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You know when you sit down to perform an activity that should only take five minutes and then you look up at the clock and eight hours have passed?

Yeah, I hate that.

In all honestly, I’d never heard of The Wire until one morning last March when I awoke to a blitzkrieg of news articles and segment pieces talking about how amazingly wonderful the series finale had been the previous night. Being the huge spoil freak that I am, I refused to read any of the said articles that mentioned the entire plot was about to be given away in the following paragraphs, but I soon came to the realization that I needed to see said TV show.

Seriously, every spoiler-free article and headline talked about how fulfilling and complete the final season and specifically episode was. I couldn’t find a single negative response to it and in doing some hasty research, I couldn’t find much against the show in general. Here was a show on HBO which critics and fans alike loved and which had been running for the past six years or so. And I’d never fucking heard of it!

I’d been burned by an HBO show before (FUCKING SOPRANOS SUCKED ASS!), but I finally broke down and watched the first season during the tail end of March.

Last week, I watched the final episode of the fifth, and final, season.

One of the top 10 shows of my lifetime? Most likely.

The beauty in the show is it’s realism. The good guys have huge flaws. The bad guys aren’t 100% evil. This isn’t some episode of 24 where all the bad guys speak in a Russian accent and Jack Bauer is God. This is real, where the good guys don’t always win, the bad guys don’t always lose, and sometimes you forget who in the hell is on which side much less who you’re “supposed” to be rooting for.

I told my brother it was like LOST, but in the real world. Everything everybody does screws over somebody else. The police, judges, lawyers, businessmen, politicians, dope dealers, crack addicts, children, teachers, dock workers, and everyday citizens all affect one another. If you think LOST weaves character stories together, you ain’t seen shit yet.

If you’ve already seen every episode, then please feel free to click the “more” link below. Otherwise, go watch the entire first season (their seasons are only 10 or 12 episodes long), become hooked, watch the rest of them, and then come read what I’ve written below.

And just in case you’re too fucking lazy to click on the link above, here’s a short recap from Wikipedia to let you know what the hell you’re about to get yourself sucked into.

The Wire is an American television drama series set and produced in Baltimore, Maryland. Created, produced, and primarily written by author and former police reporter David Simon, the series was broadcast by the premium cable network HBO in the United States. The Wire premiered on June 2, 2002 and ended on March 9, 2008, with 60 episodes airing over the course of its five seasons.

Each season of The Wire focuses on a different facet of the city of Baltimore. They are, in order: the drug trade, the port, the city bureaucracy, the school system, and the print news media. The large cast consists mainly of character actors who are little known for their other roles. Simon has said that despite its presentation as a crime drama, the show is “really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how…whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.”

Despite never seeing great commercial success or winning any major television awards, The Wire has frequently been cited by critics as one of the greatest television series of all time. The show is recognized for its realistic portrayal of urban life, artistic ambitions, and uncommonly deep exploration of sociological themes.

Central to the structure and plot of the show is the use of electronic surveillance and wiretap technologies by the police—hence the title The Wire. Salon.com described the title as a metaphor for the viewer’s experience: the wiretaps provide the police with access to a secret world, just as the show does for the viewer.

Without further a due (I still get a small kick out of that)…

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I can already tell I’m far too jacked up on (rational) emotion from having just watched the presumable series finale of Jericho to make a clear and unbiased post, so I’ll just say this.

Fuck you, CBS.

I could sit here and tout a countless array of argument as to how inept the current heads of television are. I could mention how TiVO and iTunes and bittorrent and DVR aren’t factored into Neilson ratings. I could reference the great YouTube debate or link to all the thousands of words I’ve written here on Shyzer mentioning how much money they’re losing every day they refuse to recognize the new ways of media consumption. But it’s all been said a million times before by just as many people.

