Like any year in television, 2005 wasn’t all that, but certainly no worse than 2004 or (I dare guess) 2006.

The best moment in television this year was Kanye West’s absurd “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” ad lib. Telethons are awfully boring affairs, but West managed to breathe some life into a genre that’s beyond stale. Perhaps somebody can do the same for awards shows next year?

The second best moment was provided by another African-American, The Apprentice contestant Randal who stunned the audience by nixing Donald Trump’s lame and ham-handed attempt at creating a feelgood Everybody Wins moment at the end of The Apprentice 4’s final episode. After being the good teamplayer and solid leader for weeks, Randal decided enough was enough and hogged the winner’s crown for himself. As he should have.

I’m not sure what would be television’s worst moment in 2005, but I’m sure it had something to do with My Name Is Earl, The Office, or the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

As we have come to expect, HBO delivered the best scripted drama, this time in the form of Rome, an outstanding piece of work (no wonder Tony Soprano had such mommy issues, his ancestors did, too, apparently).

Chris Rock’s Everybody Hates Chris was the year’s funniest new show, but its formula ran out of steam before the end of the season. I gave How I met Your Mom more chances than it deserved and it blew every one of them. I really don’t care if Colbert doesn’t issue another Report.

MTV coupled the basic lure of The Real World with the excess lifestyle of vanity shows like The Anna Nicole Smith Show and The Osbournes in Laguna Beach, the talky reality show set in super-affluent Laguna Beach in California. It was almost like Beverly Hills 90210 but with better views and none of “issues” (date rape! gun ownership! homophobia!) that plauged the network show.

All in all, not that bad, I suppose.

I just saw Heather Mitts play sideline reporter for ESPN’s Miami - North Carolina telecast. She sounded like a super-earnest college freshman as she told a pointless anecdote about one of the team’s watching the Chicago Bears loss to the Miami Dolphins in 1985, their only one that season. Zzzzz. It was borderline embarrassing to watch. She certainly did not change my opinion of sideline reporters. But at least she is pretty, and that’s generally good enough to be on a television.

Peter King’s eulogy to Wellington Mara is oddly disappointing. At least I had expected more from such a prominent writer about such a great man. King’s piece is nice but flat, light on both history and anecdotes. Outright mindboggling is this sentence towards the end of the article:

“If the NFL were being created today, the business would be ruthless.”

Um, yeah, but my take-home from working a little bit with NFL mid-level managers a few years ago confirms what I had guessed from reading about television contract negotiations, stadium deals, collective bargaining agreements, league expansion and much more: the NFL is a ruthless business. I’m not saying it could have been otherwise, but it certainly isn’t otherwise.

Update: King’s Monday Morning Quarterback column has a very, very strong segment on Mara.

WNBA MVP Sheryl Swoopes has announed that she is a lesbian, nonshocking the entire sports world. Meanwhile, Fisher DeBerry, the head coach for Air Force Academy’s football - the strongest of the three Academy teams - has lamented his team’s lack of black players, since black players tend to be a bit faster than than kids of other races (put more precisely: the very fastest sprinters are far more likely to be black than non-black). Swoopes will of course be celebrated for her courage, while the raking of DeBerry has only begun.

ESPN’s columnist Pat Forde serves up the very worst of sports columnism in condemning DeBerry’s remarks:

[I]t’s not like DeBerry was inventing something here — or even saying something many coaches don’t talk about in private. But given the decades of wrongly stereotyping black athletes as physically superior and mentally inferior — run fast, think slow — the coach was walking into a minefield. He was creeping toward Jimmy “The Greek” territory — and every coach knows that you don’t go there. Certainly not without great care.

I’m all for a more open dialog about race in America, and especially in sports. But sweeping generalizations about fast black players are going to get a coach in trouble.

Let’s see if I get this right: Forde is “all for a more open dialog about race in America” but he can’t even deal with the fact that the fastest players in football are overwhelmingly black? Nor is that fact something coaches only talk about in private: They put it on open display every single NFL Draft. You have heard about the NFL Draft, Forde? It’s shown on ESPN every year. You see the same thing in the starting lineups of every team in the National Football League: The speed guys (receivers, cornerbacks, safeties, runningback) are almost always black. Forde, DeBarry isn’t talking about some wild-eyed stereotype, he’s talking about reality, he is - ultimately - talking about his won - lost record, the one that is slipping, the one that you think should convince him to retire.

