The Office and Counterpoint

I think that what The Office has been doing recently is kind of interesting. The show started off with the typical office humor point of view where there's a normal person or two, the boss is incompetent and each coworker has their own bit of insanity. Pretty much the Dilbert formula. I'm not saying there wasn't anything original about The Office (well, ok there was nothing original about the American version), but the perspective was pretty standard. Over the past couple of seasons as Jim has taken on more responsibilities we've seen hints about the transition to come. And now that Jim is a co-manager they've really flipped the situation around. We learn that while Michael is a weirdo and somewhat incompetent, some of the insanity is on purpose and Jim who is expected to know better is actually needing direction from Michael.

Nothing that extraordinary, but if office fans are the Dilbert crowd who go through their day convinced they know better than their boss then the show is in some way now making fun of their fans (or at least correcting them). Seems like a bit of a strange move. Luckily Michael still comes off insane so it is not a complete reversal of views.

This sentence is acting as a transition between topics.

When news and talk shows have Jenny McCarthy on to talk about vaccines I scream "WTF IS GOING ON? WHO'S BEEN HANDING OUT THE STUPID PILLS?". Oh, that's not where I was going with that. Let's try again. When news and talk shows have Jenny McCarthy on to talk about vaccines it might seem appropriate to have another guest who is a vaccine specialist at the CDC or some university explain why vaccines are actually good and talk about the extensive studies that show they don't cause autism.

However, that's not the counterpoint that should follow her appearance. The guest after Jenny McCarthy should be a vaccine specialist at the CDC or some university and should be wearing a sport coat with chalk dust on it over a t-shirt with Maxwell's equations, too loose pants and pure white tennis shoes, also acceptable is a free t-shirt from a career fair plus jeans that were purchased in the early 80s and birkenstocks with white socks, bonus points for taped glasses and extra bonus points for soldered glasses. The scientist should be there to provide a counterpoint to Jenny McCarthy's choice of outfit.

If McCarthy cries foul because she went to the "university of google", the scientist can explain that he went to the university library and read all the books on fashion he could find, most of which happen to be from previous centuries, but hey he read a bunch of stuff so he's just as qualified to discuss fashion as she is to discuss vaccines.

The weird thing is I don't even watch the shows that have McCarthy on, but it generates so much buzz that I hear about it on NPR and news websites. Hm, I just admitted that I'm complaining about interviews I've never even seen. Well I guess I should go ahead and dedicate this post to everyone attending the "university of google" where poorly informed rants like this post count as reading assignments. Remember that anytime a claim from this blog is cited it can be proceed by, "My source, who has a graduate degree from MIT, says...".