Everything wrong with America in one photo!

Above: a poster for the "Morning Show with Mike and Juliet"

We could sit here and spend hours picking apart the people in these photos. The bright neon tie chosen by focus group, the desperately careful pose meant to suggest comraderie and ease between the two hosts, the smiles meant to convey nothing more than the reflection of a tv studio's vapid topicality.

We could do all this and more, but we won't. Why? Because it's the process of creating shows that brought these two people to this point, not vice versa.

I urge you to check out the website for this show however. It opens with a little Flash movie of Mike and Juliet sharing their high school yearbook calibre thought bubbles with us.

Ok now that your eyes are bleeding, let's move on.

Trying to discover the appeal of this show...I delved yet further into the wikipedia entry reserved for it. Yes, it has a wikipedia entry. Whoa whoa, don't get yourself in a tizzy about this. What's wrong with a blip-on-the-screen receiving its own wiki space? Every spirituallly bankrupt morning show surely deserves its own chapter in the hallowed store of mankind's common knowledge, which is increasingly wikipedia and none of the more reliable, less wiki-oriented "pedias." And why not?



Hell, even Matthew Lesko has an entry.

A further look at the bottom of the Morning Show's wiki page reveals this completely candid and unbiased assessment of the show's strengths that was absolutely not written by someone who works for the same show.

Social Critiques of Hosts
Television critics have noted that the program is unique in having two single hosts, who openly play up their marital status, seemingly abandoning traditional dictates that television morning hours be limited to "family values and sanctimony".[5] Thus, the hosts' on-screen personas ("a man who, because he loves the ladies too much or not enough, shuns long-term relationships, and an attractive over-30 woman who has pursued her career rather than marrying and regrets it") are designed to appeal to single viewers who have previously been uncatered to in the morning.

WAIT! Your eyes have stopped bleeding you say? Well, let's get that flow a-goin' again. Go to this page and watch the two hosts dance for their network paychecks, literally through hoops, in a photo-by-photo flash animation.

Did you watch? Haha, yes, they're just such free spirits aren't they? Look, it's so funny! They were both playing around with hoola hoops and then... woooooopsypoopsydoodlydoos! They got all tangled up in them! What a couple of morning themed cards, they are! I wonder what utterly meaningless, terrifyingly safe hijinx they'll get into next. LOL and HAR HAR and :), and a few more ! ! ! ! !'s.

I don't know what television critics have been noting the uniqueness of this morning genocide on brain cells, but it's not those "critics" referenced below (two of which are just links to the show's own related sites), none of whom even discuss the show's content. Note: I was not able to access Miss Heffernan's review from my desk computer at work, so in some likelihood, the referenced critique could be in her column. But one critic hardly qualifies the statement that "Television critics have noted that the program is unique..." One critic MAY have noted that. Many more however are probably just now cleaning off the dried blood from their recently self-excavated eye sockets.


CRITIC REFERENCES
^ Offical Website :: About the Show
^ Official Website : Where To Watch?
^ TVWeek.com : Twentieth Clears "Mike and Juliet" in 70% of Country
^ Official Website : Where To Watch?
^ Virginia Heffernan, "We're Not Dating" : A Morning Show With Sex on the Brain, New York Times, February 8, 2007

Blah blah blah...Anway, there's a lot to dislike here. But nothing new, especially from the Fox News family. If you live in NYC, you will have seen the posters on just about every subway platform. They're about as convincing a sell as Con Ed's relatively hilarious and now infamous ON IT ad campaign.



One can only pray that The Morning Show is as "On It" as Con Ed is. If we're really lucky, it'll be about as likely to endure as Texas House Appropriations Committee chairman Warren Chisum in a game of HOW OLD IS THE EARTH AND DOES IT REVOLVE AROUND THE SUN?

If that's the case, this particular turd won't be floating around in our zeitbowl for too much longer before getting a good, healthy Erroten.

Auf Wiedersehen THE MORNING SHOW...I hope.

Sean Crespo stand up now at COMEDYNET.COM

Recently I taped a set for comedynet.com. It was magical. Check it out.

Also stay tuned for my new video blog or VLOG or VIDLOG or VIDEBL or VB or VIDEOBLO or EOOG. Any of those well known nicknames. They start going up at ComedyNet Monday February 19. Be there or be a pear.

Which I like anyway. They're crisp and delicious.

Sorry, I'm just no good at establishing high stakes.

"People With AIDS Plaza": It's real, people.

People With AIDS Plaza.

It exists.

I work a block from it.

Perhaps it's time to retire Political Correctness?


LOOKING TO VISIT SOME OTHER NOT-SO-FAMOUS LANDMARKS IN NYC?

Try these out...

Koalas with Spyroketes Shopping Mall

The Cyberorganic Hedge Funds with Attitude Bridge

Invisible Bakeries with Rickets Stadium

The Statue of Homeless Veterans of Foreign Wars with Bad Knees--the one in the East River!

and of course...

Staples


New York is what you make of it. Even, and apparently especially, AIDS-themed places to stroll.

I am so sick of the liberal Medea in this country!

I am so sick of the liberal Medea in this country. So Medea, this left wing feminazi, murders her two kids and instead of going to jail, she becomes a celebrity when the New York Times and the ACLU get behind her "right" to abort her kids at the 43rd and 39th trimesters respectively. Then what does she do? She flees the country in a dragon-pulled chariot provided by her grandfather. And just guess what he does for a living.

Yup. He's a Sun-God.

Nepotistic Deus Ex Machina, anyone?

This country needs to get back to its core values of wrestling, defending tiny mountain passes against incredible odds, and creating the Olympics.

Until we do so, we may as well be a bunch of Cretans.