Michael Wilbon at Washington Post is a fundamentally non-moronic sports columnist and he writes the following in his October 29 entry:

But our fear of any discussion involving race should not eliminate common-sense observations. Since Jason Sehorn retired from the NFL a season or so ago, how many white starting cornerbacks are there in the NFL? The answer, as far as I can find, is zero. And even if I missed one or two, fact is that a position based largely on speed is 99 percent black in the NFL. That’s not the same as making a presumption about the intelligence or character of cornerbacks, black or white. It’s fact, jack. DeBerry didn’t offer any cultural or empirical evidence about cornerbacks; he just said he would like faster ones, and as the NFL demonstrates, the fastest ones are black. That isn’t even debatable.

Forde, you should read and learn.

ESPN’s ombudsman Solomon George (yes, ESPN has an ombudsman) made this grotesque statement after commenting on some brouhaha involving a play-by-play man and a female sideline reporter:

My take: Play-by-play commentators need to take sideline reporters — many of whom are women — more seriously. So does ESPN, which needs to give these reporters more airtime and more serious issues to address.

Take sideline reporters more seriously? Is he on crack? Or dating a sideline reporter? Or hoping to date a sideline reporter? Or overly committed to the company diversity policy? Sideline reporters are almost invariably the absolute worst aspect of any game coverage. Unless they are really hot babes they bring nothing to the table except for pointless drivel and useless questions (”Coach, what are you going to tell your team at halftime?”). They take up time that could be used for replays, or crowd shots of hot babes.

At no point and under no circumstances should sideline reporters be taken more seriously, be given more airtime or more serious issues to address.

Besides that buffo of an error, George’s column is good, to the point, fair, and informative.

I recently referred to WNBA as the NHL of women’s sports, thus declaring my disdain for both NHL and WNBA in one fell swoop. Well, perhaps not so much disdain as pity. Both leagues have TV ratings that suck (and ought to suck the life out of both organizations), albeit at different levels (yes, WNBA’s ratings are that bad. But the NHL at least used to be fun, with free-flowing breakaway play and lots of scoring. Over the last several years the NHL has become a major snooze fest, a carnival of holding, hooking, high sticking and zone trapping. I didn’t miss the NHL one bit when it went on its year-long labor-conflict hiatus. Heck, I hadn’t even missed NHL when it was around. Like most people, I couldn’t care less about the league.

But the NHL is back and its return has provided a publicity opportunity for feminist activist Martha Burk, whom you probably don’t remember from her bizarre crusade against Augusta National (a crusade that was whole-heartedly and over-the-top supported by New York Times, the newspaper that used to employ Jayson Blair). Burk has been upset by a new ad for the league, a commercial that shows an NHL player in a locker room with a vague but unmistakable Eastern feel to it. The ad features an ice hockey player who is dressed by a lightly dressed babe, a set up that made me think of warriors in ancient Greece and I figure that was the effect the league was looking for).

Unsurprisingly, Burk finds the ad “offensive on several levels,” which is pretty much how I feel about her.

She goes on, according to Toronto Star:

“The woman is dressed provocatively and when she asks the player if he’s ready, it’s a double-entendre in my view,” Burk said in an interview.

Yes, it probably is, but so what? A double-entendre is not the same thing as “let’s have non-stop sex ’til we die from dehydration!”

For all I know, the NHL may have hired Burk to create a stir. The league needs publicity in a real bad way, and with Burka, I’m sorry, Burk, running her mouth, offering quote-jobs in return for publicity, the league gets it, plus its fans get a cause to rally around. Realistically, though, Burk’s taken on this task all on her own, solicited by nobody but her ego.

You can watch the commercial at NHL’s website. WARNING:It’s only slightly more entertaining than an NHL game.

Our grand children probably wont be drooling over the prospect of playing Grand Theft Auto 46: Salem, South Dakota (controversial content: the top-less co-eds cow-tipping easter egg and the unfortunate “Kill the Norwegians! Kill the Mennonites!” line), so, what games will they be fawning over? Heck, what games will we be fawning over a couple of years down the road? And, not insignificantly, who will finance the development of the next wave of video games?

That last question is one that Mercury News journalist Dean Takahashi asks in his speech I Don’t Get It: Why Is It So *&@#$% Hard To Finance Video Games?” at the Video Game Investor Conference, a “cutting edge event [that] will bring together a visionary group of industry leaders from the video game and investment communities to share perspectives on growing investment opportunities, current strategic trends and up-to-the-minute challenges facing the multiplayer internet-based video game and the wireless/mobile game industry today.”

As suggested by the title of his speech, Takahashi wonders “[w]hy is there such a mismatch between the capital needs of the video game industry and the investment that is going into it?”

