“The Osbournes”
Ah, MTV. You and your fly-on-the-wall camera antics have done it again. I’ll admit I was skeptical of this at first. I don’t like Ozzy and have a severe disdain for family-centered programming. But somewhere along the line, something happened. Gone is the bird-head-biting Ozzy from the days of yore. What’s left is the shadow of the maniac he once was.
Like any father, Ozzy’s life is now overrun by his wife, two children and several un-housebroken dogs. Television has known no funnier moment than to see the former headbanger say, in his ever-mumbling British accent, “That animal just took a massive piss on my chair.”
Past episodes have included the family’s struggle to move into a new home (in which they search for places to hang the numerous crucifixes and sort through boxes labeled “kitchen,” “bathroom” and “dead things”) and Ozzy’s ongoing perplexity over the satellite cable. There’s more bleeped-out dialogue and, thanks to rival sibs Jack and Kelly, more bitch-slapping than your average episode of “Jerry Springer,” making the show the funniest thing to hit TV in a long, long time.
— AR
Flags of the World
Before I was schooled on the tyrannical ways of Muammar Khadafi, I knew Libya’s flag. It had to be around second grade during my class’ weekly trip to the musty library where I fell upon the colorful flag insert in the world atlas. There was Japan’s giant dot, Saudi Arabia’s dashing saber above scribbly writing (Arabic after later chatting with my dad), and of course, there was Libya, the anti-flag with its green on green motif. It occurred to me then and still remains true that flags are more than symbols of nationalism, but works of art (in some cases). At a recently discovered website (138.251.140.21/~josh/flags/intro.html) the proprietor has pushed my juvenile admiration of flags a bit further by cleverly grading each country with intriguing criteria that judge both aesthetics and symbolism, though weighted more toward the prior.
Rules you coup-d’etat-minded chaps should keep in mind when hiring graphic artists to design your streamer: 1. Do not write on your flag. 2. Do not write some stupid slogan on your flag. 3. If you must write a stupid slogan on your flag, do not do so in a living language. 4. Do not put a map of your country on your flag. 5. Do not use a tri-color unless you are in Europe.
And the survey says: Gambia all the way, in receiving the top billing with a color scheme that “represents the landscape of the nation.” Other winners include Japan’s “to the point” dot, Somalia’s gorgeous coupling of sea and star, and of course North Korea’s uniquely off-centered sphere.
There are some really really bad ones too. The Northern Mariana Islands were given an F for obviously relying on Print Shop
