TV Show Review: Outsourced on NBC

From my blog post at TVGeekArmy.com:

(S0101) Based on the movie of the same title, this show is about a man named Todd whose company’s call center is outsourced to India. Todd is told he has to go train everyone at the call center, or else he’ll be fired. Here’s the “funny” twist — the company is called Mid American Novelties and sells things that mostly only Americans would understand, like cheese hats and a deer head that sings “Sweet Home Alabama.” Some will see this as a “why are we sending these jobs to India” show and others will see it as a “wow, these are just people who want to make money too” show, but I think both will be left completely unsatisfied with the results…

Click here to read the rest.

#India #nbc #outsourced #tvgeekarmy

Ancient Astronomy and Other Fine Careers

When I was little, I knew I wanted to be was a scientist or a mathematician. After going to college and finding out more about the fields I was interested in, I quickly realized that I didn’t actually want to be a modern scientist–I wanted to be an ancient scientist. I wanted to live in the times when being as philosopher and a mathematician and a scientist were not necessarily separate things (but like, you know, without all the racism and sexism and junk). When they were just starting to study geometry and algebra. When no one knew what the stars were or had only just figured out that the Earth circled the sun.

Nowadays to be a scientist you have to study very highly specialized things. You might spend your entire career studying a particular Drosophila gene (read: fruit flies, and yes, I have done work on a project involving Drosophila genes). Just as people complain that medicine has become too highly specialized, so too has science in general. There is just too much to study in each field to learn enough about to contribute your own studies. That’s part of what is I love about being a writer–I can study history one day, and astronomy the next. Just now I’ve been studying evolutionary biology and a bit of oceanography. Of course what I’ve learned is less than the equivalent of an introductory college course, or perhaps only high school level, but because it’s so broad it’s still enjoyable. I’ve never been one to enjoy minutia.

Okay, enough ramblings. If you could have any career from any time period that you wanted, what would you be?

#ramblings

10 Reasons Why Books are Better than TV

I blog a lot about books and a lot about TV. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good TV show as much (or maybe more) than the next girl, but here are 10 reasons why I love books much better.

1) If you tell people you read a lot of books, you sound smart. Tell them you watch a lot of TV and you…don’t.

2) When reading a book, you get to choose who to cast. Don’t like Robert Pattinson as Edward? Choose someone else! (Or you can cast him in all the parts if you like…)

3) No commercials! (Yet…)

4) Reading books out loud is fun! Especially with your child(ren).

5) Reading books helps you get the references on TV shows.

6) It’s more fun to sit at a coffee shop and read than to sit there and watch TV.

7) Re-reading old books is more fun than re-watching old TV shows.

8) Fun bookmarks!

9) E-readers! (I love my Kindle!)

10) Books smell better than TVs. At least mine do. (And my daughter says they taste better too. This is her favorite book to chew on.)

#reading #robertpattinson #tv #twilight