Jericho was one of the few character driven shows on TV that didn’t employ a trite and vapid setting of doctors sleeping with each other or lawyers standing up for the common man. No matter what CBS wanted the show to be, Jericho understood that no matter how fantastic the story line was, the sci fi was only a setting and not a story in and of itself. The fact that shows like LOST and Battlestar Galactica have the same understanding only further exemplifies the type of company Jericho kept.

The bottom line is Jericho not only had a proven rabid fanbase, but had a handful of brand new episodes at a time when television was starving for new material. From two months, as the writers strike dragged on and every show had exhausted their supply of fresh material, CBS had the opportunity to move up the release date and showcase Jericho against the crap that every other network was scrambling to pump out. Instead, CBS not only killed an early release, but buried the show at it’s historically worst time on it’s historically worst day. They never wanted Jericho to succeed this second time around and in effect had no qualms about giving their fans a giant “fuck you.”

Yet I’m not pissed. These past seven episodes were beyond perfect. In ten years, we’ll casually laugh at how stupid we were in the past to have so many open-ended & slow driven shows. We’ll remember that it all started to change when shows like BSG and LOST not only refused to let the networks renew them for countless seasons, but demanded they be ended on their own terms – amazing ratings be damned! Networks will realize how successful these types of shows are, how much better written they are than the average show. Along the way, one network will finale realize the goldmine that is TV on Demand and suddenly shows will no longer be canceled due to poor Neilson ratings alone.

And then we’ll remember that show that not only came back from the dead because of it’s fans, but that managed to squeeze an entire season into only seven episodes. And we’ll remember how fucking awesome that show was and how long before it’s time it truly was.

Thanks for every damn episode, Jericho.

The only times I ever saw my college advisor was when it came time to pick classes for the next semester. I never knew exactly what I wanted to take though, so I always just scribbled down the first five classes I could think of, he’d sign off on them, and then he’d ask me six months later why I didn’t take a single one of the original classes he cleared me for. In fact, the only time he was useful was when he let me know what classes I still needed in order to graduate. A science class here, a math class there, etc. In fact, the only time he brought up my history requirements was when he noticed I’d been skimping on taking the Craft.

Any history major at USC was (and may still be, I’m too lazy to look it up) required to take a class titled History 300: The Historian’s Craft. Ugh. Shoot me now. The name of the class alone brought up images of stiff and musty old white professors in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches who talk with the same excitement in their voice as a person reading a technical manual. The only redeeming idea for the class was the outside chance that maybe my professor would smoke a pipe. He didn’t.

The class itself was mind numbingly boring, yet in hindsight kind of important. Basically, it was created to help weed out the idiots who didn’t know how to properly research a history paper or assignment and thus, the entire semester was spent emphasizing the importance of primary sources. For instance, if I was writing a paper on George Washington, I couldn’t simply quote some of the many books that have been written about him in the twentieth century. I’d have to research and pull up actual papers and essays Washington had wrote or newspaper articles from the time. Good God, I can’t tell you how many times my professor told me I needed primary sources. I could have gotten an interview with Jesus himself for a paper on the origins of Christianity and my professor still would have chided me for not getting a sit down with God.

So why am I telling you this? Oh, no big reason, other than to explain why 1421 is one of the shoddiest pieces of “history” reporting and research I’ve ever read. For those of you fortunate to have never read this trash written by Gavin Menzies (though by book sales numbers, far too many of you HAVE read this), the basic premise is that a massive Chinese fleet left port in 1421 and not only sailed around the world, but accurately mapped it as well. Australia, India, Africa, Antarctica, South & North America – you name it, the Chinese supposedly sailed there decades, if not centuries, before any Europeans.

I say supposedly because there’s about as much primary evidence for this having happened as there is for me being the first human to teleport to the surface of the moon and establishing the first galactic Starbucks.

