A banner ad on geocaching.com caught my eye recently.  Clicking on it took me to The Globetrotter’s LogBook website.  There are actually six different logbooks to choose from:

• Countries of the World
• Flight Register (for when you’ve filled up the Flights section of Countries of the World)
• Vaccination Register (for people who apparently have way too many vaccinations!)
• Trip Notebook (for when you’ve filled up the Notes section of the Countries of the World)
• Surprise (This is a buy-on-faith type of book, I guess.)
• Flanders’ Six Divine Cities ("118 top sights-to-see-before-you-die, carefully selected by the Flemish Tourist Office")

Basically, they’re small hard cover notebooks, similar to Moleskine notebooks, that have pre-printed pages tailored for travellers.  The Countries of the World book has box for each of the "current 193 countries (and their 58 overseas dependencies)" with some key facts about the country and then a space for a passport/customs/immigration stamp or anything else you can stamp it with.  There are other sections in this book for the flights you’ve taken (including room for the pilot’s signature), the vaccinations you may have had, places to make more detailed notes about your trips and experiences, and other stuff.  It seems like they’re also individually numbered because you can register them online and gain access to more content.

I might just have to pick one up before my trip to Greece.

There’s a tv show hosted by Danny Bonaduce called I’m Exploiting My Kid I Know My Kid’s A Star, which basically sees ten kids competing to be the “next star”. I’m not really sure what they’re going to be a star of, but apparently whatever it is, the winner will be the star of it.

I’ve watched maybe ten or fifteen minutes worth of this show and seen a few trailers for it. In one of the trailers, Raquel aka Rocky (who looks like a wannabe Vegas stripper), the mother of a girl named Hayley, is obsessed with winning that she says the following, complete with finger wagging…

“We have to win this competition. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME????”

And you could just see Hayley tensing up and wanting to run.

The show has segments with the parents speaking to the camera and the parents trash talk each other and and each other’s kids. And there’s an elimination process which means one kid a week gets sent home each show after Danny Bonaduce cuts them to pieces all for the sake of a few rating points.

Seriously, this isn’t entertainment. It’s exploitation.

I can’t believe that all of these poor kids really want to take part in this. More likely they can’t tell their parents for fear of retribution.

They just showed Austin and his dad after they were just eliminated. The father was saying “I’m so sorry, Austin. So Sorry. It’s a bunch of bull****.” as they walked back to their room to get their stuff and the son cut him off saying “Stop. Would you stop talking.”

In the talking-to-the-camera bit in the car, Austin said “I made my friends. I did my performance. That’s all I could do. There’s nothing I could change.”

Hopefully, Hayley will win this stupid show because I fear her mom will tell her for the rest of her life that she’s a failure if she doesn’t. But, if she does win and becomes the “next star” then her mom’s going to control her every waking moment (and probably many of her non-waking moments, too). She loses either way. Poor Hayley.

While googling for some information about this show, I found an article by David Hinckley in the NY Daily News who feels the same way I do about this show.

Oh, and I’m not linking to the show’s website because I don’t want to do anything to support it. May its ratings be less than a test pattern on a local cable channel at 2am.