4 • The Daily Beacon
Friday, August 19, 2011
OPINIONS
Better than
Reality TV
‘Blood’ best reserved for vampires Robbie O’Daniel Recruitment Editor In the beginning, the goofy premise of “what if vampires really existed, and a lot of them were all congregated in Louisiana?” felt more like an interesting twist to telling the stories of these people in Louisiana. “True Blood” did not feel like “that vampire show.” It felt like “that show with the weirdos in Louisiana that also has vampires thrown in as a gimmick.” The time spent on the vampires felt like “True Blood” knew it needed to earn its quirkiness by fleshing out characters like Vampire Bill and Sheriff Eric. The exploration into vampire blood actually being addictive to humans felt somewhat plausible as an intriguing trope further into vampire culture. As we dove more into vampire culture, even more great characters resulted. This was in no small part to the excellent acting of many of the supporting characters. Sure, Anna Paquin has never had to flex her acting muscles much in “True Blood,” which might be due to her character being written as vacillating between mooning over a potential love interest to feeling the need to put herself in harm’s way again and again for no particular reason. And Tara is one of the most annoying characters in television, one that I have been begging for the writers to kill since episode one. She comes off as even more ignorant than Sookie because her character so blindly has no direction in life that Tara often goes headlong into conflict with little to no motivation at all. She, then, changes course throughout for no reason either. But Stephen Moyer as Vampire Bill has held the show together at times. He is like the Professor X of “True Blood,” and his mission of having vampires and humans live in harmony together is as compelling here as it is with mutants and humans in the X-Men universe. Alexander Skarsgard has always been the show’s highlight as Eric. He strikes that cool anti-hero vibe, providing a fascinating foil to Bill’s propriety. And the show unearthed interesting characters like the vampire queen of Louisiana (Evan Rachel
Wood) and the vampire king of Mississippi (Denis O’Hare). As silly as it is to introduce a vampire monarchy, Wood’s performance proves that she should only be allowed to play blood-thirsty villains. Wood seemed to revel in the role on-screen with her energy. O’Hare, likewise, came off as a more prim and proper Bill but with much more insidious tendencies. Having those two characters around always presented the possibility of a wild card, so it sucks that they are dead. The show is at its best when it focuses on the people in Louisiana and fleshes out the vampires involved to where they become essentially just people too. But now “True Blood” is fixated on introducing more and more supernatural elements for the sheer shock of it all. The fact that the current season began with a scene or two about the fact that Sookie is now a fairy — and then forgot about fairies completely for the rest of the season thus far — smacks of poor writing. The supposed transformation of Sookie’s brother, Jason, into a were-panther (rather than werewolf, for some reason) was abruptly dropped and not even explained away well. And the current season-long arc around witches and mediums and revenge from the past is just dull because the viewer knows little about the main character involved. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. If that was not enough, “True Blood” has gone out of its way to neuter its greatest strength. Eric got amnesia this season — as if this show did not feel like a soap opera already — thus negating all the edge of Eric’s character so far, all for the singular purpose of allowing fanboys to see Sookie and Eric make love. Sookie, who the viewer is supposed to be rooting for, just comes off as disturbed for preferring a man when he is brain damaged than when he is his true self. Other budding romances, like Jessica and Jason, have even less story to back them up. They are just physical attractions from an artificial connection through vampire blood. How romantic. No, the show is at its best with episodes like when the viewer learned about Bill’s past life or Eric’s maker, Godric. Those were stories with emotion and stakes. “True Blood” would do best to go back to that and forget about witches, mediums, were-panthers, fairies, shifters and so on. And for the love of God, don’t introduce another one next season. — Robby O’Daniel is a graduate student in communications. He can be reached at rodaniel@utk.edu.
SCRAMBLED EGGS • Alex Cline
THE GREAT MASH-UP • Liz Newnam
Columns of The Daily Beacon are reflections of the individual columnist, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Beacon or its editorial staff.
Genetically suitable foods extend life Vie w fr om t h e B o t to m by
Wiley Robinson Think about this for a moment: Until recently, there has been nothing resembling a remote scientific consensus on something as fundamental as what people should eat to maintain ideal health. Maddeningly contradictory studies and diets asserting what’s healthy and what isn’t have been around ever since the media realized people cannot help but lend an ear to the promise of losing a few easy pounds — much less to the promise of an objective nutritional truth. Remember on TV, when it seemed like every possible food and drink was attributed with either some lingering disease or obscure nutritional piece of the immortality puzzle, often both? The subject of nutrition has been a constant debate for as long as we’ve had options about what to eat, a miraculous reality that is itself a climax of technological and medical advancement as well as unprecedented bloodshed and destruction since the Agricultural Revolution around 10,000 years ago. Might I also humbly remind you that, as Americans, we find ourselves in the middle of this climax, the eye of the most delicious storm in human history. Perhaps we rage more than anyone about diet because our options, and therefore our margin of error, are the highest. Our rates of obesity, bad mental health and chronic disease seem to correlate. The latter two are now indisputably linked to the predominant American diet of (in order of harmfulness) sugar, salt, cereal grains and saturated fat — all of which are staples of “processed” food, which really means tampered with to save money, full of cheap filler that appeals to our foolish senses and helps shelf life when supply lines are as long as they are. But these staples are equally as prevalent in high quality food considered whole, natural and healthy. Food being fresh and untampered with is important, but how our bodies genetically adapted over the course of our existence happens to be the most dependable dietary reference available. The two most popular and dramatically effective diets that fall under the new dietary paradigm of what we genetically adapted to eat since we were mobile on two feet are The Fat Flush Diet, written by Ann Gittleman, Ph.D., and The Paleo Diet, by Loren Cordain, Ph.D. They’ve both enjoyed huge media endorsements. Achieving sales patterns unheard of in the diet book