The book (and subsequent PBS “documentary”) is littered with paragraphs that are meant to confuse the reader. He continually tosses in references to his own expertise in navigation and cartography, though the only qualifications shown are a mention here and there that he served in the Royal Navy of Britain. Awesome, I went to high school for four years, I’m therefore an expert in English literature. Whenever Menzies finally decides to stake a claim, he passes off conjecture as fact. Take for instance the following quote, which I kid you not, was selected by opening the book to a random page:

In talking about why the Chinese would have bothered mapping Antarctica: Why had the Chinese bothered to do so? I began to wonder if they really had gone there. Then the answer that I should have seen at once suddenly came to me. They had chosen to sail to Antarctica in order to get underneath Crucis Alpha, the leading star of the Southern Cross. I could only shake me head in wonder at the skill and sophistication of these Chinese mariners of so many centuries ago…

NO! Stop shaking your head, damnit! THAT’S NOT A FACT! Please show me one piece of evidence that proves they sailed there to check out the stars. One journal entry, one letter home, one anything that clearly says, “why did we sail into all these icebergs again? Oh yeah, so we could check out some stars.” Until then, saying they went there is simply Menzies’ best guess! Just because they might have wanted to map the southern stars, there’s no PROOF that’s why they traveled to the South Pole when they did. My best guess is that Amelia Earhart simply crashed in the Pacific and maybe survived for a month or two on a deserted island, but I have no proof that events unfolded this way, so I could never say it was fact. Maybe she really was spying on Japan, maybe she landed and led a normal life out of the spotlight, maybe she was captured by aliens, who the hell knows. I certainly don’t and neither does Menzies.

Here, let’s flip to another page. In fact, let’s look at the claim that Chinese sailors not only made port in my foreign hometown – Newcastle, Australia – but also left behind ruins.

On evidence found near Newcastle of early Chinese fleet activity: In 1965, sand-miners unearthed a huge wooden rudder from this site; some said it was 40 feet high. If this description was even remotely accurate, it eliminates the possibility of an unknown Portuguese or Dutch voyage.

Okay, excuse me while I go punch myself in the face so as to alleviate some of this frustration I have pent up now. What do you mean IF it’s accurate? This happened barely 40 years prior – GO INTERVIEW SOMEBODY WHO WAS AT THE UNEARTHING! If you can’t find anybody who was there, then say so! And where the hell is this rudder? Did it vanish? Did they stick it back in the ground? Who the hell knows because Heaven forbid Menzies does some actually research and investigating.

The book is FULL of baseless “facts” like these. Menzies constantly cites “accounts” by many famous European explorers of encountering things that in hindsight don’t fit the historically accepted timeline, such as plant and animal life that’s only indigenous to Asia or how they found a map in Europe that already had the world mapped out for them before they set off to explore it. The only problem is that Menzies doesn’t reference any of these accounts! He provides not a shred of proof that any of these European explorers actually had these accounts. Come on! I can do that, Christ. Did you know that Columbus once talked about how shocked he was to encounter magical dragons protecting a gumdrop village in Cuba? Oh yeah, Columbus loved it there. The space aliens who supplied the village with endless amounts of chocolate milk treated him like royalty. Oh, you never heard of this tale? Don’t worry, it totally happened, Columbus once talked about it to his buddies.

Menzies does try to explain why he has such few primary sources. There was a great purge of exploration knowledge in China (though in reality it wasn’t nearly as bad as he makes it sound. In fact, there are still surviving primary sources from that era that Menzies either ignored or chose to leave out because they didn’t support his claims), or the DNA analysis hasn’t come back yet (THEN WAIT TO PUBLISH THE FUCKING BOOK!), or carbon dating on the ship wreckage was inconclusive, or no Chinese artifacts in the Americas have been found yet despite many people’s best efforts, or… Hell, whenever he actually goes out on the limb and references an actual source, there’s a decent chance that source is fake! He makes reference to a museum that doesn’t exist (page 220, the Kedumba Nature Museum in Katoomba, Australia) and to make matters even more hilariously frustrating, such a museum never existed in the first place.

