The Salading
by Chris Hardwick on March 16, 2009
Dancing With the Woz
I had never seen an episode of “Dancing With the Stars” before a week ago, mainly because I have a sensitive gag reflex. I ONLY watched because of Steve Wozniak and I was unsarcastically hoping that he would do a Segway grind across the judges table. Instead, he used his feet on the floor. And he friggin’ WENT FOR IT. Was he the greatest dancer? No. But I really enjoyed watching him. He’s just a big bearded pile of hugs. I was happy. That is, until douchey judge Bruno Tonioli, who had apparently taken some kind of mouth-laxative shortly before, opened it to make words.
“It was like watching a Teletubby going mad in a gay pride parade.” Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Tonioli has actually seen that happen, I’ve worked in television long enough to know that this wasn’t improvised. He’d obviously been holding onto that gem and just clenching his fists together the whole show, waiting to blurt it out so that people would say, “Aha! How clever you are, Sir!” But it wasn’t clever. “Clever” would presuppose some kind of creative mechanism at play. What happened was, they had a fat guy on their show and they called him fat. End of story. As challenging as punching a baby. Would it have been acceptable to call Heather Mills a decorative pogo stick?
As the admin of your nerdist group: ping the nerd-army in the nerdist facebook group to upload pictures of spam (and maybe even Spam™) and do some spam-tagging. Call it a contest and 881 socially awkward netizens could push the Spamtagging agenda ~viraly.
nice salad offer although it kinda went all over the place.
Great articles, I’ve really been enjoying the nerd salads.
This is exactly why we should all go vote for the Woz. This is a dumb show and I think it’d be cool if everyone voted for him a couple thousand times to make him win.
I’m glad I’m not the only one leery of the new shuffle. I was looking to get one for my morning jog (since my nano is a little…well I guess bulky isn’t the right term, but its more then I need. My nano should be dedicated to my long commutes, not my long jogs), but when the sales rep showed me the new shuffle promotional ad I kind of backed away. In a slight hurry.
I admit to being a S.U. whore on facebook. But to be fair I can’t get twitter to WORK for me the way its supposed to. It won’t send tweets to my phone and I can only update through the website. Facebook at least has the benefit of my far flung Irish cousins who sit several years behind on such trends and think the S.U. is a great way to brag about their latest drinking games.
I am however tired of being ‘super-poked’. That accounts for 95% of the mail I receive from facebook.
OK, I admit, I didn’t watch it. But I love your review of the show. THe judge said whaaa? Oh no he dih-int! Anyway, the judge is a douchebag, who will be forgotten long after the Woz goes down in tech history.
I didn’t see the “dance” live, but I did see a recap of it when he was torn up a bit and that guy Tonioli is a real douche bag. I totally agree with you that he didn’t say that off the cuff. He was waiting on that all show long, or possibly all week long. The Woz was pretty terrible but he didn’t deserve that much ridicule. I nearly pissed myself laughing when you pointed out that he was in Elton Johns “I’m still standing” video. Holy shit that guy should talk for ripping on the tech nerds creator. I’m glad that Wozniak can’t dance, otherwise I wouldn’t be typing on this super cool MacBookPro right now.
As far as that POS shuffle debacle goes, my friend bought one and you are totally correct sir, it’s a laugh, and not a good laugh. The “only” thing good about it is that it’s 4GB rather than the 2GB from previous versions, but the functions on it are NOT good. Apple is now forcing everyone to use their crappy headphones and that really sucks. It’s not that their buds sound bad, the don’t sound good either, I just don’t like it when a company tells me what kind of sound quality I get. I’m going to check the box “fail” and NOT buy this version of the Shuffle.
Michael
I was all confused as to why people were commenting on the new Shuffle, then I followed the arrow to the Escapist. You covered a lot of ground with this post. I LOVE watching the Woz dance, and how uncomfortable the doomed never to be a winner Karina is when he begins his geekspeak. I myself love the nerds in my life. Great post.
jajaja very funny post!!!
Here’s a great random Irish Saint Patricks Day joke.
Two married friends are out drinking…
One says to the other: “I can never sneak into the house after I’ve been drinking. I’ve tried everything. I turn the headlights off before I go up the drive. I shut off the engine and coast into the garage. I take my shoes off and creep upstairs. I get undressed in the bathroom. I do everything, but then my wife still wakes up and yells at me for staying out late.”
