The April slump is often the worst part of the year. It’s the homestretch of the school year and many are starting to feel it. This is a time filled with tension and stress for many as work on final projects kicks off and graduation finally starts to become a reality for seniors. Sometimes, the best way to relieve stress is to just tear something down. It can be almost therapeutic to unleash all of your rage and tension onto a worthy, or unworthy, target.
Everyone has something that they just can’t stand, despite the fact that this thing has become a beloved by the masses. Sometimes, it’s even questionable how these things even made it into the nexus of popular culture in the first place. So, in the spirit of relieving stress, the staff of The Mustang has selected the most overrated things they can think of and explain why they feel that why.
Marissa Aguirre, Staff Reporter- The Chainsmokers
Anna Daggett, External Affairs Contributor- Keurigs
Keurigs are the most overrated coffee makers in America.
You wake up every morning and you want some fresh coffee, I get it. I am that person too; however, I am also the type of person who thinks that with a little cream and sugar almost any coffee can be transformed. My questions then; why buy such an expensive machine? Take for example, the one I have at my house. It is a smaller version that only makes one cup of coffee at a time. ONE CUP!!! How am I supposed to function off of one sole cup of coffee? Not to mention every time I put in one of those of little coffee packs I literally watch two of my hard earned dollars turn into water and caffeine. It is truly an outrage.
Whatever happened to being okay using the $10.00 coffee pot from Wal-Mart? You know, the one that lets you make 12 cups of heave in a single go, or buying a huge bag of coffee to get us poor college students through long hours and early mornings? Less may be more, but it isn’t in this case. I would much rather have 12 cups of Folgers coffee waiting for me to just pour into my cup than spend $300 on a machine that can only give me one cup at a time. Just saying.
Laura Tafoya, Student Wellness Contributor- Reality Television
There is one thing on TV that is completely overrated, and I think everyone should stop watching. Reality TV has been a climbing genre in the past few years, but there’s nothing real about it! In order for a TV show to keep running they must have great ratings, and people need to watch, so they do everything they can to ensure that viewers are always watching. Most of what individuals do in reality TV shows are things that no one else would ever do do in real life! I mean can you really find love while dating thirty different women, and does any man date thirty different women at the same time?! I highly doubt that!
Don’t get me wrong, there are some reality shows that serve some intellectual purpose and humor, but many are just exaggerations of the real world. We spend way too much time trying to act like the people in reality TV shows, when in all actuality, the people we see on there is nothing like the person they really are! Or, the people on these shows are no role models to imitate in our own lives, as many of them are a hot mess!
Reality TV shows us what the producers want us to see, not what an individual in the showing is actually like. So the next time you watch a reality TV show, don’t! Change the channel, click! There are more shows out there that are not considered reality and yet, are still more real than the reality shows. There are so many great TV shows to watch, and none of them include reality TV shows!
C.P. Thompson, Sports Reporter- The New York Knicks
Expectations were high for the New York Knicks upon entering their 2016-17 NBA season. They had legendary NBA coach Phil Jackson as their President, and former Chicago Bulls all-stars Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah were joining veteran Knick player Carmelo Anthony on the roster. Surely, this would be their season for a come back.
Phil Jackson’s career as a coach has phenomenal numbers. During his 20 years of coaching, nine with the Chicago Bulls and 11 for the Los Angeles Lakers, Jackson is an 11-time champion. He has a winning percentage of .704, earned a total of 1,155 wins, and never once missed the playoffs. Carmelo Anthony, joined the Knicks in 2010, coming off a very successful career with the Denver Nuggets. After making it to the playoffs in his first three seasons with the team, Anthony has yet to make the playoffs since. Throughout his career, he averages 24 points per game and 6.6 rebounds per game.
The Knicks were hoping to fix this by adding a pair of players from the Chicago Bulls. The Kicks acquired Derrick Rose in a trade from the Bulls in 2016. Unfortunately, injury has led Rose to some limitations; in the playoffs of 2012, Rose tore his ACL forcing him to miss the following season. Just a few games into the 2013 season, Rose tore his right meniscus causing him to miss the remainder of the season. Despite injuries, Rose has put up 19 points per game so far in his career. Joakim Noah, who was Rose’s teammate for eight years, became a free agent after the 2015-2016 season and signed four-year, $72 million contract to the Kicks. Noah, in his career, nearly averages a double-double, scoring nine points per game and nine rebounds per game.was drafted in 2007 by the Bulls.
