Johnny-Come-Latelys

First of all, Wimbledon announced this week that it will finally start paying male and female champions equal prize money. HELLOOOO? Wimbledon hasn't been paying equal prize money?! You've got to be kidding me. Welcome to the 21st century, England. Supposedly the other tennis tournaments dispensed with the discrimintation years ago. Surprise, surprise... Wimbledon's just coming around. As my sister says, leave it to a bunch of old, white, elitists to be the last in line. ::sigh:: Oh well, at least they fixed it now.

Secondly, Nielsen Media Ratings announced this week that it will start putting ratings boxes in college dorms, college apartments, and frat and sorority houses. Thank you, Nielsen!!! I've said for years that it's completely absurd that college students aren't factored into TV ratings at all. I realize that college kids watch the least TV out of any age group, but knowing what TV they DO watch is really important!!! Not only do they make up the majority of the ever-sought-after 18-24 demographic... there are plenty of shows targeted specifically to college kids, including almost all the programming on the CW. After running a pilot group, Nielsen discovered that including college kids in the ratings increased Grey's Anatomy's numbers by 53% and America's Next Top Model's numbers by a substantial percentage I can't remember right now... not to mention its severe impact on televised sporting events! This is the stuff advertisers should want to know... and that's the reason Nielsen ratings exist in the first place! To set advertising rates. (And especially to capture the 18-24 market.) I don't understand why they haven't done this before, but I'm really glad they're finally doing it now.

So this blog entry is a shout-out to two Johnny-Come-Latelys. It's pretty disappointing you weren't on board sooner... but welcome, Wimbledon and Nielsen

Redemption

I just briefly wanted to say that I retract my criticism of Ashton Kutcher and the other producers of Beauty and the Geek. They DID come through in the end, and now the world is right again. So clearly they read my blog. ;-) Just kidding.

But seriously, they changed the format of the final elimination to REALLY measure the contestants' transformations. Instead of asking them lame questions about each other to determine which team wins (like they did in the other seasons), the producers surprised the contestants by bringing back all of their fellow competitors to VOTE to determine which team made the greatest transformation. Needless to say, evil CeCe got hers this week. And she deserved every one of those people telling her she's evil, because she is. In her final interview, she said: "Any of those girls who think they could learn something from some geeky guy... well they're as stupid as they look." Gee CeCe, that's one of your greatest hits, along with "These guys are big loser nerds," and "I only came here for the money."

So thank you, producers, for recognizing and subsequently rectifying the problem -- and for dissuading these types of competitors from tainting the show in the future. And yay for the brunettes for getting a chance to do unto CeCe as she did unto them.