Welcome to late stage capitalism.
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My money is on Dynamo.
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Good grief! Did someone really just write ‘fewer applause’?
Well I cannot give it even one applau.
While I will often pedantically argue about ‘fewer’ and ‘less’, I accept that it is trivial. But this demonstrates the value of recognising there IS a difference.
And as for anyone thinking ‘applause’ is a plural noun, words fail me. (Well, obviously not, eh?) 
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I was having this same conversation with the wife last week. We used to enjoy ANW but the past couple of seasons have gone seriously astray with the feel-good life stories and guilt trips. It’s gotten so they are more interested in showing those little video montage clips rather than the contestant’s actual runs. Barely watchable now. Same goes for America’s Got Talent…no golden buzzer unless you can spin plates on your head and have also beaten cancer several times.
Always loved that story. A few of his short stories have really haunted my brain over the years - Thinner, The Ledge, and Dolan’s Cadillac for example.
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Your Money Or Your Life from Time Bandits also goes here…
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The Long Walk was harrowing, and one of the only Bachman Books that I actually like.
(I hated Thinner.)
The Ledge was a pretty good short story which got turned into a cool short in the movie Cat’s Eye, and Dolan’s Cadillac was riveting; one of my favorite tales of cold blooded revenge. against someone who seems “untouchable.”
“Scream for me, Dolan…”
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The ending is what gets me…the moment he realizes his daughter ate the pie so he resigns himself and cuts himself a slice…man, that’s just so dark and disturbing.
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The ending is one reason I don’t care for it; though I don’t require a “happy ending” in order to like a story.
More so, I didn’t like any of characters; particularly the main character who is the utter epitome of White male privilege and entitlement.
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Sounds like they’re taking a cue from the profiles of U.S. Olympics athletes that NBC started airing in the late 1990s, every one a sob story. Maybe they’re trying to make the American Ninja contestants seem more like serious athletes.
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Is Betsy deVos on the show’s board of directors?
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Hi @GinaLoukareas, I haven’t seen a lot of your posts on BoingBoing. I appreciate your writing here and I hope we see more of it.
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Thank you so much! I’ve been on the social media side of Boing Boing for a couple of years. Thought I’d try to spread my wings a bit!
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We can’t be seen to be doing these things on television for ourselves, that would be narcissistic and shallow. See also “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
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it’s a play on the linguistic quirks of quantitating a qualitative assessment (one that ought not be made in the first place).
I, for one, got the joke.
I even saw the forest for the trees.
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Oh cool. Ever since I joined the 1% I’ve been looking for an underclass to pit against each other in fits of strength. Why the problem, are you not entertained?
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I remember Debt well – because I was on it. Would have been in '96.
I was just out of college, as was my wife, and when I auditioned, they asked how much debt we were in. We had about $40k of student loans, so I put that down. When they accepted me onto the show, they said that they didn’t usually go above $9,000, and so my official “debt” on the show was announced at the top as something like, “And Eric will be playing to get out of debt in the amount of $7,463.” It was some odd number – drama from specificity and all that – but nowhere near our actual debt.
I did… poorly. I blame the buzzer. Rather, I blame my inability to buzz in before the others, so I should blame my reaction time. I was able to answer some question about Oingo Boingo, I remember that, and not much else. I have some solace in that the guy who won the whole thing ended up becoming a 5-day Jeopardy champion years later, so, you know, at least I was beaten by the best.
My consolation prizes were a savings bond ($200?), a piggy bank, and a label machine! It was quite a nice label machine. Plus I got to meet Wink Martindale, which at the time was very exciting.
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It was a joke? Yep, but I laughed for entirely different reasons (with a different definition of ‘joke’ I suspect).
We couldn’t take the rich person’s hard-earned allocations, that wouldn’t be Pareto efficient!
*barfs forever*
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