His friend replies: “Do what I do. I screech into the driveway, slam the front door, storm up the steps, throw my shoes into the closet, jump into bed, slap my wife’s bottom and say, “How about a blow job?” She always pretends she’s asleep.”
I thought it was funny, have a great day. It’s hard to love St. Patricks Day when you don’t drink, but hell with it, I still love it.
Michael
The buttons on the headphones is not that surprising. Apple has strange designers who see to feel that form is greater than function. When I started school, there were a bunch of Mac Labs that had big-ole desktop towers (not sure of the model. Probably T-Mac 5.6 or whatever) and of course most people are more familiar with Windows PC’s than Macs. And yet some of our classes took place in the Mac labs.
I remember it was my 2nd or 3rd term and I was taking Video Editing in the Mac lab, and for many it was our first time in front of a Mac. I had used them before, but it was years back. We needed to burn something onto a disc at one point and half the class couldn’t figure out how to open the CD-Rom drive. The face of the tower was completely smooth. No buttons except for power and reset. You couldn’t pry the drive open. I remembered that in prior versions of Macs you had to go the dropdown menu to Open the drive, or that you could drag your disc to the trash and it would eject it. But there was no option in the dropdown menu and no disc to trash. It was infuriating and finally someone raised their hand and meekly asked “How do you open the CD-Rom Drive!?”. A wave of relief passed over the other half of the class that felt that it was entirely too stupid a question to ask. The teacher, a rabid Mac enthusiast, sighed and pointed out that on the keyboard there was a button on the top right that would open and close the drive.
ON THE KEYBOARD! I had to chuckle and remembered why I never dealt with Macs. They’re so ridiculous. It seems like they care more about being sleek and stylish than having common sense functionality. For those towers, you had to have a very specific keyboard. If it breaks you can’t just plug in some cheap replacement. You HAVE to get Apple’s version with the CD-Rom button, otherwise your drive is utterly useless. Same thing for that Shuffle. Don’t like the headphones that came with it? Happen to have a pair of quality headphones that you paid over $100 for? Too bad you can’t change songs unless you use the Apple earbuds! It’s completely ridiculous, and it’s stuff like this that keeps me from every buying anything Apple. They’re so anti-3rd Party components that there’s never been a point for me to bother with them.
Heck, I don’t even know if it this is 100% true, but I heard from my roommate that they’re now putting little microchips in the headphones for iPods that are required for the player to feed sound to them. If you use headphones that aren’t Apple authorized and don’t have said chip in them, then your player is useless. I know! It sounds completely absurd and unbelievable. And yet it completely falls in line with the way Apple markets their products. So I wouldn’t be too surprised if it were true.
I’m not a Mac hater. I can use em, albeit not as fluently as a Windows PC. I’ve just never seen the point. Why be tied entirely to one company, when you can shop around?
Whoa! Sorry for the long comment. I don’t realize how much I type sometimes
What happened was, they had a fat guy on their show and they called him fat. End of story.
To be fair, you just called the gay dude gay. Oh snap!
…and I can’t believe I kind of just defended a Dancing With The Stars judge. I feel dirty now.
Sha-SNAP!
Actually, calling someone gay isn’t an insult. Calling someone fat can never really sound like a compliment.
Kra-KROW (Poland)
Actually, both fat and gay are non-insulting characteristics that are used as insults by douchebags everywhere. Tonioli’s line was dumb, as you said, because it was easy and obviously fed to him. Likewise, your dismissal of his comment basically boiled down to, “anyway, he’s a big homo.”
And the thing that’s driving me nuts is that there are SO MANY OTHER THINGS you could say about him that would be funnier and more clever, but you went for the obvious joke, totally negating your earlier point. Awwww shit!
Hmmmm…not sure that what I meant…in any case, your powers of dissection are impressive.
I loved how during the second week of voting, woz actually told people not to “cheat”. I think we all know what that means. No fun!
1. I DVR Dancing With The Stars every week, then watch only a couple of the dances for the very reason you mentioned. There’s always one or two non-dancers who go for broke and just have unselfconscious fun. Their joy is contagious, and they usually last quite a while because they’re so much fun to watch.
2. Fat prejudice is the one prejudice still acceptable in this country. It’s so pervasive, most people don’t even notice it. Kudos for nailing that judge.
3. When you run your billion-dollar social networking phenomenon, can I have a job?
You mean to tell me you didn’t even tune in out of curiosity when Carolla was on the show? I’m sorry, I thought you guys were better friends than that. How dare you, good sir.