Red, White, and Drool

Over the weekend, I was sent a link to one of those clips where some interviewer from another country talks to a (hopefully not but highly likely) random sampling of U.S. citizens and asks them a series of idiotically simple questions along the lines of..."Which of these is not a primary color: red, blue, or muffins?"

This interviewer is usually then richly rewarded with such stunning gems as "Wait, what kind of muffins?"

Always depressing, but no more so than if you went to any number of other opulent countries and asked their lowest common denominators the same basic set of questions. Unfortunately we happen to have a disturbingly higher number of lowest common denominators. If you weren't aware, and you probably aren't if you're living in America right now, this nations's denominators are hovering between the "very low" to "Mariana's Trench" levels.

It's a serious problem, one which, if our politicians as well as our numerators don't get on top of by giving our educational system a boost, might eventually be our ultimate downfall as a superpower. Case in point, if asked to name other superpowers, I wouldn't be shocked to hear responses from my fellow Americans such as "laser eyes" or "super stretchiness."

Yes Yakov, what a country.

Perhaps I'm a little spoiled by the company with whom I grew up. My family's intelligence--barring the crazy Jesusy portion of them--tends to reside in, if not the highest eeyrie of brainpower, at least at upon a very healthy upper-mountain jutty of rapid-fire neurons. My older cousin Josh Frost, who is more of a half-brother really since his mother and mine are twins, is a good example. I probably spent every day of every summer up and through our mid teens at our grandmother's pool with him and my other cousin Bobby.

So I know the guy pretty well.

Since he was a little boy, all he wanted to do was to become a math teacher. Well, that worked out for him because, guess what he teaches? That's right. He teaches French Woodshop. (I set my sights a little higher however. Sadly, my goal of becoming Spiderman has yet to manifest itself. YET!)

But he's not just any math teacher. He's the kind of math teacher you wish you'd had. Teachers like Josh are the only reason every child isn't getting 'left behind' these days. If a kid's stuck on a problem, he stops and walks him through it. Alternately, if that kid's a math whiz with no time for the basics, well, he'll take the time to challenge his gifts. The guy's good at what he does and it shows. He won a presidential award for teaching in 2005. His N.H. math team mopped the Granite State's floor (ironically it's marble) with the competetition for almost 10 years, and even after moving back to the much more densley populated Massachussetts a few months ago, his new team still came in second last week, with a chance to take the state championship later this year. By the way, I'm pretty sure one of the kids on his team is a robot and just pretending to lose once in a while. Josh took umbrage with me however when I tried to test this theory by throwing magnets at the kid and asking him unsolvable riddles and waiting for his head to explode. (it didn't)

And oh yes, Josh also scored an 800 on his math SATs.

(I'm sure he did fine in English too. Thank you very much.)

Anyway, that's Josh.

So after weeping into my hands for a full minute or two, I forwarded the link to this video to him, an unspoken offer to partake in some company for that particular piece of misery. "Who better?" I thought.

After we both agreed that a good place to start would be by creating a list of Americans to sterylize, basically anyone who can't score above 115 on an IQ test--I further contended that fans of ACCORDING TO JIM be placed on this list automatically, regardless of test results--Josh suggested that perhaps a country with such an aloof interest in the education of its own citizens may no longer be up to the task of voting in capable, worthy politicians.

I happen to agree, and two terms of the worst president in history makes this tragic case for us. Don't panic though. We have an answer to this problem.

Well, Josh does. It is simple, fair, and effective, and I urge the thousands upon thousands of politicians who read my blog daily to act upon this idea. The Frost-Crespo Voting Act of 2007 could turn this big lug of a country around. And it would pretty much cripple the Republican Party until it got its head out of its own ultra-conservative-pandering ass, which would probably be never. So either way, America wins. And while Josh is himself not a comedian, his response to this video was filled with enough malaise, I felt it warranted posting.

And thus...

FROM JOSH:I agree that all presidential ballots should be computerized but not facilitated by 3rd party companiues with a vested interest in particular candidates. There should also be a paper trail, but most importantly, before voting I think citizens should have to answer 10 randomly generated questions (logic, geography, current events) to at least 70% accuracy or their vote doesn't count.

Sample pre-vote test:
1) Who is the current VP?
a) George W Bush
b) Condeleeza Rice
c) Dick Cheney
d) your mother

2) Which of these countries is closest to us geopraphically?
a) United Kingdom
b) Califoria
c) your mother
d) Canada

3) If seven chickens weigh 56 pounds, how much does each one weigh?
a) 8 lbs
b) 5.6 lbs
c) 10 lbs
d) your mother

4) Whose face is on the quarter?
a) Ben Franklin
b) Bill Clinton
c) George Washington
d) your mother

5) Which country is York in?
a) New York
b) your mother's country
c) England
d) Pennsylvania

6) What is the other baseball team in New York City called which is not the Mets?
a) Dodgers
b) Red Sox
c) Yankees
f) your mother the car

7) Which of these weigh the closest to the same as a pound of steel?
a) 5 lbs of wood
b) 2 lbs of dirt
c) 1 lb of feathers
d) 7 kg of grass
e) Yo-Yo Ma

8) Out of these, who was the worst president of the U.S.?
a) Osama Bin Laden
b) Adolf Hitler
c) George W Bush
d) Geena Davis
e) George W Bush
f) George W Bush
g) George W Bush's mom

9) Fifteen minutes is what fraction of an hour?
a) one half
b) one third
c) one quarter
d) muffins

10) Given a choice, whose side would you have fought on in the United States Civil War?
a) North
b) South
c) East
d) West

NOTE: If they answer b for number 10 the floor below them should then open up and drop them into a pit full of pissed off alligators and ACCORDING TO JIM blooper reels.


We are a family of many opinions. Fortunately for you, all of them are correct.