4 posts tagged “tv show”

Found via Jason Cutler’s Facebook, one of the funniest videos I have ever seen on YouTube. Sure, the cut of Helvetica is not quite right and the typesetting is a bit on the tight side compared to the original Magnum, PI opening, but it still shows amazing attention to detail. And the sequences that the creator chose are perfect.

I have to admit I did get stumped once when watching Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? when the question was on the different levels of sky, something I never learned about at school. And when I learned that the kids on the show swotted up prior, I lost interest in it: if I swotted, I could beat their sorry asses.
   But every now and then, I impress myself. I knew when Herbert Hoover was the US president, for example, and the contestant didn’t (nor did the kid). Occasionally it’s not hard to impress yourself, when you have contestants like these (found on Snowy’s blog):

For a moment I thought this was a real billboard saying someone was missing (see the bad typography), since it was the only one I saw. Turns out now it’s for a TV show.

Missing

A lot of people chide Americans for not knowing their history. When a contestant on Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? answers that Abraham Lincoln was FDR’s immediate predecessor, it’s easy to make that criticism. My belief is that we are all largely in the same boat, with a limited awareness of our history, especially in the west.
   Germans are admired for their intelligence and if you examine their economy, you can generalize that many of their exports are founded on the intellectual endeavours of the German people. But there is a similar lack of awareness, as I read in an old Wired article today:

In November, the first children born after the fall of the [Berlin] wall turned 18. Evidence suggests many of them have serious gaps in their knowledge of the past. In a survey of Berlin high school students, only half agreed that the GDR was a dictatorship. Two-thirds didn't know who built the Berlin Wall.

   The criticism of the US comes simply from the fact that more of its citizens are exposed to international scrutiny. Mount the same number of cameras or do the same number of surveys in other nations, and I think the same pattern emerges.
   It reminds us, however, that not only do we have to be aware of our history, we must protect it from revisionism, something that is plaguing countries such as the Republic of China.