Pirates and Americans and Space Vampires, Oh My!

Continuing with the (very short) tradition of frivolous Friday blog posts, I'm confessing to my bad tv habits. Thursday is my guilty pleasure television night, which at the moment consists of Bones, The Amazing Race, and Stargate: Atlantis.

For any anthropology or forensics people out there: Is the forensic anthropology in Bones totally realistic, kinda right but altered a little to fit tv timeslots and plot demands, well they throw in the jargon, or that's so wrong I'm going to sit here and point and laugh? My feeling is it is somewhere around the jargon part of the spectrum, but this isn't my field. Still, pirates! That makes up for just about any amount of unrealistic research practice.

The Amazing Race works well as a spectator sport. You need to pick a team early, and then barrack for them all the way through (or until they get eliminated, when you can get a new team but not one that is already taken). In the last series my team was the geek couple, but my sister picked the eventual winners (the hippies). This series, which is 'families' rather than pairs, I'm going for the couple with small children because the children aren't annoying (so far), with the New Orleans family as my back-up. I could possibly extend this into a drinking game - drink when the Americans talk loudly to non-English speaking people, drink when someone misreads a map, scull when your team exchanges exasperated looks in slow motion - but maybe Thursday night isn't the best time for the overconsumption of alcohol.

Stargate: Atlantis is the only one of the three that I can possibly justify from a 'research' perspective, as it may rate a mention in the rewritten version of my introduction as an example of the continued evolution of motifs of lost races (in this case, especially images of Atlantis) in science fiction. But really, it makes me happy in a bring-on-the-sf-cliches-and-enjoy-them-in-a-somewhat-reflexive-but-mostly-gratuitous-manner kind of way.