Step Right Up...

Apparently the circus sideshow act isn't dead, it's just on cable. Has anyone else been watching The Learning Channel lately? More like The Damn Freak Channel. A short list of what's been on:

• The Half Ton Man
• Dwarf Family
  
• The 750 Pound Man
• The Girl Who Turned to Stone
• The Woman With Half A Body
• The 200 Pound Tumor
• The 627lb Woman
• Face Eating Tumor
• Born Without A Face
• The World's Strongest Boy
• The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off
• Born With Two Heads
• Archie: The 84 Pound Baby
  

What's sick, other than some of these people, is that having watched all of them means more than twelve hours of my life was devoted to this crap. And I've watched a few of them twice. The thing is I always want them to be about two seconds long. Like we cut to the boy and he's like "Well... daggum it, one day ma skin just fell'd off." Because if your skin fell off, you'd talk like a toothless old southerner too. I also think they should play ironic music in the background instead of the stock "sympathetic orchestral piece" they use at the moment. For instance there happens to be a song by Boy Hits Car called "Man Without Skin." Here's a lyrical excerpt:

You're like a man without skin.
Everything that touches seems to hurt him .
And he says maybe I'm just a person.
But I'll be for you if you let me.

It sells itself really. And another thing, what's with the super imaginative names? For instance The 627lb Woman, happened to be about... that's right a woman who weighed 627 pounds. They didn't even bother smoothing out the numbers on that one. In the past they at least rounded to the nearest half ton. But you know women... so vein. "I won't have people thinking I weigh 630 pounds. I'm no FATASS!" Sure honey, lots of people mesasure their BMI in scientific notation.

The Woman With Half a Body? Yep. Half a body. She wasn't all there, of course as her husband notes not all of her has to be. It's a shame they couldn't have sculpted something for her out of the 200 pound tumor they took of that other chick. And what a great cameo Arnold Schwarzenegger could have made there. "IT'S NOT A TUMOR! You are just a fat non-girly girl! Let me introduce you to the 627 pound woman... your twin! BECAUSE YOU ARE FAAAT!" Obviously the Arnold in my head is pretty belligerent.

Another another thing. The Dwarf Family: why weren't they wrestlers? That's a pretty great schtick there. Can you imagine a whole family of dwarves just laying into some wrestler? All in different colored costumes so you can tell them apart. Norm MacDonald would probably explode with delight. (He references midgets and hookers alot, so if one of them was a hooker too that'd probably be good.)

In the end I've come to a conclusion. Two actually. First is that these people should probably get more money from TLC. Come on, they ain't going from town to town here, they've got to make all their cash in one shot. And secondly, they should form some kind of Sideshow Justice League, SJL, and fight crime with their combined powers of distraction. I can see the criminals now. "I was going to suicide bomb this place, but these people... I just could not look away. That one does not have a face! Swear to Allah! No face! I must have watched for an hour, the next thing I knew I was in cuffs. Damn you Sideshow Justice League!" That's like, if they caught a terrorist. It would vary from crime to crime, but I think that's just semantics.

Anyway my point is... way to kick ass TLC!

- Scott

P.S. The Girl Who Turned to Stone reminds me of the aptly named boneitis from Futurama.