I meant to post this right after the bit about One Hundred Years of Solitude but then there was Fable and X-Men Legends... so there you are.

I found this old, way too long poem on a floppy a few weeks back and because of its title I thought it would make a nice segway from the book. I cannot explain the poem or defend it but I will only say this: it's hella long and was written all in one sitting and so this publishing is a celebration of proliferation when I was a Senior at Lane Tech.

3rd book in 11 months: One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's really really good. It was recommended to me by no less than 3 people who had never actually finished it. But they all praised it nontheless, and now I'm recommending it to you. Even if you don't finish the whole book you should give it a look, the style is memserising and the content brilliant.

Fox premiered “The Next Great Champ” tonight and I must say I was pretty impressed. Boxing lends itself to the sort of drama that reality TV shows need and this first episode delivered. At first I didn’t want to like the show, it being a quick, sour-grape tasting, response to Fox losing the bidding on “Contender”. “Contender” being produced by Rocky himself, along with the guy who created “Survivor” was a can’t miss with me. And it also being the first show with this idea you’d think they would have the best formula and they might. But since Fox launched “Next…” first I now have to wonder if I should invest myself in another boxing reality show. Also Fox secured trainers Tommy Brooks and Lou Duva for “Next…” which I hadn’t heard about before. We all knew Oscar was going to be the face of the show but for them to get two very high quality, championship caliber trainers for the show told me right in the first few minutes that some good thought went into the production. I especially liked the scene were Duva, Brooks and De La Hoya started to speak very frankly and harshly in an effort to rank the contestants.

Only three criticisms come to mind about the pilot. For a show about boxing they really don’t put the focus on the actual fight. There was a 4 round elimination bout that capped off the show. That’s only 15 minutes when you count the minute break in-between rounds. Take out the breaks or edit them down and you’ve got 13 minutes, for an hour long show that’s not a lot, it’s about a fourth of the program. Instead what we saw was a super edited montage of each round spaced out with shots of the ring card girl. But I guess this makes it more accessible to non-boxing fans. Secondly, it wasn’t clear to me if the #1 ranked boxer would have been eliminated if he lost. I knew he was fighting for $25k, that much was certain, but the idea that he might be eliminated was tossed around a bit and logic dictates that someone’s got to go every week, or at least after every fight. And lastly the clip for next week’s show insinuates that one of the boxer’s “significant others” will be trying to help his guy by cheating or deceiving, which if done well could be really entertaining but I can’t really see what on Earth this guy could possibly try that would actually have an impact on anything. From this vantage point he’s just around for moral support, it’s not like he’s judging the fight or anything.

*EDIT* I changed the title to two shows because I just remembered Arrested Development.