However, despite these changes, the Knicks are currently sitting at the bottom of half of the Eastern Conference ( at 12th place) with a 28-46 record. The 71-year old franchise has not actually won a title since 1973. In the past 16 season they have made the playoffs four times, and have not had a winning record since 2014. To turn these numbers around, the New York Knicks hired one of the best coaches in the NBA. Also, by obtaining Rose and Noah into the Anthony mix, this gave the fans something to hope for in the 2016-2017. However, as the season comes to a close, the fans of the New York Knicks must put this year behind them and look forward to another season.
Eric Lowe, Editor- The Big Bang Theory
This was a toss up between three shows that I really feel have far more acclaim than they deserve- Gilmore Girls, The Walking Dead, and The Big Bang Theory. However, Gilmore would have turned into a 2,000 word tirade about Lorelai and Rory Gilmore being the two most despicable characters on television while ranting about how the student publication Rory works on at Yale is hilariously inaccurate compared to real life. (Rory’s office is the size of Light Hall auditorium, the staff is about five-times larger than most real newspapers and the funniest thing of all is that the editor wears a suit to work everyday. HA!) Meanwhile, The Walking Dead, a poorly written zombie show that is basically a Fox News reporter’s wet dream, features an indestructible police officer as it’s hero, violence has zero consequences, (in fact anyone who isn’t a fighter or tries to take a peaceful route is written to be a wimp or out of touch with reality,) and guns can solve most if not all problems. Also, grenades can take out tanks. Unfortunately, I have to be honest, I’ve been watching this show from the beginning and probably won’t stop any time soon. Yes, my foot tastes good.
No, the focus of my ire is a show that has gone on for way too long and has no redeemable value. That show is The Big Bang Theory. While Gilmore Girls may enrage me, and The Walking Dead might make me shake my head at how nonsensical it is, no show annoys me more than TBBT. The entire cast of characters is horrible. The things been on for a decade now and so far only ONE character out of seven has experienced any growth or change- Howard, who goes from being a slimy pervert to a mature family man. Everyone else either stays the same or regresses. Raj goes from being a sympathetic character who can’t talk to women to being the most unlikable and pathetic human being on the planet. His symbiotic relationship with Howard went from being best friends to just plain creepy, especially after Howard gets married. The couple, who were expecting a child, had to sit down with this guy and say, “hey, we‘re in this relationship. We’re having a baby. Not the three of us. Stop being weird.” Raj of course had his feelings hurt, so Howard and his wife took pity and recanted their entire statement, essentially saying, “Oh never mind, be as creepy as you want!” WHAT!!!
Then we have our main trio of characters. Sheldon is the most famous character and admittedly the funniest. Unfortunately, as the show continues, Sheldon has gone from being a character lacking social skills due to being too smart for his own good to a character who is just a complete asshole. Somehow, this is tolerated by his girlfriend Amy, and his roommate Leonard. Leonard sits just under Lorelai and Rory as the most despicable character on television. This guy can whine. He spends the show basically pussyfooting around Sheldon rather than presenting a descent foil for him. It’s not clear how many of the shows episodes could have been wrapped up in five minutes had Leonard just put Sheldon in his place. Then there’s Penny. Leonard spends years pining after the hot blonde that lives across the hall, but when he finally gets her, it doesn’t really seem like an achievement. She wants to be an actress, which means she spends the early seasons working as a waitress. She struggles with her bills, with her rent, with her love life and finally she just settles for Leonard. It doesn’t feel like a real culmination of anything, but rather Penny just settles for the whiny guy across the hallway because he satisfies her needs. Gee, so romantic.
Some of you could be thinking, “but Eric, lighten up, it’s just a sitcom,” but here’s the thing- IT’S NOT EVEN FUNNY. The show has someone, I’m assuming a trained chimpanzee, add a laugh track during the editing. The chimp theory is given weight by the fact that this laugh track finds everything hilarious. Here’s a video of the show being filmed, minus the laugh track.
Yeah, that was pretty awkward. The show isn’t funny, it’s characters border between being unlikeable and creepy and it’s been on for ten years, and has been recently picked up for two more. There is no show on television more annoying or overrated than The Big Bang Theory.
