Wiggum: If I can tranq out just one freak on stilts, I know I've done my job.
Lou: You're living the dream, chief.
Simpsons Season 14: The Great Louse Detective
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Still Reliable, Sources Now Also More Convenient
While listening to CNN's podcast of this past Sunday's "Reliable Sources" program for 37 minutes and 50 seconds of my drive home today, I began to wonder whether I still needed to keep my Season Pass scheduled for the same program on my Tivo at home. It's the exact same show content-wise, minus the commercials, thus it is much shorter than the 60 minutes of broadcast time that the Tivo chews up for it. Of course Tivo makes it pretty darn easy to skip through the 22 minutes and 10 seconds of ad pitches, none-too-revelatory "updates" from talking head du-jour, plus the lead-ins/hand-offs to/from preceding/following shows, but you can't get any easier than not having to do anything at all.
So what's in Tivo's favor? First, it's always plugged into generally one of the largest pieces of screen real estate in the house (our tvs still dwarf the size of even the most gargantuan computer monitors, though theoretically they share much of the same hardware). Second, if you have more than one Tivo and a home network, you could theoretically share programs between them.
I say "theoretically" because it has been our experience that we have to have a dedicated hard-wired cable into the tivo boxes from the two wireless access points we have in our fairly small house. One access point could service the whole house, but not with any sort of media sharing going on, and we already wirelessly stream our music to our stereo. We sometiimes get interference from our microwave on that, but it doesn't generally degrade the other basic online stuff we do, like web browsing. Whereas if we have the tivos networked solely wirelessly over the exact same infrastructure, it not only brings all other online activity to a crawl, but it also doesn't go fast enough to watch generally in anything close to real-time, while it's downloading. So you both can't watch what you're downloading, nor get to any other content while you're downloading, at least not until almost 10-15 minutes has been downloaded, then you have a reasonable chance of staying ahead of the download cache.
At least hard-wiring the Tivos to the access points minimizes their impact on our web browsing, so we can watch youtube, but that still isn't necessarily fast enough over the slower version of WiFi that many houses still have for real-time viewing while downloading (we have one old client that only operates on 802.11b, so we have to use the slower one until we retire/upgrade it). However even in the worst case of the above scenarios, our iTunes will still work since it's presenting already downloaded shows and video podcasts, like Reliable Sources.
So that's 3 strikes against Tivo: 1) for the 22 minutes of hard drive space, 2) for making me do what I can otherwise avoid at no loss to me of anything of value, and 3) slowing down my incessant news trolling. Season Pass priority Number 7 gets canceled. CNN Reliable Sources podcast
Selections from the rest of my current Season Pass list:
#1) Austin City Limits: WMPT because the other PBS station available on our Comcast subscription for some reason has listings a week off from who is actually appearing, so I'd fire it up on a Sunday night excited to catch Lyle Lovett and instead get Robert Randolph & the Family Band, which maybe is fine, but nevertheless not what I was looking for at that time. When your available media consumption time is as hotly contested as ours is, I may not get an hour for picking and singing in the 2 weeks or so that any given episode is saved on my box, so it helps if I at least know what I'm getting ready to watch. It gets the high priority also primarily because it has zero competition in its normal broadcast timeslot in the rest of my regular viewing schedule, so the only time I'd want to cancel it myself is if I were watching something else, usually soccer, in which case I'd manually cancel the recording.
#2) Desperate Housewives: I personally don't watch it much, but I know somebody close to me who probably would be more than a little upset to come home expecting to see the episode not be recorded that she missed because she was busy putting our son to sleep, or cleaning up after my piglike self because I still need work on getting my cleanliness acceptance factor closer to that of a civilized being. I program the Tivo, so my show got first slot, but number 2 ain't too shabby (though I wouldn't complain if she took the effort to figure out how to swap them, as I'd applaud the technology learning initiative it would demonstarte).
#3) The Office: our current favorite.
#4) The Simpsons: classic that has seen better days, but I'm still not ready to drop out of the top 5 yet. Plus I'm really looking forward to the movie (please be another Beavis and Butthead and not another
#5) My Name is Earl: a close second behind The Office.
Once these are available as free downloads, Tivo loses them too. I wonder if Tivo or anybody else has tracked the impact of the releases of programs into other formats on PVR/DVR usage.
