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Updated 88 Days ago
The Hills Gets An... Unexpected St. Louis Following
Its Sunday night, do you know where your husband is? If he has been telling you for the last three weeks he has been watching the football game with the guys there is a chance that you have been misinformed. Not only because Sunday night football doesn't start until September 7th, but because he might be among a group of men in their late twenties and early thirties gathering together to watch the MTV reality series, The Hills. St. Louisan Scott Lawler (a regular attendee of a weekly Hills gathering) told me, "We don't necessarily have big parties for the episodes, just a group of us that get together and watch."
Every week Lawler and five of his friends gather at one or the other's house to eat, watch and talk about the drama that unfolds on the small screen between Speidi et.al. He explained, "We are all about 27-29 years old and all began watching the show separately but after talking a few times, we decided to get together and watch. This way we can debate and talk about why we hate that Spencer so much!!!" He added that one of the party goers is a big fan of Spencer, "...so we usually get into a heated argument every time."
As an outsider to the phenomenon that is The Hills I have a hard enough time figuring out how one group of people can have enough drama crazy to constitute three seasons of reality television (even The Real World changes characters once a year), but I am baffled by what the draw would be for a group of adult men. Lawler told me, "We are not always a men's only [group], sometimes there are girls that come by and watch too, but we usually get too into the show to where they don't have fun."
So, I can buy that it's fun, but so is watching old movies while gorging on a gallon of double-fudge ripple ice cream in your sweats. So what keeps them coming back every.single.week? "All of us have full time jobs and have been through a lot of the same things these kids are going through (minus the luxury cars and so forth), so it's easy to relate." Call me lost again, but I had no idea there was much to this group of kids outside of the luxury cars and red carpet events. Crap, I guess I am going to have to watch this show at least once now... thanks guys.
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
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It's not that I have a problem with Gays, cause I don't, but it's pretty obvious that Scott Lawler puts Tinkerbell to shame.
So Melody, if that's your real name, you may want to get some perspective from someone who is less of a sexual deviant.
Good Day.
Frankly even if my guess isn't right (I think it is though) I'm still 100% sure you are a complete idiot turd. (I would say more, but I know what our profanity filter allows)
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.