So, the season premier of Survivor aired last night. I didn't watch it, as I'm already committed to the similarly-themed, yet much more realistic, Lost, which has never featured a flabby, naked middle-aged man, but does feature the somewhat more attractive Evangeline Lilly, who, in the vernacular of the immortal (unlike Tupac) Marshall Mathers, makes my pee-pee go doing-doing-doing. (Actually, it's never made that noise. In fact, if it did, I'd be somewhat concerned. Come to think of it, I don't think it's ever really made a noise by itself...squick-squick-squick, maybe, when involved in intimate activities, but that's certainly not a noise it made of its own volition). But I digress, as I tend to do. Just as I tend to do a lot of things, such as...dammit, there I go again. Fuck. At any rate, back to Survivor, I'm sure that many people, even people with IQs in the triple digits, tuned in to see what happened on the premier.

This season of Survivor garnered a lot of controversy before premiering because of the fact that this season, the teams are split into groups according to race. So, what does this mean to the series? I'm not sure, but I think it'll probably settle once and for all what race is the supreme master of the world. Which, of course, means that people are going to whine if the white race wins. They should've called the show The Amazing Race, if only there wasn't already a show called that.

I must admit, I'm totally unqualified to comment on Survivor. In fact, I've never even watched it, save for once the first season when I accidentally tuned into it for about seven minutes, thinking it was some sort of Gilligan's Island remake starring a bunch of damn hippies. Personally, I think it's a total sham. These people are not really "surviving". If I get stranded on a deserted island, I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to have a camera crew following me around with medical personnel standing by in case I fall down a cliff. And I'm pretty sure that there wouldn't be an Animal Planet-reject host offering me "immunities", "rewards" and "One Million Dollars".

I think CBS should strive to make this show more realistic. Take everyone out onto an island, let a hurricane hit it, then don't interfere while the survivors kill each other until there's a last man standing, who would then receive the over-size novelty check for "One Million Dollars". And I know that right now you're probably saying "Rifleman, are you crazy? Don't you know how hard it would be to ensure that the island the contestants are on is hit by a hurricane?" I can think of two ways to solve this problem. One would be to have the contestants waiting to be loaded onto a plane and rushed to an island in the path of an approaching hurricane. The other, more practical way, would be to simply call up President Bush and get him to use his Weather Dominator, which SSW previously discussed in our interview with Flint here.

But that's not going to happen, because CBS's top brass are a bunch of lawsuit-fearing pussies. As for this season, I'm hoping that Asians win, mainly so that perhaps the Chinese will go easy on the US when they take over the rest of the world.

This week, the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world (aka "The Good Guys"), commemorated the fourth anniversary of the first anniversary of the attacks on the US on 9/11/2001. Coincidentally, this was on the same day as the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. A lot has changed in the world since then, and I'd like to take a few moments to remark on some of the greater changes since then.

- There are now approximately 10000% more movie and television roles open to actors of Arabic descent than there were prior to 9/11. This is a good thing, as our movies and television writers and directors were largely without a nationality or race to be a collective enemy since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. For most of the decade before 9/11, if you wanted an evil group of people to be portrayed as enemies on film, you either had to set your film before 1991 (Hunt for Red October), use aliens (Independence Day) or make up some story about a group of Germans calling themselves "Nazis" killing Jews in "The Holocaust" (Schindler's List). But not anymore...anytime you need a collective antagonist now, you can rely on the Arabs (World Trade Center, Alias, 24, United 93). In fact, is it not possible that Al Qaeda orchestrated these attacks on America not because they hate our values or our freedom or our habit of stationing troops in the holy land of Muhammad, but rather because they were tired of not having enough acting roles? I'm not saying this is true, but it is a valid point.

- Before 9/11, the captain on any airline flight would announce "You're now free to move about the cabin" (which, as anyone who's ever flown knows, was actually announced as "You're...uh...now free to...uh...move about the...uh...cabin). Now, anyone moving freely about the cabin is liable to be tackled, stomped upon and ultimately killed with a crushing blow to the head with a fire extinguisher (but only if the airline hasn't removed the fire extinguishers from the plane as some sort of cost-cutting measure). The captain might as well say "You're now free to kill any slightly suspicious-looking person moving about the cabin. Especially if they are Arab-looking".

- Thanks to Osama and his buddies, average Americans now have a hatred of brown people 7% greater than we did before 9/11. And while a slight level of mistrust might be justified, as it was a group of brown people that did decide it'd be a good idea to hijack some airliners and fly them into buildings, we Americans, always trying to outdo each other, have taken it to extremes. Suddenly, every Arab, Persian, Indian and dark-skinned Mexican is a potential terrorist. Which is silly, because only 67% of them are.

- Since 9/11, everytime I fly anywhere, I get to wait in a long security line while strangers rummage through my suitcase and subject me to mutation-causing radiation. The security checkpoint--which used to be, let's face it, a formality--is now a bottlenecked zone of sweaty strangers subjecting us to their foot odor while they struggle to pull their shoes back on after being anally-probed by a TSA-approved security guard who's wearing a uniform that's about three sizes too small. In some airports, they are even testing a new x-ray system that will scan your entire body, rendering you in digital naked gloriousness on a monitor for the security guards to snigger at your genitals. I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of complete stranger sniggering at my genitalia--that's an activity I only reserve for my closest friends and family. I do, however, get a smug satisfaction out of the fact that all these x-rays and scanners are emitting so much radiation that the day-to-day exposure to it encountered by the security guards will eventually render their own genitals whithered and useless.