So what's in Tivo's favor? First, it's always plugged into generally one of the largest pieces of screen real estate in the house (our tvs still dwarf the size of even the most gargantuan computer monitors, though theoretically they share much of the same hardware). Second, if you have more than one Tivo and a home network, you could theoretically share programs between them.
I say "theoretically" because it has been our experience that we have to have a dedicated hard-wired cable into the tivo boxes from the two wireless access points we have in our fairly small house. One access point could service the whole house, but not with any sort of media sharing going on, and we already wirelessly stream our music to our stereo. We sometiimes get interference from our microwave on that, but it doesn't generally degrade the other basic online stuff we do, like web browsing. Whereas if we have the tivos networked solely wirelessly over the exact same infrastructure, it not only brings all other online activity to a crawl, but it also doesn't go fast enough to watch generally in anything close to real-time, while it's downloading. So you both can't watch what you're downloading, nor get to any other content while you're downloading, at least not until almost 10-15 minutes has been downloaded, then you have a reasonable chance of staying ahead of the download cache.
At least hard-wiring the Tivos to the access points minimizes their impact on our web browsing, so we can watch youtube, but that still isn't necessarily fast enough over the slower version of WiFi that many houses still have for real-time viewing while downloading (we have one old client that only operates on 802.11b, so we have to use the slower one until we retire/upgrade it). However even in the worst case of the above scenarios, our iTunes will still work since it's presenting already downloaded shows and video podcasts, like Reliable Sources.
So that's 3 strikes against Tivo: 1) for the 22 minutes of hard drive space, 2) for making me do what I can otherwise avoid at no loss to me of anything of value, and 3) slowing down my incessant news trolling. Season Pass priority Number 7 gets canceled. CNN Reliable Sources podcast
Selections from the rest of my current Season Pass list:
#1) Austin City Limits: WMPT because the other PBS station available on our Comcast subscription for some reason has listings a week off from who is actually appearing, so I'd fire it up on a Sunday night excited to catch Lyle Lovett and instead get Robert Randolph & the Family Band, which maybe is fine, but nevertheless not what I was looking for at that time. When your available media consumption time is as hotly contested as ours is, I may not get an hour for picking and singing in the 2 weeks or so that any given episode is saved on my box, so it helps if I at least know what I'm getting ready to watch. It gets the high priority also primarily because it has zero competition in its normal broadcast timeslot in the rest of my regular viewing schedule, so the only time I'd want to cancel it myself is if I were watching something else, usually soccer, in which case I'd manually cancel the recording.
#2) Desperate Housewives: I personally don't watch it much, but I know somebody close to me who probably would be more than a little upset to come home expecting to see the episode not be recorded that she missed because she was busy putting our son to sleep, or cleaning up after my piglike self because I still need work on getting my cleanliness acceptance factor closer to that of a civilized being. I program the Tivo, so my show got first slot, but number 2 ain't too shabby (though I wouldn't complain if she took the effort to figure out how to swap them, as I'd applaud the technology learning initiative it would demonstarte).
#3) The Office: our current favorite.
#4) The Simpsons: classic that has seen better days, but I'm still not ready to drop out of the top 5 yet. Plus I'm really looking forward to the movie (please be another Beavis and Butthead and not another
#5) My Name is Earl: a close second behind The Office.
Once these are available as free downloads, Tivo loses them too. I wonder if Tivo or anybody else has tracked the impact of the releases of programs into other formats on PVR/DVR usage.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Just a Collection of Tubes in the Sky
To parapharse the eminent Senator Ted Stevens (Google Query: Tubes Internet Senator), the satellite radio network is just a bunch of tubes in the sky, but unlike the "tubes" of the terrestrial networks, the satellite kind of XM and Sirius are much, much more expensive, and in general unlikely to any time in the next 10+ years be considered anything resembling a competitive market.
BusinessWeek: New Conditions May Ease XM-Sirius Merger
I say this as subscriber to both services, and appreciator of various aspects of each, that I wish the two would just merge their technology and let me subscribe to a package of the best of each that I could share between each of our two stereos, rather than accept the compromises forced on me by the current situation:
If my wife's car needs work, or I yearn for the joy of our '99 Maxima again, I get to hear Bob Edwards, Bob Dylan and (sometimes) my hometown St. Louis Cardinals. If I'm driving my primary car, and I've figured out how to reset the security code on our stereo after it got locked when we had to have the car jump-started this past winter, I get Howard, Champions League Soccer and NPR. I'd like to combine those worlds, and having a merger that would allow me to somehow use my existing hundreds of dollars invested in our current receivers and antennae (a dream, I know) or at least not have to shift my listening habits to one set of options or the other would probably be a good thing.
