February 2008
Politics viewed by exchange rate
My friend Andreas travels back and forth to Europe a lot. He points out in his blog that pre Bush it cost 89 cents to but one Euro… today that same Euro will cost you $1.51.
More network stupidity
NBC is rumored to be ready to cancel a new show “Quarterlife” after one disappointing episode, ratings wise. We have gotten to the point where we rarely watch a new show until we see how it is doing in the ratings and if it will survive. We have been burned by liking too many shows that never finish their first season. So here we have a major flaw in the system… the shows...
WatchLife imitates “The West Wing”… for a reason.
Close the FCC →
More insanity from my favorite useless government body
Yesterday's surreal busride
We went to Playa Del Carmen yesterday and loved it… after visiting there I would never stay in Cancun again. We took a local bus from the Cancun bus station, the 45 minute ride cost $3.60 and featured TVs on the ceiling like on an airplane. On the way down… “The Queen” in spanish. On the way back a 2006 Nick Nolte film, “Peaceful Warrior”. Here is an...
AppleTV first rental
I rented a movie on DirecTV today and after waiting 20 minutes for the start time when it started the audio was horribly, unwatchably out of sync. Called and got credit. Hey, maybe Apple has this same movie. They did and I rented the HD version, same price as DirecTV. I assumed it would act like purchases on AppleTV, start playing in a few minutes… well not if you choose high def. I am...
Irony? 2
Blu-Ray wins over HD-DVD but by the time they sorted it out, I stopped caring. Physical media is so 2000… I’d rather download either as purchase or rental and spend money on disk drives than Ikea shelving.
Irony?
Fidel Castro resigned today via the internet… which is not available to citizens under his control.
Mississippi journalism vs. LA journalism
In Mississippi it is illegal to sell sex toys. A reporter at the NBC station in Jackson decided to put on a disguise and see if she could find any. She did and ran an exclusive “news” investigation on it. LA Weekly got hold of the story and a columnist there published the reporter’s name and station address and asked readers to send her sex toys.
Screw the great outdoors
A few weeks ago I mentioned here we had a rodent problem. Turns out we also had a bird problem. Generations of birds have been making their home in our attic - poking thru the 1950’s mesh that had become brittle in those little screens up by the roofline. We pulled out almost a garbage can full of nest material and have spent hundreds of dollars on screening material and specialists to fix...
NASCAR
Over the holidays I was talking to a friend who works on a lot of NASCAR coverage. She was telling me how amazing the resources are to cover the races, more equipment than usually is used for the coverage of the Superbowl - but every week at a different track. The USA Today has an article today that says for the Daytona 500 Fox will deploy 77 cameras.
“I’ll be completely honest with you, there’s so much math involved in...”
– My Name Is Earl creator and head writer Greg Garcia in this E! article.
Wisdom of Howard Stern
Howard made the point this morning that if there was a draft for military service we would not see Congress wasting their time holding hearings with baseball players. He also said if there was a draft there would be much more protest in the streets over the war and what is going on in Washington in general. Maybe the draft is not a bad thing?
WatchIt’s Valentines Day for the FCC… Jane Fonda drops the C word on the Today show.
Writers strike ends
The strike cost the economy 3.2 billion dollars and took 101 days to resolve. I am guessing that the people it affected most are those who will never see a dime from the contract.
AppleTV
New software for AppleTV! One thing I have not seen mentioned is you can now use AppleTV as an AirTunes device. This means it shows up in iTunes as remote speakers and you can stream music to AppleTV (which in theory is already hooked up to your stereo) as if it were an Airport Express.
TV Director Kirk Browning passed away
Many, many years ago the public TV station I worked for wanted to to a studio based opera. We had done symphonies, rock and roll, country all sorts of shows, but this involved helping with stage direction for camera and such. So they brought in Director Kirk Browning to helm the project. He was amazing, did a lot of Live From Lincoln Center and Great Performances. A great guy who suffered us...
Catch of the day: Cocaine →
Bizarre news story find…
There is a god (lower case)
Paris Hilton’s movie, “The Hottie and the Nottie,” opened on 111 screens yesterday, and sold only $76 in ticket sales per location. That breaks down to approximately 10 people per theater. It’s anticipated that the movie will sell only $23,000 during the three-day weekend.
George W. Bush available Jan. 2009, resume here →
The Evolution of Tech Companies’ Logos →
WatchClip title says it all. Hey, props to Comedy Central who seems to have gotten it - the clips now start right away and feature lower third supers for ads, and a full spot at the end.
WatchA Daily Show looks at Mitt Romney suspending his campaign. Some amazing clips of Mitt saying outrageous things. It gets good about 4 minutes in.
Your tax dollars at work →
Sen. Arlen Specter introduced a bill this week that would allow houses of worship to show football games on big-screen televisions.
Mergers
Delta and Northwest airlines are trying to merge. What do you want to bet this merger will take less time to get approved than the Sirius/XM merger? Which will affect you more? Huge media companies and oil companies have been allowed to merge in less time than Sirius/XM. So far the NAB has spent a total of $4.3 million dollars to lobby against the merger. I know I have written here before about...
Mahalo →
A human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms.
Election stupidity
Monday night I was doing some last minute research on the issues online and found an article warning registered independents or non partisan voters that if you voted Democratic there was a box at the top of the ballot that you had to check in addition to your choice for your vote to count. This was a box marked “Democratic” with no other choice… why did it need to be checked in...
yooniverse: Webtwitch: Our new-found need to immediately look something up online the moment it comes up in the context of our daily lives. via Wired
I love the internet
Got an email this morning from a friend in Cincinnati that there was an article in the local paper about a guy who I knew who was let go from his job at a TV station after 27.5 years. I had seen the article when it ran but my friend was pointing out the comments after the article, because I was mentioned. Some people said some nice things. One of the comments was from an old friend who I was...