Multitasking--Hulu, Excessive Reading & Fashion Porn

A lot of my time is spent, obviously looking at (moving) pictures--Ronye asked 'how [I] balance all the TV shows that [I] watch,' and what I do is usually try and catch only one or two TV shows a night. On days when I don't have class, or when I've got free time, I log onto Hulu, drag the window to one half of my screen, and in a second window, go on with my Internet habits of (as afore-clarified in title).

A screenshot of what I'm doing right now.

Obviously, right now, I am watching TV (a passive activity) and typing this blog. Normally, however, I'm running through my Google Reader feed (usually 1000+ updates) and looking at static pictures.

Screenshot of my earlier entry Daily Reads displaying my daily reading list.

Go-to websites on my feed usually include The Daily Beast and Entertainment Weekly; that doesn't include the myriad of links on social media provided by the awesome people I follow on Twitter. (I love Twitter. Follow me on Twitter. You'll probably talk to more on Twitter than in real life).

 I spend the rest of my time surfing fashion blogs and feeding my inner sartorial whore; for looking up the latest fashion spreads, I have two go-to sites:

Fashion Gone Rogue

Fashion, whether you like it or not, is mostly a woman's world. FGR regularly posts up editorial spreads from every issue of Vogue, various catalogs, ad campaigns, and other magazines. High quality scans and compiled all in one place, it's like buying twenty magazines and flipping through without all the ugly advertisements and having the opportunity to compile, on your hard drive for personal use, all your favorite fashion images. As an amateur fashion illustrator, I love having an easy resource like this.

The Fashionisto

The Fashionisto is FGR's... brother site. Focusing on man candy male models, this site is the definitive place to find images of the elusive XY mannequin.  Mmmm... I think I'll leave this entry here. I've got boys to drool over homework to do.

Mike Teavee, Move Over

I watch an inordinate amount of television; in the context of being GenY, it's another facet of my overwhelming consumption of media, and looking at myself, it's kind of freaky and slightly ridiculous how much I watch. Ironically, for my Communications class, our professor is constantly urging us to watch more TV.

Here is, in a roundabout table, a compilation of my TV schedule from the last year:

Yeah, I know.

Intersperse with various filler episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims' Unit, beginning to watch many of the shows halfway through Season 3 and lots of catching up, pretty regular catch-ups of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the occasional disgusted/fascinated screening of Jersey Shore and watching through two seasons of Dirty Sexy Money in half a hectic week, and the hours of television I've consumed over the last nine months is probably well into the hundreds.

Left, Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report (e.g. favorite newscaster ever), and right, Dirty Sexy Money, favorite now-defunct/cancelled-TV-show-that's-got-both-Billy-Baldwin-and-Donald-Sutherland-squee!!!!-yay. Images via IMDB.

One genre of television that you don't see in my schedule, however, is the game show; I've got nothing against game shows--Jeopardy ftw!--but being narcissistic and thinking better of myself than the people who are on these shows, I don't like to 'waste' my time failing (or kicking ass) on questions I ace at home.

Running home in the afternoons between classes to have a swift lunch, there's only one program my television receives that isn't an infomercial, a shopping channel, a soap opera or episode of Sesame Street--'Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?'

ARE YOU? HUNH? ARE YOU? Image via Fox.

This show is really, really well done production-wise, but what about the basic premise of this show?

Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Are you smarter than a prepubescent elementary schooler who still has recess breaks? Are you smarter than a child whose hairline is barely past your pelvis? Are you smarter than a kid who has spent the last ten years of their life sleeping, eating, crying, and occasionally flipping through picture books and scrawling through arithmetic worksheets?

True, the questions on this show are sometimes extremely specific, giving an unfair advantage to the pint-sied "assistants" of fifth-graders who are featured on the show, but there's still a large number of basic questions that are common knowledge and are relatively easy to answer. Take a quick peek below:

To the contestants on this show--are you proud that you're smarter than a fifth grader? Really? Does the fact that you're proud you're smarter than a ten-year old make you feel awkward? Or are you ashamed that you're not 'smarter than a fifth grader'? Or do you even care?

I understand why people go on this show--$$$.

But what does this television show say about America, the good ol' US of A, that this show is not only on the air, but (somewhat) popular and that people clamor to compete on air to claim that, yes, they are middle-aged, balding, fatting but still 'smart'?