Takahashi outlines the economic fundamentals of the gaming industry (volume, profitability etc) and its steady march towards consolidation and bigger development budgets. Nothing wrong with either one, but Takahashi notes how skewed investments are in the industry:

Video games are an attractive market. But there seems to be a lot of fear about investing in them. Venture capitalists have shied away from them, in part because investments in early stage development companies carry huge risks. It’s a hit or miss business, and venture capitalists have no particular skill at picking those hits…

According to Takahashi, there are two areas where VCs are willing to invest: Online gaming and cell phone games. Neither is a bad market, but both combined are just a small niche of the over all video game market.

It doesn’t take much money to get started in this business so companies such as PlayFirst and LimeLife are taking small $5 million rounds. If the games cost only $100,000 to develop, then that money can go a long way. A lot of developers who are refugees from the console wars are taking lessons from this and moving from console games to cell phone games. The economic model is friendlier.

But if you look at the numbers here, something is wrong. There’s an $18 billion market for console software, but nobody wants to invest in it, unless they’re buying EA stock at some very high multiples. EA is so big at around $18 billion market valuation that a lot of the Hollywood studios can’t afford to buy it. There’s a $1 billion cell phone market, and a $2 billion online games market, and the investors are climbing over each other to invest in those markets.

I don’t get it. So why is this the case?

It gets even more interesting from there.

Read it all

In lieu of financing, some developers have to self-finance, as noted in this Wired story from March this year:

In getting Alien Hominid released for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube, The Behemoth did something virtually unheard of in the industry: It fully developed its game before bringing it to publishers.

Originally, the team had developed the game for web downloading, and won over millions of enthusiastic players. But the developers wanted their game to be available for console play. This was no cheap task.

“We self-funded through mortgaging our houses,” said producer John Baez, while another team member sold his house to raise money.

Along the way, The Behemoth spent what its team members call a typical PS2 game-development budget — they wouldn’t be specific — all the while knowing they might end up getting nowhere.

“We were going to take it to the end,” said Baez. “We took a pretty much finished game in to publishers, and said this is the game we want to do.”

But in the end, it worked. The group struck deals with publisher O-3, which distributed Alien Hominid in the United States, and with another publisher for European distribution.

A less interesting and quite windy examination in The Economist of the social role and impact of video games.

Popular low-cost Internet name registrar Go Daddy created a bit of a stir earlier this year when one of its commercials was pulled from the Super Bowl telecast. The commercial featured “Go Daddy Girl” Candice Michelle as a witness at some fictional congressional-type hearing. The offending gag was that Michelle kept having “wardrobe malfunctions” that threatened to bare her ample chest. It was apparently all a bit too much for NFL’s very image conscious operatives and the second of the two ads didn’t make it on air during the telecast, which probably didn’t hurt Go Daddy too much since the incident resulted in a lot of publicity for the company.

Go Daddy has now released eight new commercials, two of which feature Michelle (”Car Wash” and “Art Class”), while the other six are described as testimonials (you don’t think I wasted my time watching those, do you?)

Go Daddy’s president and founder Bob Parsons is a man who knows what he’s doing:

I know that both new “Go Daddy Girl” commercials, as every commercial featuring The Go Daddy Girl, will spark controversy. The vast majority of our current and prospective customers will like the commercials. There will also be a contingent who will dislike the “Go Daddy Girl” commercials, and once again accuse me of being inappropriate and “using sex to sell.”

How one can watch the “Go Daddy Girl” commercials and not accuse Parsons of using sex is beyond me, but, the thing is, he uses sex to get attention, and low prices and good customer service to actually sell.

The new Michelle ads are, in my opinion, appropriately mild, certainly milder than the car-wash-themed mock commercial for the Catholic Church that “The Simpsons” used in one of its Super Bowl episodes (You may recall its tagline: “The Catholic Church - We’ve made a few…changes”).

You can watch Go Daddy’s commercials here.

I’m not a real big fan of Jay Mohr, but, hey, when the guy’s right, he’s right, and Mohr couldn’t have been more right about the woeful WNBA, the NHL of women’s sports: It’s totally pointless and nobody cares.

Do you know anybody who has ever watched a game? Have you ever spoken about the WNBA at work? At home? Anywhere? The NBA and the networks that have aired the sport have tried in vain for far too long to prop up this league as entertainment. If you are entertained by 7-foot, 225-pound women from Poland who have less basketball skills than the worst NBA D-Leaguer then I guess you are one of the few people who cares.