Why didn’t the Chinese sail to Europe? They partied with effing penguins, but they couldn’t figure out how to find the center of civilization at the time? If the Chinese had settled amongst all so many Native American tribes, how come they didn’t have immunities to European diseases? Why didn’t the Chinese set up a single tribute colony, which was supposedly the whole purpose of their trip? How is it that Menzies is allowed to use ancient tales and superstitions by Native Americans (long ago, yellow people came from the sea…) as support for the “fact” that the Chinese showed up, but I’m not allowed to use them to support my hypothesis that a magical dragon kingdom of gumdrops and lollypop lanes did in fact exist?

To be fair, I haven’t finished the book. I say that only to point out that I doubt I’ll make it all the way through. After 200+ pages, there’s only so much I can take.

As humans, we hate not knowing something. It goes against our innate nature and I can most definitely sympathize with people who hate not knowing what happened in our past. I want to know just as much as the next guy whether or not the Chinese actually discovered the New World before Columbus. But people need to understand one simple fact, especially when it comes to teaching history: It’s far better to say you don’t know something than to pass off your assumptions and speculations as fact.

I’ve got to make 5 posts by midnight tonight if I’m to fulfill my 30 posts in 30 days quest. Thus, I’m digging into the archive of unfinished posts and seeing what I can polish up and get published. Here’s the first of *fingers crossed* five.

There aren’t many times when I voluntarily give up the Internet for prolonged periods. In fact, I’m struggling to think of any such occasions right off the top of my head. That is, excluding the week leading up to July 21, 2007.

To say that I was a little paranoid about being spoiled the ending of the final Harry Potter book would be an understatement. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that people on the Internet are assholes, myself included. Some more often than others, but trust me, the fact remains. If you spend more than an hour a day on the Internet, there will be a point somewhere along the line where you’ll purposefully be a dick just for the hell of it. And when the entire HP book ends up on the Internet over a week before it’s actual release date, you didn’t have to have an active imagination to know what would follow.

So, with that said, Only click the link below if you’ve finished the Harry Potter Heptalogy, because otherwise you’re going to be spoiled. For you see, I surprisingly don’t want to be a dick right now.

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The title of today’s post comes from the very mouths of Chong and myself, where we muttered those very words about 90 times over the course of two weeks in South America.

Basically, the story goes as such. We started our adventure in Chile, where we planned on staying for a week. After that, it was off to Buenos Aires for a week and then back home. Easy, quick, and smooth – well, so went the plan. Alex brought with him a Lonely Planet travel guide for Chile and I brought down a Frommer’s Argentina & Chile 3rd edition travel guide. And let’s just say that it took all of 10 minutes for us to realize that the only thing I’d brought along was a hunk of paper that was going to slow us down.

My first discovery that Frommer’s sucks is when I flipped it open to look at the map inside and found a grand total of one map for Santiago.

One. Map.

Alex flipped his book open and not only was his map far larger than mine, but each subsequent page was a zoomed in map with much more detail (ie, STREETS) of all the local burrows. But the alarmingly lack of street information wasn’t even the worst of Frommer’s inefficiency. We wanted to take the subway that afternoon and as I opened my book, I saw on the inside front cover a beautiful color map of Buenos Aires’ subway system. Fantastic! We were saved! But you know me, always running around assuming things that aren’t true. So you can imagine my surprise when I flipped to the back cover and found a beautiful…Travelocity advertisement? What the hell?! No Santiago subway map in the entire book? Welcome to Frommer’s!

But Goob, you might be saying to yourself, you’re a Master Navigator (that almost sounds dirty.) You don’t need a stinking map! And you’re right! I didn’t need a map, seeing as how Alex’s Lonely Planet had plenty! What I did need were reviews and suggestions on things to do. You know, the kind of thing you’d expect a travel guide to have, right? Wrong, because Frommer’s has nothing like that!

Actually, I should clarify. The book does have recommendations on things to do and see. But unlike Alex’s Lonely Planet guide where each tourist spot had a rough overview on what to see, how to get there, and when to go, Frommer’s is more in the style of “Here’s a cool place, go there.” That’s it. No instructions on the best way to get there, why it’s a good spot, or who might enjoy it best. It was like I was reading the damn Yellow Pages.

