The King

Recently Chelsee put me onto the show T.I's Road To Redemption, because OBVIOUSLY I wold love it. I LOVE T.I and I LOVE people in need of help and reform. .  . . and I not so secretly have a crush on reality TV even though I am sure that it is slowly rotting away at my brain from the inside out. Basically the whole idea of the show is T.I goes to people in gangs or into drugs and such and puts on an "intervention" style show to get these kids, essentially off the streets. The one that I watched yesterday followed a 19 year old guy from some slum in LA who had been a part of one of the chapters of the "Crips" since he was 13. He was pretty much directed there because his mom is married to one of the high ranking members of the gang. So T.I shows up and takes this kid to a mans house who was a part of a gang and then got shot in the back and it paralyzed him from the waist down, basically showing him the worst case scenario if he is in a gang and doesn't end up in jail or dead. THEN he takes him to the federal prison and has a little sit down chat with a former gang member who had been sent to jail and pretty much told the kid that if he were in jail he'd be raped and killed because he's small, his gang chapter is small and he's half black and half mexican so he wouldn't be able to choose a side if the yard came down to a race battle. That's pretty much the scare the shit out of the guy tactic, and then comes the sugar. The guy wanted to go back to school to become a chef, so T.I takes the guy to a high class LA restaurant that hasn't opened yet and gets the chance to cook with the chef. It was wonderful! When the show was ending they did the update as to what he was doing now and it said that he had enrolled in school and was working as a prep cook at an upscale downtown restaurant. Good for you! The next thing you see is him receiving two boxes from T.I that said that it was the first of many to come, incentive to keep him off the streets. The boxes were filled with all of the kitchen tools and hardware he would need to make pretty much anything. I think that the best part about this is that it's T.I's community service to keep HIM out of jail. WONDERFUL! At least the courts in the states are doing something positive with people in the spotlight that have done things that could be turned into examples. 

Survivorman

Have you seen Survivorman? I was watching it last night, this guy is NUTS! First of all he just gets dropped off into the wild in a place that he doesn't really know. Last night it was a swamp in Georgia, that would be so effing scary there was like 6 different types of poisonous snakes chillin around and alligators, he was sleeping 10 feet from the swamp in an open tree shelter thing. I wish I knew half the stuff that he knows. So he was there for a week and he has to catch all of his own food otherwise he doesn't eat and then on the last of the 7 days he has to find his way back to a meeting place where whomever picks him up. It's just him and his handy camcorder. He doesn't have a tent or anything. Seriously I can take some pretty intense wilderness but I couldn't do it all on my own. Survivorman is my new hero, plus he is sponsored by MEC which is pretty much the coolest thing ever. But I want to know how often he does this, because there's a lot of episodes and each one is like a week of his life. Does he just do it for a week, goes home and has a shower and a meal and then sets off to his next wilderness adventure? What a life!? Imagine getting payed to choose to be self-sufficient in a remote location anywhere in the world. Where would you go? What do you think would be the easiest place? What would you bring?