Realities

As much as I’d like to live more of my life online and away from the television set, I still find myself drawn back to the same old habit of channel surfing and Internet surfing at the same time. Old habits die hard, I guess. Or maybe things are just getting more interesting online and on TV again.

I skipped American Idol, which is down to its Top 5, and The Amazing Race this season, but I invested some time on a delayed telecast of Season 3 of The Biggest Loser on The Hallmark Channel. Funny, but by the time I found out who had won, he had already gone on Oprah, three months earlier at that, to confess that he had gained most of the weight back. No matter. I had the benefit of looking up the rest of the contestants online to see if they’d kept the weight off—and most didn’t, but the weight gains ranged from around 9 percent to over 30 percent.

Lately, however, I’ve been discovering new fascinations. In terms of reality television, I may have gotten rid of my Fear Factor addiction, but I’ve come to love its sister game show Wipeout on AXN Asia (Thursdays, 9pm), where players have to go through a series of crazy stunts, a la Takeshi’s Castle sans the cute. While I still think this show doesn’t hold a candle to any of the Japanese game shows I’ve seen, I like the Fear Factor touch! I also enjoy hearing the players mouth off—something we don’t get to see much on the Japanese shows.

I also came across a pretty creepy show on Discovery Channel called Lost Tapes. The premise is that the show features found videos of people who’d gone missing after traveling to uncharted areas and encountering unknown creatures. I’ve caught two episodes so far, and they both interspersed clips from the “lost tape” and clips on the supposed creature/undocumented species partially caught on tape or at least responsible for the person being missing. Think Blairwitch Project. It’s something like that.

What is initially spine-tingling is that the program doesn’t say the footage isn’t exactly the actual footage of an actual lost tape. The program operates on the question, “What could have happened?” on one or more mysterious occurrences then forms a story around it from the perspective of a video camera purportedly used for documentation purposes and found by investigators. If you’re not a stickler for facts, and you like “What if…?” scenarios, this show is for you. Just don’t take it too seriously—even if it’s on the Discovery Channel.

Online, I’m still hooked on microblogging, but I’ve discovered that, aside from international celebrities, local celebrities are on Twitter too. Personally, Oprah, weird-typing-typical-of-older-people and all, is still the biggest hook (she did increase Twitter traffic by 40 percent), but I also got a kick out of discovering the following local celebrities are Twittering away: @alexderossi, @camilleprats, @gandanghari, @Macherieamour (Cherie Gil), @bigsis222 (Lea Salonga), @jimparedes, @mondgutierrez (Richard’s twin!).

There’s a long list online of other local celebrities bitten by the microblogging bug (Google is your friend), and you can probably find more by harvesting their list of followers. In fact, that’s how I find old friends through my real friends’ social networking sites, and I could do that, but I don’t have a lot of time.

Life is still waiting to be lived away from TV and online.

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