Just thought I would let fans of the Recap know that this year I’m going to try writing a Big Brother related blog.

There’s more details in the introductory post, for the curious, or you can just wait for the show to start and check it out then. Your choice!

The new blog’s name is “Big Bother”. You can find it at bigbrother.mythor.net

And now back to your regularly scheduled recappinating!

With the season wrapping up I thought it was about time I actually wrote up the explanation for why it’s okay to be mean to the contestants on the show. I actually meant to write this a couple of weeks back but now the Finale has stealthily crept up on me and I’m almost out of time!

If you’ve been around some of the forums, the official one in particular, you are probably aware of the “Friends and Family of…” phenomenon. This is where the Friends and Family of a contestant will log onto a forum and strongly and/or viciously defend their friend from the various attacks forumgoers make.

This was best exemplified this season by the Friends and Family of Sheridan, known on the forums as “FAFOS” due to the alarming rate at which they sprang up.

Friends and Family will usually defend their loved one by telling us all that their beloved Fatty is not actually that mean, stupid, lazy or whatever they’ve been accused of. In real life, they’re actually kind, clever and just generally lovely. The forumgoers are told that they don’t know the real Fatty!

And they’re absolutely right. We don’t know the real person.

But they’ve also inadvertently given us a green light to continue being mean, precisely because we don’t know the real people.

What we see each night on television is just what the producers of the show want us to see. If they want us to think Alison is always the nicest, most caring, most considerate and generally lovely girl on set, then all the footage that supports that gets aired, while all the footage that might show her as a horrible, mean spirited and evil woman is conveniently left out.

So we’re not seeing the real Alison. What we are seeing is more like a caricature. We are seeing Biggest Loser Contestant Alison, a character in this reality soapie. If we were to say that Alison is horrible for not warmly welcoming Bryce and Michelle back, then it is Biggest Loser Contestant Alison we are criticising, not Real Life Alison.

A great example of this phenomenon from last season was Courtney. During the first half to two thirds of the season, Courtney was horrible. He was brattish, insolent, lazy, conniving and probably a lot of other very unkind words. But at some point during the show, either his personality turned the corner or the producers started giving him a kinder edit.

Which Courtney is the real one? Is it the horrible troll we saw for the first half of the season? Or the lovely, funny lad we saw in the last half?

If he’s actually the lovely, funny lad we saw in the last half of the season, does that make terrible people of those who criticised him during the first half?

I say no. We were reacting to what we saw of Courtney at the time.

That is the distinction, for me. Yes, I am mean to some of these people. I expect some of them do take it personally, though I expect my insults are at the low end of the spectrum, going by what I read on other sites! But if I could tell them just one thing, it would be that I am criticising the person I saw portrayed on my TV screen and that I am actually aware that that is not the sum total of their being.

Does that reasoning make sense to anyone but me? I certainly hope it does. :-)

I don’t always post the links to the TV Week interviews, though perhaps I should. But the interview with Cosi is simply too good to pass up.

In it, Cosi is surprisingly frank about certain aspects of the show… and certain people.

I don’t want to spoil the whole thing for you, but he does call one contestant a cow.

Want to know who? Go read the interview on TV Week.

And feel free to come back here to comment on the contents!

Thanks to everyone who so kindly donated to the new hosting for my site.

I have since shifted from my old webhost over to Dreamhost and while things have still been a little bumpy, they ought to be sorted out by tonight. Fingers crossed!

One up side is that at least Dreamhost tell me when things are broken, something my old host never bothered to do. It’s a lot easier to deal with when you know that they know that things are broken!

Anyway, thankyou one and all.

If you’re in the market for a new webhost, Dreamhost seem pretty good. The servers run surprisingly quickly (when things aren’t broken of course!) and they offer a lot of features you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

As an added bonus, Dreamhost account holders can offer promotional codes, making it even cheaper to get hosted. The regular price is $10.95 a month, $9.95 a month if you pay a year in advance (and cheaper if you pay for more years!) and you can get as much as $50 off your first bill if you use one of my Dreamhost promo codes that are now available via my regular blog.

See you all tonight for the elimination of Bryce!

With the new segment “The Warehouse” proving unpopular with fans and the continued unpopularity of “The Walk” it is clear that the 2009 season of The Biggest Loser Australia will need some new segments with which to replace both sections of the show, if they hope to regain fans who have been switching off in disgust.

And what better person to invent a new segment for the show than someone random idiot on the internet, right?

What this particular idiot has come up with is an idea for a segment imaginatively titled “Cooking with the Fatties”. Obviously Fremantle may want to rename this, perhaps “Porking with the Pudgies” or “Baking with the Blimps” or possibly even something that isn’t offensive at all. You never know what those crazy producers will get up to.

The way “Cooking with the Fatties” would work is that each week the contestants on the show would be tasked with creating a couple of dishes to be prepared “to camera”, with one or more contestants acting in the role of “hosts” of a cooking show.

Ingredients available to the contestants could be selected beforehand, possibly even at “The Warehouse”, however there would be no “bad” option, only a choice between two healthy sets of ingredients. A set list of various herbs and spices would be provided to all contestants, with the selected ingredients comprising of things like steak, chicken breasts, fish, various fruit and vegetables, etc.

Contestants would explain how the food is prepared, from start to finish, along with the reasons for the inclusion of each ingredient in their meals.

During the team stage, this could be set up as a competitive challenge, with the staff nutritionist as the judge. Judging could be based both on the nutritional value of the dish as well as the taste and presentation. Some cross promotion could even come in here, with the host of Ready Steady Cook coming in for the taste and presentation judging, for example. An additional category, perhaps judged by Ajay, could be based on how well each team’s respective “host”/head chef performs their duties.

