The Best New University Courses for 09/10

These days, everyone goes to university. People don’t start their first full-time job until they have enough letters after their name to earn a thousand points on a Scrabble board. But for every Business, Law or Philosophy and Psychology degree, there’s a useless one, like Surfing, Klingon or Applied Mathematics. And even more new degrees are being opened every year. I took a look at some of them, like a voyeur in an exhibitionist factory.

First off, Paris Hiltonology at Dundee University is an excellent degree. Obviously it leads to a BSc, being a highly scientific program. Classes include Canine Shrinkage: The Fundamentals, Vacuity 101 and BFF Selection. An extended Press Manipulation module lasts for two semesters, with the first being a general introduction and the second looking at detailed ways to promote your sex tape. Having read through the course materials, I can see this being a very worthwhile and interesting course. Many people believe that by 2020 the most common job in the developed world will be ‘Vacuous Celebrity’, so this qualification will be a boon to all interested. A warning, though: this will be a tough course to be accepted into. Anyone with a grade average of C or above is unlikely to be considered.

Both Oxford and Cambridge will this year begin offering an MA in Running Around in Circles. This is definitely going to be an advanced course, with both practical and theory elements. Of the two universities, I’d recommend Oxford’s programme over Cambridge’s, as the former has invested £27million in a new circle-running stadium and wind-tunnel.

The Online University of North America and Europe is offering a new course, entitled Making Money Using the Internet. There are no entrance qualifications needed, just send a cheque for $1200 to their PO number and you’ll be enrolled. I wish I could say more about this course, but I still haven’t received the materials yet, and I was accepted over six months ago. Sorry!

For those of you who are in full-time employment but who wish to expand your brainclout, there are also many exciting and interesting night courses available. I highly recommend the Toronto School of Continuing Studies’ Certificate in Wife Appreciation. From full-bodied to slightly fruity, this course will let you appreciate wives of all varieties. Course fees include samples of the wives and a book to make your own notes in. I really enjoyed this course, having had very little experience of wives in the past; from the first class to the last, I found myself learning more and more while having fun (and testing a lot of wives, too!).

Finally, MIT has a new course entitled Extreme Makeover: Home Edition Studies. With one class taught by Ty Pennington himself, this course covers such subjects as Being as Pathetic as Possible to Get on the Show, Shelves: How Many is Too Many?, Bullying a Neighbourhood into Working for Free and What to do When the Truck Breaks Down and Won’t Move Out of the Way of the New House in the Big Reveal. This is a terrible course with no redeeming features. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And not just because they refused to decorate my apartment on the grounds that I’m “not tragic enough.”

Bloody students, with their long hair and their alcopops and their Jean Paul Satre and their low-cut jeans…in my day it were conscription or you’d work down t’ mines.

Television Review: Extreme Makeover Spinoffs

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a highly popular American reality TV show, the spin-off of Extreme Makeover, a show in which hideously ugly people were bullied by family members into having plastic surgery. The weekly episodes of Home Edition usually follow a similar format: Someone contacts the show because their family of 300 are forced to live in a stripper’s g-string in the bottom of a vat of acid. They can’t even afford the rent on the g-string because the head of the family (usually a soldier or a priest, or – even better – both) has been forced out of work due to his legs having fallen off while saving a kitten from death at the hands of a combine harvester. One (or all) of the 160 children in the family has a very rare disease that means they can’t come into contact with anything made of an odd number of atoms, and they all need to be permanently attached to giant medical machines that are so big they can’t be moved. The team of architects and designers then send the family to Disneyland, destroy the old living area and build a palace of luxurious proportions big enough for the population of a small nation, replete with specialist medical facilities (and staff) for the diseased children and enough bedrooms to make Bill Gates blush. The houses are built and furnished by companies who consider such generosity to be a small price to pay for being mentioned repeatedly by a popular prime-time show.

The popularity of this programme has led to several new spin-offs of the Extreme Makeover format. I had a look to see what they were like, and hoped that the unconcealed hatred I displayed in the previous paragraph didn’t affect my judgement.

Extreme Makeover: Personality Edition will begin in November, and will be hosted by Dr. Phil. Participants in the show will be nominated by their friends, relatives, coworkers and people who just happen to encounter them on the street. The criterion for inclusion on the show is that the participant must have some outrageously annoying personality defects, which the programme’s team of psychiatrists, psychologists and lifestyle consultants will attempt to fix.

The pilot episode featured Dave, an advertising salesman from Detroit. This man had so many personality problems that after ten minutes his very appearance on the screen made me want to kick the television. He finished other people’s sentences for them, laughed nervously at everything he said, made awkward comments to strangers and picked his nose on public transport. He was also so arrogant that Dr. Phil nearly punched him. The end of the show saw the experts make so little progress with Dave that they were forced to resort to making him watch a video of some kittens playing for eight hours, in a scene reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange.

From this first episode, Extreme Makeover: Personality Edition is a surprisingly satisfying show. It’s really worth it for the final few minutes, when a practically lobotomized Dave is revealed to his friends and relatives, now a much more agreeable individual whose sole personality flaw is the unfortunate tendency to drool slightly.



From next year, viewers will get to watch Extreme Makeover: Cockatiel Edition. It’s a common problem: You buy a cockatiel, you enjoy it for a few weeks, and then you start to get bored with it. Well, this is the show for you. People with dull avian pets can have bird and image experts redesign their cockatiels to make them much more interesting. The first episode had Minxy, a two-year-old female owned by Gordon Sludge of Brampton, painted blue and given a trendy Mohawk haircut. She was also given bionic wings so that she could double up as a cooling fan on hot days. I predict big things from this show.

Finally, Extreme Makeover: Makeover Show Edition has got the TV industry in a spin. Reality show producers with staid, unimaginative programmes and no inspiration can get their productions improved with help from the Extreme Makeover team. I didn’t like this show, because I felt that the people giving advice were bullies. The poor reality show makers were being forced to make conceptual changes to their programmes that they weren’t comfortable with. An example from the early episodes is a fashion makeover show specialist being forced to supervise in the building of a new lighthouse. And I couldn’t help but feel anger towards the expert who made a restaurant makeover show production team start creating makeover show makeover shows. For one, that episode was just confusing.