And I particularly enjoyed the following golden gem from Frommer’s own website:

I’m dissatisfied with my guide. Can I get a refund?

Book refunds or exchanges are dependent on the policy of the retail or online store from which the book was purchased. Frommer’s does not provide refunds or exchanges for books that were purchased from a retail vendor.

Yep, because it’s Books-A-Million’s fault that Frommer’s guide books suck! It has nothing to do with the fact that FROMMER TRAVEL GUIDES ARE ABSOLUTELY ABYSMAL TO BEGIN WITH!

So, if you haven’t quite caught on to the subtle hints I’ve been occasionally dropping, I’ll say this. If you enjoy stress-free vacations and not wasting money on glorified paperweights, then please, for the love of God, never buy a Frommer’s Travel Guide. The sooner this company is taken out back behind the shed, the better for us all. No wonder American’s rarely travel outside of the country. They’ve got travel guides like these making them want to beat their heads in with a tack hammer.

I just posted this on Hey, It’s Free! but I figured the few Shyzer readers I have left might find this useful as well. Long story short, there’s a site called ExpoTV.com that pays people money via Paypal in exchange for video reviews about anything.

And by anything, I seriously mean anything. I just reviewed the latest Simpsons movie. All you have to do is record yourself talking for a minimum of 60 seconds and then upload the video. Most reviews only pay out $2, but there are a few special categories that pay out $10. Electronics is the big one. In the past few days, I’ve reviewed three cell phones, two digital camera, two different iPods, an xbox 360, the xbox wireless remote, a nintendo wii, a nintendo wii remote. That’s 11 items right there, netting me $110, and they all probably took me a max of 90 minutes to review and upload. And when I think about it, there are plenty more electronics I can review. My TV’s, DVD player, my three laptops, my desktop computer, my computer speakers, my universal remote control, etc.

This site has been around for over a year and I can’t believe that I just now found it. At midnight tonight, the sports equipment, pets, and baby products categories drop from $10 to $2, so I’m cramming as many of those videos in as I can right now. But if you want some quick money, just sign up and review a few electronics and be done with it. Of course, read that HIF post I made and the post I made on Hey, It’s The Forums! as well for more info, because there are more than just electronics that you can review for $10 (cars and travel destinations off the top of my head. I think a review of Myrtle Beach is in order!) There’s also a giant ass thread on Something Awful that’s been going on for over a year, which is where I found out about this site. Hundreds of people there have been paid out and there’s a HUGE tips and faq guide on there, which is very helpful.

And I thank you all for signing up under me. If you do so and then upload just 1 video, I make $5, which I’ll be using to create a big contest on HIF to give shit away.

One of the few message boards where I nerd it up is full of nothing but webmasters who basically make their living from running some of the most popular websites on the net. Of course, I just surf around and soak up whatever bits of information I can gather from them, but one of the cool things is sometimes you run across a new site that one of them is starting.

KO Hit.net is such a site.

Basically, some guy in Europe decided he could make money just by hosting an ass load of music that people could download for free. I know there are a lot of sites like that out there, but far too many of them are in Russian (which I guess isn’t a problem for Fellner anymore), or contain tons of porn advertisements or even spyware and viruses. But KO Hit doesn’t have any of that and it’s a heck of a lot easier to use compared to booting up Limewire when you just want to download one song.

The search feature is a little wacky, but it works best if you just type in the artist’s name and then find the song from there. You can even listen to the songs first before downloading them, which helps when you have no idea what the name is of the song you want.

So check out KO Hit if you feel your iPod’s been a little bland lately. Of course…uh….you know, you should only download songs that you already legally own and whatnot. Because if there’s one thing we here at Shyzer Industries won’t stand for, it’s stealing. Well that and allowing Bob Costas on TV.

Man, he’s such a douche.