Rather than rewarding the winning team with game unbalancing rewards, prizes would instead be healthy cookware (supplied by a sponsor), gym equipment (sponsored) or more immediate treats, such as massages or the old “letters from home”.

Once the game moves out of the team stage, the cooking section would also become a solo affair, with each contestant being provided a set of ingredients and having to create one meal out of just those items, plus a set list of “common household ingredients” (ie; flour, butter/substitute, various basic fruit n veg) with the winner being decided based on nutritional content, ingenuity/originality and edibility.

The reasoning behind this segment is twofold:

Firstly, it would allow contestants a chance to express their personalities in a fun and interesting way, instead of only ever seeing them bitching and moaning about the exercise or other elements of the game.

Secondly, it would provide a lot of the information viewers are regularly begging for in regards to the nutritional content of foods and how to prepare healthy food that doesn’t taste like army boots.

Adding this segment to the show, particularly if it were to replace “The Walk”, would get the show closer to the original intent - helping people to lose weight either on the show or at home. There are no capricious elements involved and there can be no question of the result being chosen by the producers - with no game influencing rewards on offer there isn’t any motivation to do so.

What say you, the readers of the Recap? Does this sound like something that would interest you?

Michelle has popped up in an article from yesterday’s Mercury, addressing the high rate of obesity amongst Tasmania’s children.

In the article, Michelle suggests one solution to this problem may be to institute “bootcamp” style workouts at the start of each school day.

“I’d love to see children do 30 minutes of exercise before class starts each day — that would be awesome,” Bridges said.

“Schools need to see the importance of exercise and encourage children to grow into healthy, active adults.”

Leaving aside the reluctance with which teachers would greet this proposition - would you want to teach a class of thirty sweaty, hyper kids each morning? - she is right that people need to stop turning a blind eye to the problem.

“We shouldn’t be kidding ourselves, we have to stop making excuses.”

She said fat adults were passing bad habits on to children, breeding whole families that were obese.

“Parents need to take control,” Bridges said.

“They’re the grown-ups, they’re the ones who should be setting the pace. They’ve got to set guidelines and be good role models.”

An idea which was reiterated in another article in today’s Mercury, where the Tasmanian Minister for Education, David Bartlett, says that the bootcamp idea is “too extreme”, but also…

He said parents needed to stop blaming schools for unfit children, and do more at home to encourage exercise and good eating habits.

“It’s a crowded curriculum and people in Tasmania, I believe, as my number one priority, want me to lift literacy and numeracy rates and that’s what we’re working hard on,” Mr Bartlett said.

He said more emphasis needed to be put on what happened at home.

Both sides make some good points. Mr Bartlett is correct in that parents need to take some responsibility for turning their children into pudgy nudfuhs. But at the same time that doesn’t excuse schools from attempting to educate children about health and fitness.

Is a “bootcamp” idea going too far? Probably, yes, but if you read what Michelle was actually suggesting, instead of simply freaking out at the “bootcamp” word, you’ll see that what she’s suggesting is really not so far away from what kids of my generation did on a regular basis. Various kinds of energetic exercise, done as a group activity, is a great way to get kids to be more active. Couple it with some instruction on healthy eating habits and maybe some practical lessons on preparing healthy, tasty, meals, and maybe the obesity epidemic would at least be slowed.

And if that doesn’t work, maybe the Government could mandate a real bootcamp for the parents of overweight children!

[Sources: School's bootcamp and Bootcamp idea 'too extreme' both from the Mercury]

In a break from tradition, Threadless are having a $9 T-Shirt Sale!

Well, it’s “from” $9. There’s a few t-shirts going for $9 but most are more than that. Still less than the regular price, though.

Favourites this time round: The Scr-Emo ($9 for Tees, $35 for a Hoody), Meat Is Murder ($9 Tees) and Refrigerator Running ($9 Tees, $35 Hoody)

Get some new t-shirts!

(Cross-posted from www.mythor.net, thought it might interest folks here too!)

The Sunshine Coast Daily is reporting today that evicted rulebreaker John Morrall has confirmed that he will not be invited to attend the Biggest Loser Finale.

“One of the things I visualised when I was meditating was me at the finale looking fantastic.

“I had my whole picture, rocking up on the Harley Davidson, jeans, boots, a cool belt buckle and a great t-shirt, walking down and looking at myself.

“That was my visualisation and they’ve just said to me that ‘you won’t be invited to the finale’ and that knocked me on my backside,” John said.

There’s been some confusion around the forums as to whether he would be allowed on stage at the finale and it seems clear now that he will not.

Personally, I think this was a good decision. While it would have been interesting to have seen his “final” results, by putting him up on stage the show would essentially be saying, “This is the sort of result you can get if you completely ignore doctor’s orders and put your life in jeopardy.”

Also, John reveals an interesting glimpse of what life is like inside the White House. Apparently certain folks behave very differently when they have a camera on them…

“I’ll say this, I was never a rebel but I was true to who I am and that was the most important thing from day one.

“But with a lot of the other people in the house, the minute the camera goes on them they are very different people, there’s some great little snakes in there,” he said.

But at least the snakes are heeding the free medical advice, John.

[Source: Sunshine Coast Daily]

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Yeah, sorry if you have and got the bounce message saying I don’t exist. I do, honest!

Apparently during the recent server troubles my host had, a couple of backend settings also went boom, including the one that says where to send my mail.

And my host didn’t bother to tell me this. So I had no idea anything was wrong as I don’t use mythor.net as my primary email… D’oh!
But it’s working again now. So if you sent me something and it bounced, feel free to try again now! recap followed by the at symbol thingy and then mythor.net