What if you were a genius in a jock world? Or just a smart, hard working man in a jock world? What if all the chicks assumed you’re a nerdy smartie of little social value because of your skin color? Maybe then you would become one of the Bitter Asian Men, “the site made by bitter asian men, for bitter asian men… and also for all of you out there who might be curious as to why we, as asian men, are so bitter.”

The site is boiling with reasoned anger about the place and role of Asian men in contemporary America. The site details several examples of how Asian men are hated on, so to speak, but I found the piece on Asian parents most interesting. Here’s an excerpt:

The first factor is the pressure. Oh, the pressure. If you think you know what parental pressure is, and you’re not Asian, you are wrong. Asian kids are consistently expected to do more and do better than their peers, and hell, even kids twice their age. Therefore, almost all Asian children 1) will play an instrument (a dignified classical instrument at that, and certainly not electric guitar) 2) will study math at an accelerated pace - I was doing calculus in middle school 3) will participate in as many extracurricular activities as possible (all academic though, never sports) and 4) take standardized tests early and as many times as necessary to achieve a perfect score.

Asian parents instill the notion of ‘you must succeed’ (by which they mean academic success, not social success) so early that by the time they reach high school, Asian kids are walking zombies reciting scientific facts like gospel. This problem is only exacerbated by the Asian trait (so common I swear it must be genetic) to compare children. Inevitably in any Asian child’s life, they will hear a line similar to “Why aren’t you taking calculus yet? Jim Wong’s son is a year younger than you and he is!”, or “You only got a 1550 on the SAT? Sally Lee’s daughter got a 1590!” or “What, you mean you’re not valedictorian!?” Though all Asian kids are driven by their parents to be geniuses, of course, only a few of them are actually capable of being geniuses. Those that aren’t live constantly under the vague impression that their parents wish their kids were better, while those who ARE, of course, live constantly under the vague impression that their parents believe they COULD be doing better.

Obviously such academic pressure leaves no time for a social life. Dating isn’t mentioned in the Asian household, and girls only come up as a topic of discussion if they’re horrifically smart and if your parents want to compare you to them. If dating is allowed, of course, the girlfriend must be Asian and must be smart (though not as smart as you, of course, as that would hurt the Family Honor). The end result is that Asian kids are disproportionately Book Smart over Street Smart. They can explain to you the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus but never grasp the fundamental rules of dating.

This complaint sounds like a Turbo-powered version of the ye olde Baby Boomers criticism of and eventual revolt against the bourgeois values that were so widespread in Europe and America until they were basically swept away by the Counter Culture in the 1960’s (more so in Europe than in America).

I really, really hope that Bitter Asian Men isn’t a prelude to a similar development among Asian Americans, because, damnit, we can’t afford to go through that kind of personal hedonism and societal waste again.

BAM’s feelings are understandble, though. Popular culture really does shaft Asian men, who rarely land movie roles as anything other than martial arts experts - not even as geeks, since Hollywood for some reason likes to cast African-Americans as computer experts. While Asians have made inroads in professional baseball in America, baseball itself has lost a good deal of its standing as America’s Sport, a role now carried by the National Football League, where, I believe, Dat Nguyen is the only Asian.

To add insult to injury, golf ace and self-described Cablanasian Tiger Woods is marketed exclusively as black in America.

Basically, America doesn’t allot much social status to areas which Asian men quite frankly dominate (such as computers) while it obsesses over those where Asian men do poorly (like football). Yet, as Bitter Asian Men points out, Asian females are coveted by whites. Why wouldn’t that piss you off if you were an Asian-American male? I know several interracial couples where the woman is Asian, but not a single one where the male is Asian (excluding a gay couple, for fairly obvious reasons).

(It should be noted that “Asian” in this context refers to Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese et al, and not to Indians, who, in American parlance, are lumped in with Asians. Interracial dating/coupling seems to be far less of a concern to Indians, and also far less common among them).

Part of the problem is that America is simply stuck in a Black and White worldview. Whites are the norm, Blacks are interesting and everybody else can essentially go screw. Or more to the point: There are people who are neither black nor white? How strange. The critically acclaimed, and in my opinion overrated, movie Crash spends a lot of energy on the Black/White divide, but treats Latinos and Asians as some kind of sideshow, even though Los Angeles, where the movie takes place, is 60% Asian and Latino. Considering that Asians and Latinos make up a rapidly growing proportion of America’s population, it could be in Mainstream America’s interest to pay them a little bit more attention.

From a national perspective, Asian American men present America with an intriguing dilemma: Should they assimilate into the less productive, more violent mainstream, or should they maintain their strenghts at the risk of further alienation?