Rant & Link Dump

Quick detour before I get back to the movie reviews. A TV heads-up and some links:

'I SURVIVED...'

I wanted tell everybody (anybody?) out there about a great show on TV which nobody knows about. You won't see many ads for 'I Survived...'. And since it's on BIO (Channel 266 on DirecTv), you probably don't stumble onto it much. But it's good, real good. It features people who have survived unbelievably dire circumstances -- being shot in the head, or stabbed in the throat, stranded in shark-infested waters for hours on end, trapped under ice, arm caught in farm equipment, huge metal hook stuck in your throat (that was a good one). People have been kidnapped, raped, left for dead, and yet everyone on the show found some way to stay alive.

In this week's episode, there was a guy who had a female stalker pay someone to shoot him -- six times -- and after he somehow recovered, she poisoned him -- three times -- and still, there he was to tell his story to the cameras. Almost without fail, it is an amazing, inspiring hour of television. There is on occasion, however, a story so gruesome, that the payoff doesn't really make it worth the ride. Some are stories where most people involved died, limbs are sometimes lost, and in one truly unbelievable story, a woman was splashed in the face with battery acid -- on two separate occasions -- and was badly disfigured.

Even in the worst cases, though, it shows the unthinkable limits humans can go through to survive. The unbelievable resiliency of the human spirit. It's really quite a show.

LINKS

--Some dude in Jersey named his kid "Adolf Hitler" and wonders why he can't get a birthday cake with his name on it.

--John Woo is ahead of his time, but only by 11 years: The nation's first face transplant just happened.

--This story seems depressing -- because it is -- but there's one redeeming element that saves it for me: This little girl wrote a letter to Santa, and got exactly what she wanted this Christmas. In this fucked-up world we live in, sometimes you have to look pretty hard for a silver lining.

--Ever wonder what it takes to work for the CIA? Here's a primer.