publishing industry, as Cordain himself put it, they started off slow and picked up instead of the inevitable flair and fade of fad diets, which are hard to stick with for long either because the research is too extreme and arbitrary or the food itself is branded and proprietary, a la L.A. Weight Loss. The premise for both plans is largely the same: a huge focus on lean, animal-based protein, un-starchy vegetables (starchy vegetables including potatoes, bananas and peas) and fruits; the elimination or near elimination of cereal grains in all forms (bread, cereal, pasta, rice), refined and whole grain alike, because at the end of the day all grains metabolize as sugar and are stored away in places that only intense exercise — an unexaggerated luxury in our time — or diet can burn away; and a general avoidance of dairy, salt and salt containing food, legumes and fatty meats. The universal theme tying these diets together is an avoidance of foods introduced during the Neolithic, when agriculture and animal domestication disseminated globally. The human body is simply not optimized to digest grains, which require tools to digest from their raw forms. Milk from any mammal is not really meant to be consumed passed infancy. Both of these assertions are supported by the fact that there remain many groups of peoples in the world, usually those culturally unexposed to the kind of agriculture we have, that have not developed the physiological tolerances (genetic band-aids) to these new arrivals. Peoples without access to salt in their diet lack heart disease across the board. Two out of every three people are overweight in America, weight being only one obvious indicator of the ravages being done by the foods we aren’t adapted to consume. Commercialism, our loudest and most monied authority on nutrition, maintains itself, as it must, with deception; yet the government, noble mandator of the nutrition fact, has backed the wrong science for decades, ever advocating its most subsidized crops, corn and grain. MyPlate.com replacing the Food Pyramid of Subsidization is a step in the right direction, though it still emphasizes grains and clings to bad science — like linking cholesterol to heart disease. In reality, veins are inflamed by acidic diets high in salt that the body clogs with cholesterol in an exaggerated attempt at repair. Our very culture makes eating right like swimming against a tide, but these diets make it doable. Earlier this summer I lost 25 pounds and melted the beer and pasta “freshman 15” off my waist, a tire a few years in the making, in less than two weeks. — Wiley Robinson is an undecided junior. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.
Relevancy essential in humanities Chao s Theory by
Sarah Russell
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A good friend of mine has worked as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a year and a half now. I recently met a few of his coworkers, and in the ensuing small talk I was asked my major. Those of you in the humanities will immediately be able to envision the facial expressions on this group of engineers, racking their brains for a polite response. One finally volunteered that he “never much liked history in high school.” The conversation then turned to computer modeling and radiation prevention, and I realized that once again I had found myself in a position of irrelevance. We humanities majors the world around, particularly literature and history majors, often find ourselves defending the importance of our chosen majors. No, we did not choose to study dead people in an effort to avoid a “difficult” major in college. We firmly believe that in a fast-changing world of new technologies and scientific discoveries, the only constant is the human condition — you can’t possibly understand where we are heading without understanding where we came from. But dealing in the sciences involves a currency of facts and figures, while the humanities’ economic system handles ideas, and reconciling these two currencies is like mixing oil and water. (See? Sometimes humanities majors know science-y things too.) Honestly, it’s sometimes no wonder why people find the humanities dry and pretentious. In an Aug. 5 article in The New York Times about modern literature, the author, Terrence Rafferty, chose as his focal point the advent of zombie literature, writing that “the fleshchompers advance, are repelled, advance again and are repelled again, more or less ad infinitum.” I am not convinced the author himself did not fall victim to these flesh-chomping machines, given the liveliness of his prose. Even in a popularly read publication like the Times, discussions of literature, music or history are written like a peer-reviewed journal article. That, or they follow a form that many authors of popular history
have perfected: writing humorous satires of sweeping eras of history or of renowned writers like Shakespeare. So writing history in any kind of popular forum comes down to a choice of dry and dusty prose or an absolute mockery of the great men and women of the past. If this is the only way to get the public interested in the humanities, then we surely are doomed, because no one has any reason to take us seriously. And this is where, I believe, we in the humanities need to take a page from our peers in science and engineering. No scientist would dream of writing a humorous piece about mononucleotides, nor would she believe that the only way to share her findings was through scholarly academic journals with big words and obscure graphs. I was having this discussion with a friend of mine in microbiology, who told me that all good scientists believe it is their duty to share their findings in an accessible way, because what good is research if it is made so obscure that only a handful can appreciate the advances the research provides? So, my fellow humanities majors, I would propose a paradigm shift in our approach to our research. If we are to prove ourselves relevant in today’s educational systems and in society at large, we can no longer consent to be part of the exclusive clubs that many historians, philosophers and literary scholars have created for themselves. Nor can we reduce our findings to tidbits of humorous trivia accompanied by cartoons of a headless Marie Antoinette. We all believe in our appointed cause — to study how people think, why they did the things they did, how that has changed and where it’s taking us. Few would disagree that in a world this uncertain, such a view is unfounded or unnecessary. Where scholars in the humanities have traditionally fallen short is in applying this view to their findings, and then publishing it in an accessible way. Writing one of a million pieces about “The Great Gatsby” is only of interest if it is clear that there is a new way of reading the book that gives new insight on the human condition. I am not saying it is an easy task to translate literary criticism or historical perspective into layman’s terms. It isn’t. But it is becoming increasingly important to try. We need to swallow our pride and follow the scientists’ example, or we risk becoming not only irrelevant but altogether nonexistent. — Sarah Russell is a junior in history. She can be reached at srusse22@utk.edu.