To buttress one of their arguments for the merger, my iPod plays the same music from car to car to car, and that kind of consistency I like.
BusinessWeek: New Conditions May Ease XM-Sirius Merger
I say this as subscriber to both services, and appreciator of various aspects of each, that I wish the two would just merge their technology and let me subscribe to a package of the best of each that I could share between each of our two stereos, rather than accept the compromises forced on me by the current situation:
If my wife's car needs work, or I yearn for the joy of our '99 Maxima again, I get to hear Bob Edwards, Bob Dylan and (sometimes) my hometown St. Louis Cardinals. If I'm driving my primary car, and I've figured out how to reset the security code on our stereo after it got locked when we had to have the car jump-started this past winter, I get Howard, Champions League Soccer and NPR. I'd like to combine those worlds, and having a merger that would allow me to somehow use my existing hundreds of dollars invested in our current receivers and antennae (a dream, I know) or at least not have to shift my listening habits to one set of options or the other would probably be a good thing.
To buttress one of their arguments for the merger, my iPod plays the same music from car to car to car, and that kind of consistency I like.
Space
Gillian Anderson and first season X-Files, mirroring an old Looney Tunes classic (in my head it does anyway).
Try to find this episode to buy online. You do a Google Search for "Fallin' Hare", the title of the episode, and you get a link to an ebay 16 mm film ($50 at last check), Amazon gets you this collection only available currently through third parties:
.
Hmmm, who's the winner here?
Try to find this episode to buy online. You do a Google Search for "Fallin' Hare", the title of the episode, and you get a link to an ebay 16 mm film ($50 at last check), Amazon gets you this collection only available currently through third parties:
.
Hmmm, who's the winner here?
Saturday, February 24, 2007
The Good, The Bad and The Big Audio
Saturday night's 1 a.m. broadcast on Encore Western of "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" IMDB quotes, a quote from Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan-Maria Ramirez, "Who the hell is that? One bastard goes in, another bastard comes out!" reminds me of hearing it in a different context, as a sample in a song by Big Audio Dynamite called Medicine Show from their debut album This Is Big Audio Dynamite.
This album was an important part of my early musical education, recommended for me early in my college days by my best friend, deceased just for a year as of 2 weeks ago, so I'm understandably nostalgic about things like it.
As a former disk jockey and music director, I've got a pretty large music collection, all of which has been digitized for well over 5 years now, so if I own it, it's on my computer. Unfortunately for me, even in 20 plus thousand songs, the only copy of "Medicine Show" I had owned other than the original cassette Greg made for me was a bizarre-o 12-inch remix that just wasn't going to cut it.
Five years ago I would have fled to Napster or Kazaa/Limewire, etc. where I'm sure a decent copy of the song I remember could be found. They aren't really that obscure of a band, and it was on a major label, so somebody out there is bound to have posted it at one point or other. Five years older, and in the iTunes Music Store world of today, I decided to first look there before I fled to the wilds of free. Ten minutes and $7.92 later I've got it and near instant gratification in one ear and the soundtrack in the other.
see on iTMS.
Who loses? Comcast/Encore, as they had no way to leverage my interest in their content into cash in their pockets. Who wins? Apple/Big Audio Dynamite, as they made it possible for me to enhance my experience for a reasonable price on my schedule. And I spent that extra money even after already owning a copy of the DVD box shown below, and Ennio Morricone's most excellent soundtrack, containing The Ecstasy of Gold, the song I chose as my debut track on the nominally 80s radio show on WNRN-Charlottesville I helped create back in the mid 90s, Les Temps Perdue.
This album was an important part of my early musical education, recommended for me early in my college days by my best friend, deceased just for a year as of 2 weeks ago, so I'm understandably nostalgic about things like it.
As a former disk jockey and music director, I've got a pretty large music collection, all of which has been digitized for well over 5 years now, so if I own it, it's on my computer. Unfortunately for me, even in 20 plus thousand songs, the only copy of "Medicine Show" I had owned other than the original cassette Greg made for me was a bizarre-o 12-inch remix that just wasn't going to cut it.
