Geek vs Life

So I’m browsing around on TV.com, adding episodes for Haruka -Beyond the Stream of Time-, when I catch this little nugget at the top of my screen. I’ll spare you from reading it (although the comments are amusing), and give you a brief synopsis:

A 10-year-old girl in England who is reportedly 4′9″ and 6 stone (84 lbs) was called “fat” by Wii Fit (even though that term is not used) in their BMI test. Her parents are pissed, and now the spokesperson from the National Obesity Forum (remember, it would be England’s National forum) wants to ban the game from children.

If you want more on what’s been said and everything, you can go ahead and read it, but here’s the reason I’m posting this:

Something in that article is wrong.

I went up to the CDC’s website and found these nifty little calculators. The first one is for adults, the second is for children. So, I assumed that maybe the game doesn’t have a separate calculator for children. So I did it in the adult calculator. And the result was a BMI of 18.2, which is underweight (18.5 is normal). So I did it again with the children’s calculator. I assumed that the test was done today, on the girl’s 10th birthday (giving it an exact 10 years). This time, the result of 18.2 put the girl in the 69th percentile for her age/weight/gender. The 5th through the 85th percentiles are healthy weight. Which means that, by the information given, the girl is not overweight.

This leads us to four options:

1) The game was wrong. Out of all the options, I find this one the least likely. I mean, if there were glitches in the game, surely we’d've heard about it by now, wouldn’t we? No, if it were an error in the game, this wouldn’t be an isolated incident.

2) The parents are lying. Everyone thinks that their child is “perfect,” and no parent would want to admit to their child’s actual weight, if they are overweight. So this option is a bit more likely than the first.

3) The newspaper purposefully changed the information. According to my roommate, the Daily Mail isn’t exactly know for it’s accuracy in reporting. Using the calculator, I found out that that same girl, if she were 93 lbs instead of 84 lbs, would be in the “at risk of becoming overweight.” Perhaps the step-father’s statement had been “six and a half stone” instead of “only six stone” (93 lbs would be approx. 6.6 stone), and the paper took some “liberties” in their reporting. I think this one’s a little more likely than the last.

4) User error. The pad could’ve been broken and not weight her correctly. Maybe the girl had her backpack on still, or was holding something that made the sensor think she weighed more. I highly doubt the paper would’ve checked on that, and the parents were probably too offended to think of testing it again to check it. This is probably tied with #3 on most likely.

So there you have it. Should children be “banned” from playing a fitness game? Especially one that, I believe, does denote itself as “for entertainment purposes only”? I’ll let you make your own decision.

I must admit, I’m probably biased. I’ve been reading Douglas Coupland books for years now. I read Microserfs in three days while stranded in Mexico. I remember intentionally bring jPod with me the next time I went because I remember the fun I had the last time. Some books are just meant to pass around. For me, jPod was one of them.

jPod is about a group of coworkers that have been assigned together because of the first letter of their last name, “J”. The book focuses on their adventures working for a game developer somewhere in the Vancouver Canada area (if you’re think EA Games, you’re probably right.) The book takes a few left turns and bring in a great supporting cast. The weed-grow op owning mother, the cougar chasing brother and the “extra” actor father. There’s a trip to China. An encounter With Douglas Coupland himself and so much more.

Geeky as the characters may seem, they each have personalities, flaws and strengths that are not unfamiliar to me or my immediate surroundings. I know an Ethan, I know a Cowboy and I even know a Bree.

When last year I read that the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) was turning the book into a TV show, my gag reflex kicked in. People more often than not, take a great story which works well as a book, mess around with it and make it an asinine movie or TV show.  Why toy with something that was just fine in the first place?

To have a clear conscious,  I gave it a shot, and rock it certainly did. The show stays true enough to the book without it a being verbatim copy of it. The people are the same, some of the situations too. But you have additional content as well which just makes the mind meld of both the show and the book just that much better. Both entities can co-exist in the same universe without it being a “oh but the book was so much better” kind of situations. They accompany each other and do it WELL.

But life is not without its problems. With about 4 episodes left in the season, the CBC decided to pull the plug on the critically acclaimed show. Not that unusual when you consider what happened to other cult faves like Firefly, Twin Peaks, Buffy, Freaks and Geeks and countless others. It seems that for some reason, cult classic TV shows die young nowadays. Network bigwigs have a short fuse when it comes to giving a show a chance. Then again, airing a show aimed at a young adult demographic on Friday nights is not very intelligent, to say the least.

But there is a ray of hope at the end of this dark tunnel. After a grass roots campaign and multiple emails, postcards and Lego pieces were received at the CBC, they have agreed to rebroadcast the series in it’s entirety and retest the ratings, giving the show a second chance at life. Starting on Thursdays at 8pm, on June 19th, the series will air again on the CBC. The network can be viewed throughout Canadian markets and also in some northern American markets too (Seattle, Vermont…). Pending an improvement in ratings, the show just might return for a second season in the near future.

Death in television is never final, look at the resurrection of Family Guy and Jericho. If you watch it, they’ll make more.