When “The Real World” debuted twenty years ago, it was about seven reasonably intelligent strangers trying to make their way in New York City. Now the show is about people too stupid to recognize a terrible, exploitative contract. The Village Voice obtained the standard contract for cast members, and some of the stipulations are absolutely brazen in their subhuman treatment of cast members. Some choice examples:

• You may die, lose limbs, and suffer nervous breakdowns. (Stipulation 1)
• You grant the Producer blanket rights to your life story. (49)
• The Producer can do pretty much anything they want with your life story, including misrepresent it. (49)
• You may be humiliated and explicitly portrayed “in a false light.” (12)
• You can’t change your physical appearance during filming, without the Producer’s express permission. (26)
• The production crew can show up at your personal house at any time to film and/or to take anything they want, as long as they return the objects once production has ended. (20a)
• The Producer holds the authorship and copyright to every photograph, email, website, sound or video recording, documented performance created in relation to the program, on every medium imaginable. (8)
• You’re obligated to participate in a Reunion Special for up to five years after the show ends, you’ll be paid $2500 for your involvement, and the Producer only has to give you 14 days notice. (50c) [VV via the 20s]

And yet none of that is as bad as this combination:

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I’m warning you: this clip from “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” will corrode your brain cells and diminish your IQ. In it, contestant Jennifer selects the category “Second Grade Measurements” and is given this problem to solve:

If Jacob stands on Spencer’s shoulders, they are two and a half yards high. How many feet is that?

Now, I’m pretty bad with math. I had to close one eye and furrow my brow, but within about five seconds of reading that problem I settled on “seven and a half feet.” However, as I watched Jennifer attempt to figure out this problem, I started second-guessing myself.

Her initial hunch is “a football field,” which shook up my established notion of how tall two boys should be. Then, as she struggles to remember conversion rates (she thinks there are 352 feet in a yard), I started thinking, “Wait, ARE there only three feet in a yard? Or is it six?” Then she talks about the college chemistry class she took at TCC in Texas  (Tarrant County College), and I went through my math again, thinking that maybe I needed Avogadro’s number somewhere in the equation (HOW MANY MOLES ARE IN JACOB AND SPENCER?). Finally, Jennifer takes a peek at her fifth-grade counterpart, a girl who has determined that the answer is 78 feet. Now, 78 feet is a preposterously stupid answer, even for a child in the American school system. Just absolutely moronic. But it’s still closer to the actual answer than Jennifer could possibly get, so she says “78 feet” and does NOT get the $2000 she could have gotten for not being an imbecile.

[via Reddit and BuzzFeed]

There was a period of time in America where Paris Hilton garnered attention and headlines everywhere she went, thanks to the twin assault of a hit reality show (‘The Simple Life”) and getting stuffed in nightvision. But we’ve moved on as a nation since then, and “The World According to Paris,” Hilton’s new reality show, debuted to awful numbers (even for Oxygen) — something for which Paris blames the network.

“Paris is furious that the show didn’t premiere at the time it was supposed to,” an insider tells me when speaking about ‘The World According to Paris.’ “She worked her tail off doing promotion and publicity for the show and then because of a technical mistake, the show aired at a completely different time in a lot of markets.”

The show aired last Wednesday at 10 p.m. like it was supposed to. Also, in Paris’s world, “working your tail off” means “getting butt-hurt and quitting.”

Her busy week of promotion included a rough interview on ‘The View,’ where Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg grilled the socialite on the frivolity of her show. She reportedly flipped out backstage and got into a shouting match with a producer. In short, it was a disaster and she canceled events because of it.

What an awesome person; I’m so glad she has her own television show. Ordinarily, I’d consider this story too frivolous and pointless to cover — and that’s saying something, since I led with video of a dog biting balloons today — but I saw this GIF interpretation of what happens on Paris’s show, and I wanted to share it:

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One of my favorite pastimes is making fun of “Glee,” so of course this screencap from Reddit makes for good fodder. Hey Mr. Schuester, go back to teaching jazz hands! Thankfully, humorless commenter begedinnikola was able to provide context:

He just wrote what he was speaking. It’s not a math/problem, equation.

Um, that’s not a grammar/sentence, punctuation.

If you actually listened to what he was saying instead of just looking for something to bash, you would know math wasn’t a problem there. It was clearly stated that they need to 5000$ and that they need to sell 20000 candies at .25$ each to make that.

Oh, so “20,000 x .25 = 5000.” I’m sure it would have been impossible to write that on the board without overhauling the script and the scene’s blocking. My bad, “Glee” fans. Sorry for making fun of your show.

Anyway, let’s go ahead and have some fun with Mr. Schuester in front of the whiteboard. Use the blank board here to make your own.

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Last night, Special Olympics CEO Tim Shriver was Stephen Colbert’s guest on “The Colbert Report,” and the entire interview (see video below) was centered on Shriver’s campaign to get people to stop using the word “retarded” to describe people with mental disabilities. It’s actually a fun interview to watch — Shriver makes a well-reasoned argument, and Colbert’s final word on the subject is a line drive out of the park, a metaphor I chose on account of the baseball season starting today.

However, as I watched this, I couldn’t help but think, “Who actually calls disabled people ‘retarded’ any more?” I certainly respect Shriver’s desires as far as Special Olympians are considered, but I’ll goddamned if I’m going to stop calling Jeff Zucker a retard.

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