Five years ago I would have fled to Napster or Kazaa/Limewire, etc. where I'm sure a decent copy of the song I remember could be found. They aren't really that obscure of a band, and it was on a major label, so somebody out there is bound to have posted it at one point or other. Five years older, and in the iTunes Music Store world of today, I decided to first look there before I fled to the wilds of free. Ten minutes and $7.92 later I've got it and near instant gratification in one ear and the soundtrack in the other.
see on iTMS.
Who loses? Comcast/Encore, as they had no way to leverage my interest in their content into cash in their pockets. Who wins? Apple/Big Audio Dynamite, as they made it possible for me to enhance my experience for a reasonable price on my schedule. And I spent that extra money even after already owning a copy of the DVD box shown below, and Ennio Morricone's most excellent soundtrack, containing The Ecstasy of Gold, the song I chose as my debut track on the nominally 80s radio show on WNRN-Charlottesville I helped create back in the mid 90s, Les Temps Perdue.
The Modern Media Consumer
The Modern Media Consumer: A study in the annoyance, frustration, and overwhelming feelings of betrayal felt by this humble customer in my dealings with media publishers, the owners of the ultimate object of my desire, their product, and the consumption of it in some form or other.
The recipients of today's indignity: the one and only, Mr. Tony Bennett, and Bugs freaking Bunny.
In the networked world, people tell each other to "check out" things they think might be of interest, and someone did that to me regarding NBC's tribute to Tony Bennett, "Tony Bennett: An American Classic" aired sometime in the winter of 2006 (there's an "A Christmas Story" themed ad for Cingular and a Jesus movie, made the approximation easy). This is how highly I regarded the recommender's opinion: I allowed it to take an hour of precious hard drive space for full definition audio/video for over 2 months while I waited to archive it for potential eventual viewing.
That may not seem like much sacrifice in the new world of 80 hour PVR/DVRs ("Tivos" to most of us), but over the holidays it was, as is common in American households. This year was the year we flew back to my family's home in St. Louis, and it was the time for celebrating my father-in-law's 60th birthday, and it was when we finally were able to start re-building a relationship with my younger brother's family, this year barracked out in Arizona, one that had been on hold for years due to an excess of complications and budgetary/time issues going back really to before our wedding almost 6 years ago.
Who knows what serendipitous joy had to be discarded un-viewed during that entire period? And all to preserve this one hour of crooning, a musical style I am not generally known to appreciate that much (don't get me started on Ol' Blue Eyes). For comparison's sake, the only other show that had a a similar "highly protected" status to prevent me/Mr. Tivo from having a brain-fart and accidentally deleting was the US vs. Denmark friendly soccer match in January, which I had actually completely forgot about during all of my travels, only to happily find helpfully awaiting me after whatever leg of the journeys I was on when it was being played.
So, it was a bit of a something something that I saved this particular Tony Bennett show. And today I finally got around to taking it the next fateful step on its path to my eventual viewing: archiving to DVD. Archiving is not however a direct line to my eyeballs, but it's a necessary one for things that I think probably will like if I give them a chance, but who knows when the next time might come that my cranky ass actually feels like giving a chance to something I don't KNOW I'll like?*
I generally try to at least watch the beginning and/or the end of a show when I'm dubbing it down if it's on a commercial channel, because who knows when their schedule has been slightly shifted by live programs, or if it's merely off a couple minutes due to the normal vagaries of broadcast schedules, but I can't watch the whole show to pause and stop the recording and make sure it all fits on the disk. This way I can usually just fast forward through the commercials during the first break, which generally offsets this margin enough that I haven't yet found one of these shows being prematurely cut off.
So here comes the first dramatically backlit shot of Mr. Bennett in a spotlight, solo on the stage, really nice, classy-looking imagery, then up pops this crappy little insert on the bottom of the screen for the local news broadcast: "Elderly couple murdered in Northern Virginia, News at 11". Classy indeed. And you see, that's the crap you have to put up with when you try to watch those "free" over-the-air broadcasts: you never know when a complete viewing train-wreck like this is likely to occur.
Say it's not a gruesome, tragic double-murder ruining what's otherwise a thoughtful and moving tribute to an American icon, what about when you do the nice social thing of go to a friend's house (or even better, the friend of a spouse's house) and watch the local team in a game you don't really have any interest in, while you're recording at home the game you really want to watch off the satellite (should you be so lucky as to not a have a freaking massive tree that you can't remove blocking your reception). For me say Missouri is playing Kansas when both are ranked again and slugging it out in the Big 12, while U.Va is pounding on a hapless Maryland. This is the essence of delayed gratification that we're all taught is one of the principal signs of achieving adulthood, right? Making the best of a crappy situation, at least saving your reactions to real- if delayed-time. And there, on the freaking ESPN2 ticker you see the final score.
