISED FOOTBALL GAME.
And the WSJ came to the conclusion that during the 60 minutes worth of time on the official NFL game clock, there was approximately just 11 minutes of actual playing. So what fills up the rest of those 3 or 4 hours worth of television?
Continue reading "Today’s fact: the average football game consists of just 11 minutes of action"
If you have watched The Discovery Channel on any regular basis over the past two years, you should have seen their musical promotional video. It’s either called “I Love The World” or “The World is Just Awesome” depending on who you talk to, and is also otherwise known as the ”boom-de-ah-da”, “boom-de-yada”, or “boom-de-ya” song, depending on how you interpret the spelling of the refrain).
The clip features scenes from various Discovery Channel shows, such as DEADLIEST CATCH, MYTHBUSTERS, DIRTY JOBS, MAN VS WILD and others, with the stars and guests on the shows lipsyncing the catchy commercial song as they go about their business.
Here’s one of the originals:
And here the Discovery Channel stars themselves sing it live:
SURVIVOR is one of those shows, especially as it is about to enter its 20th season this month with an all-star HEROES VS VILLAINS theme, that Web Watch loves watching – if only because the show somehow always figures out how to be fresh, exciting, and surprising season after season.
Jeff Probst has even given all future contestants one vital hint on how to survive Survivor, and it all comes down to studying game theory, which Web Watch will cover in a future post.
One thing that Jeff didn’t feel the need to mention is that one key part of being on Survivor is that at some point during the game, you’re going to be naked.
Sure, the CBS censors may pixelate your NO NO ZONE, or the contestants may decide to show off their newly-buffed bodies in an attempt to increase their Survivor-provided 15-minutes of fame — but after 20 seasons (and approximately 300+ contestants), there was bound to be a glut of Survivor contestant nudity available at some point.
It was inevitable, really.
Continue reading "NSFW: A complete history of naked SURVIVOR contestants (and Jeff Probst?!?!)"
Watching late night television on New Year’s Eve has become a tradition. No matter where you are, who you’re partying with – as soon as midnight draws near, everybody gathers to the closest TV screen to watch Dick Clark and his big ball drop on Times Square.
Sure, Ryan Seacrest may be inheriting the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve throne soon, but it will always be Dick Clark’s show.
But other networks have tried to muscle in on the stranglehold that Dick has had on New Year’s Eve festivities (portions pre-recorded). FOX tried to create an event by having motorcyle legend Robbie Knievel jump “over” the Mirage casino volcano last year. The broadcast was poorly done, there was no crowd to speak of, and even the television audience could tell that Robbie didn’t really jump over the volcano. See for yourself:
So the question is – where was everybody that cold Las Vegas evening?
Continue reading "Looking for something to TiVo on New Year’s Eve? Try RED BULL NO LIMITS"
Have you ever played the card game FLUXX?
It’s very simple to play, as there aren’t any rules until you begin the game. Just do whatever is listed on the cards, and you’ll figure out the rest. Every game is unique as the played cards interact in different ways.
So why not take the same philosphy and apply it to a game show?
Continue reading "December 18th is “WHO WANTS TO BE A….” Day!"
So by now, Web Watch hopes that you have taken the time to view the Muppets’ version of Queen’s BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY.
If you haven’t, we’ve included it here. (If you have, we know you’re just going to click PLAY again, if only to watch Animal’s segment one more time.)
Obviously the highlight of the video for most people is Animal’s part. Web Watch, on the other hand, enjoyed noticing the many lesser-known Muppets that were included in the video, including Mahna Mahna.
Continue reading "Mahna Mahna (doo doo doo doo doo). Mahna Mahna (doo doo doo doo)."
Web Watch has enjoyed watching Gordon Ramsay yell at both potential and actual restaurant employees for years on HELL’S KITCHEN and KITCHEN NIGHTMARES, respectively.
And in the end, we wholeheartedly agree with the yelling, as he is yelling for good reason the majority of the time. All Gordon wants is to bring out the best in people.
So while you may not agree with his methods, you can agree that when it comes to food he does know what he’s talking about.
Which is why FOX has decided to import yet another British series for Ramsay that shows a decidedly softer side of the typically angry chef in GORDON RAMSAY: COOKALONG LIVE, airing live on FOX on December 15th.
Continue reading "Want to cook like a professional chef? Set your TiVo on Dec 15 for “Gordon Ramsay: Cookalong Live”"
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Confirmation that TiVo Doesn’t Hurt TV Advertising
TiVo Premiere XL DVR
Longtime readers should recall when Web Watch shared TiVo Viewing Statistics that listed what types of programs TiVo users were watching when skipping through commercials. Those metrics indicated which were the most common shows to be watched live (such as American Idol) vs those shows that viewers would store up on their TiVo to watch later (such as Grey’s Anatomy).
There has been a long-standing debate among broadcasters and advertisers as to whether TiVo, DVRs, and the ability to skip commercials hurts advertising. The belief was that if the viewer didn’t watch the commercial, then why bother to buy the advertising in the first place?
In the past year, we’ve seen more creative advertising pieces be put together, in an attempt to “TiVo-proof” the commercial. Some movie trailers, for example, display static content in a black bar above the trailer being played — so even if the commercial is being fast-forwarded through, the viewer can still see the name of the film being advertised.
Continue reading "Confirmation that TiVo Doesn’t Hurt TV Advertising" »