Another Dealbreaker icon moves on

It's true, it's damn true. Dealbreaker's Joe Wiesenthal is leavings the Opening Bell in order to get more sleep persue other ventures.

Dealbreaker: Opening Bell

Editor's Note: After some 2.5 years, this will be my last Opening Bell. One can only take so much sleep deprivation, after all. On the other hand, getting reminded and abused about typos never really gets old. Unfortunately I don't really have any advice or words of wisdom to leave you with, since I'm pretty tired.

As I said in the comments, Opening Bell has been an important part of my morning crawl for news for as long as hes been doing it, and I've always enjyed it, typos and all. Some mornings the typos were so egregious that I thought it was just part ofhis schtick.

Fans of business blogs should note that Mr. Weisenthal's excellent blog The Stalwart continues it's tradition of thoughtful bloggotage. Check it out.

*in his honor, and in tribute to 2.5 years of DB's Opening Bell, I left all the typos in this post uncorrected.

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More Commentary on Kid Nation

Last month I had some rude things to say about CBS' new reality show, Kid Nation:

Is Kid Nation the bottom of the barrel for Reality Television?

In the intervening time, there has been no small amount of anguished commentary on the Intar-Webs about this latest low-water mark. By far though, the most insightful article comes from humor site Something Awful.com.

Kid Nation Predictions *Warning! Spoilers*

It's no secret that reality television producers have been scraping the marrow of the barrel. They've been doing that since the first boiled horse anus passed between the glossed lips of a Playboy Playmate on Fear Factor. Now CBS television has reached a new and abyssal low with their latest offering.
Kid Nation, debuting this Wednesday, excretes 40 children between the ages of 8 and 15 into a "ghost town" in the middle of nowhere for a duration of 40 days. Together, mostly without adult supervision, they'll have to figure out how to live and rule over a suspiciously theme park like Wild West town stocked with jars of candy and tumbleweeds. According to the Wikipedia article on the taping of the show's first season, it also came fully stocked with unmarked bottles of bleach ready to quench children's thirst.
You have to give CBS a lot of credit for this ingenious idea, because no one is known for being more level-headed or less prone to violence than children. They're always rational and they never punch, hit, claw, bite, or spit on each other.

Read the whole thing, it's worth it.

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Is Kid Nation the bottom of the barrel for Reality Television?

I hope so, but I doubt it.

Yahoo!: Kids reality TV series filming draws complaint from participant's mom, kudos from others

CBS reality series in which youngsters run their own town
has prompted complaints from one of the children's parents, and may have skirted
New Mexico's child-protection laws.

Seven years ago, when Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? aired on Fox TV, I thought that I was watching Rock Bottom. I retrospect, I could not have been more wrong.

I still can not believe that there are so many people willing to humiliate themselves in order to be on TV.

Blogger Tracy Coenen at Sequence Inc has some excellent commentary on this:

Sequence Inc: “Kid Nation” controversy

It sounded interesting, but my mind immediately went to
safety issues. I wondered what parent in their right mind would send their young
child or teenager off to live with almost no supervision. There was supervision,
wasn’t there? Or were the cameras rolling while the adults weren’t allowed to
interfere? It’s not clear, and I suppose that’s part of the mystique that CBS is
hoping will draw in viewers.

As I commented on her blog, this is a breathtakingly obnoxious way to monetize "Lord of the Flies"

I really don't know what else to add to this, aside from figuratively shaking my head in disgust.

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