Decadent Decade / Jim Breen's Dictionary

I saw an episode of America's Next Top Model yesterday. I was eating and moving through the living room at a time when the TV had been left on whatever channel it was on, and it caught my attention. Reality TV shows (especially contest/competition/elimination ones) are ridiculous. Granted, when I heard American Idol was going to be holding auditions in Alaska, I was all for trying out -- for all the stupidity of the backstage dramatizations, it IS still a unique opportunity. The fact that they're taking a unique opportunity like that and twisting it so that most of the "entertainment" comes from listening to the entrants talk about the other entrants and the like is just horrible. I'd rather watch reruns of star search; the entertainment there is good clean fun as you realize just how many celebrities got started there when they were six years old.

What really, truly bothers me about reality TV, though, is this: every decade has its hallmarks, a few things that people always think of when they look at it. The 80s had rubiks cubes and hair bands, the 60s had woodstock and 'Nam, the 90s had unbuttoned, plaid, flannel shirts. One of the defining features of this decade will be reality TV. Everyone in society should feel ashamed.

Jim Breen's online Japanese-English dictionary is awesome. It's a fact I've known for a while now. You can go to the world lookup and type a Japanese or English word in either romanji or Japanese characters and get a translation. Today I actually tried the text translation feature 'cause I was feeling lazy, and lo and behold -- unlike babelfish, it rocks. Babelfish tries to give you a translation of its own, generally outputting highly amusing gibberish that gives you a gist of the text. Other times it's just horribly wrong. Jim Breen's dictionary, though, doesn't actually translate the text. It recognizes and pulls out the words in the text and gives you their definitions as listed in the dictionary, leaving you to actually translate the senctence. I feel extremely silly for not using this feature before; I don't really want to know how much time I have wasted trying to look up idividual words when I wasn't exactly sure where one word ended and the next began.