Apparently I’m the only person who remembers the trailers for Babel that they played constantly when it first came out. They made it seem like it was some international terror suspense movie that would be entertaining to watch.

It’s not. And it’s not.

The problem was that the movie wasn’t anything like the trailers made it out to be. It’s a drama that goes on and on about how we can’t communicate with other people who have the same feelings, emotions, blah blah blah. It was basically three poorly connected stories going on at once. It’s as if I was watching three separate mini-movies that kept cutting away just when I started to tolerate them. To make matters worse, half of the characters acted as if they had a learning disability that put them on par with 4 year old with Down’s Syndrome. Just because you’re a fish out of water doesn’t mean you have to act like an idiot, despite what this movie tries to teach you.

In fact, you know it’s a shitty movie on the screen when you find that you don’t give a shit whether any of the major characters to live or die. What rubbish.

Seeing as how all of the good shows are finally coming out of winter hiatus, I figured it’d be a good time to review the new shows in an attempt to find the next Battlestar Galactica or Scrubs. And thanks to RSS & torrents, the third best combination ever invented by man right behind rum & coke and beer & baseball, you can quickly download anything you haven’t watched so far and quickly catch up.

The Good: Jericho – Present day America. Major cities suddenly nuked by an unknown enemy. And a small town full of seemingly half genius, half dumbass citizens. Yeah, it’s a somewhat weak premise, and it’s a “family” show despite the nuclear holocaust, and some of the plot holes are so glaring, you have to wear sunglasses while watching. But if you can get past all that, it’s actually not a bad hour of television. We’ve all dreamed about what we’d do if the end of the world happened in out life time and so it’s fun in the sense that every step of the way, you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Man, I never would have thought to do that!” It won’t be winning any awards any time soon, but it’s not being canceled and people are tuning in, which says enough.

The Bad: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – I wanted this show to be good. I still do. The premise of a behind-the-scenes-of-SNL type comedy/drama from the creator of The West Wing sounded great. But if Aaron Sorkin doesn’t get off his high horse soon and immediately stop writing condescending episodes in between bad plot lines, myself and the other 28 viewers left will ultimately flip the channel. So why do I still keep coming back for more? Because of the actors. Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry have some of the best chemistry between each other, almost to the level of Scrubs’ Zach Braff and Donald Faison. It’s fun watching Perry finally be able to play the serious & witty role, and play it quite well I might add. It’s lucky (and rare) that despite his work on Friends, he managed to not get typecast as the goofy, sidekick guy only to watch his career go down the tube years later.

The Ugly: Daybreak – What do you get when you mix Groundhog Day, 24, and a sack full of shit together? Daybreak. ABC couldn’t have pimped this show any more than they did and it still flopped pitifully. The only thing missing from making this the ultimate crapfest were the writers of LOST – oh wait, that’s right, this aired in the same time spot as LOST did. No wonder.

The Great: Heroes – I’ll be completely honest here. I hated this show at first. Had I written this post back in October, Heroes would have enjoyed the spot above all to itself. But thankfully, I watched more than just the first two episodes and soon fell in love with the whole show. We all grew up with X-Men comics and cartoons. But even outside of X-Men, we all have a favorite superhero and the one thing they each have in common is the fact that they have some sort of cool super power! But for most of us, we fell in love with a character who had already mastered their powers and who was using them against the forces of evil in the world. Never has there been a story where we actually get to follow these heroes transforming right before our eyes – until now. Few of the characters in Heroes have even come close to harnessing their powers, much less mastering them. We’re able to watch as they struggle to fit their newfound changes into their normal life. At the same time, we get to watch as a few of them discover that the dark side might be a more lucrative path. Will the good guys band together? Will they learn to mesh their powers together in order to stop the impending nuclear blast? Chances are they will, but it’s still fun as hell to watch.

So go fire up your favorite downloading program and catch a few episodes of these days, minus the craptacular one mentioned above. Hopefully you won’t be too disappointed.