So what, this is the price of watching free programming right? Well, I thought that's what advertising was. And even though I was tivo'ing and recording the DVD of the Tony Bennett show, partially fast forwarding through the ads, I can still tell you that the primary sponsor of the show was Target**, and the first ads were for Cingular, Target and that Nativity movie. I mean, you know you'll have to one way or the other generally at least see any ads embedded in the breaks of the program, as well as the logos and other bric-a-brac overlaid on the video (hello Mr. Peacock), but why also during the actual broadcast of a non-live sporting event?
So if a broadcast network doesn't even take itself seriously enough to prevent it's own self-inflicted wound, why should I bother to believe that it really matters to them? Why would I expect them to do anything other than the most inept of jobs on any other presentation of what would otherwise be considered high-brow-ish programming?
And like so another broadcast network makes a good argument for it's own eventual demise to people who actually care about what they do, today easily found among the user-contributed and edited content on places like youtube.
I know that the person really cared about what they were doing when they went to the trouble of digitizing this old Bugs Bunny from 1946, youtube link (bizarrely this is currently the only place in my house I can watch what I remembered used to be the most ubiquitous content of my childhood). Yet why didn't Warner Brothers do this, making this kind of stuff available to people like me who grew up with it and have a very strong, latent interest in viewing. You can't tell me the cost is what would be preventing making making this quality of video available for .50 on iTunes.
I only found out that Bugs and Pals appear to not be receiving current broadcast on my friendly local Comcast network when I tried to schedule a Tivo season pass to have a little for a late night, pre-bedtime viewing treat some cold winter night. No luck finding any Bugs or Looney Tunes, but I think there might have been that kind of creepy tiny tunes baby version of the same characters somewhere. I know some of these old beauts are a bit embarrassing these days (to say the least: some superlatively shitty racial stereotypes here, viewer beware, but there are plenty that remain plenty entertaining, even if the Peter Lorre and Edgar G. Robinson references in the earlier non-racist Bugs cartoon need to have a director's commentary to explain to many of today's viewers.
So there you have it: this Modern Media Consumer today is annoyed at what I do see when I take the time to watch a high-profile Prime Time foofarah on NBC, and then doubly so for having to look to user-contributed content to find one of the most well-known icons of Western Pop culture. Losers: NBC and Comcast; Winner: Youtube and Verizon (the provider of the series of tubes coming into our home).
*Thus these things go to DVD, then to a holding area on top of one of the tvs for a period of rest lasting between 1 and 3 months, following which I usually will pick them up, realise that they're still unlabelled, requiring me to wonder what the hell the last things might have been that I would have left there.
This can sometimes be an interesting journey through my recent viewing history, assuming I knew what it was that I was archiving, but as is most often the case I wind up confused, but if I have the time I'll go ahead and throw them back in the nearest player so I can finally label them and migrate them on to the next part of their journey, usually in a nearby secondary holding area.
Downstairs this may be on top of the bookcase, which is relatively valuable real estate as it's directly at eye level. But it's just above lots of open shelving, from which it and the latest episode of 2 hours of unwatched VW Gol may never see the light of day (I never know when I might want to track down one of the dozens of goals scored anywhere in the world the week of February 19, 2007, that I also would presumably have no other access to on youtube, or somewhere similar). I have more than a couple foreign language movies, I likely will never, ever see, despite my best intentions, in this category.
**The Target branding actually was prominent enough that I noted it even while fast-forwarding through it, like the Cingular ad featuring my favorite Holiday movie, but I forgot them both when I was actually writing this and had to cheat for the above, so please forgive the temporary deception.
The recipients of today's indignity: the one and only, Mr. Tony Bennett, and Bugs freaking Bunny.
In the networked world, people tell each other to "check out" things they think might be of interest, and someone did that to me regarding NBC's tribute to Tony Bennett, "Tony Bennett: An American Classic" aired sometime in the winter of 2006 (there's an "A Christmas Story" themed ad for Cingular and a Jesus movie, made the approximation easy). This is how highly I regarded the recommender's opinion: I allowed it to take an hour of precious hard drive space for full definition audio/video for over 2 months while I waited to archive it for potential eventual viewing.
That may not seem like much sacrifice in the new world of 80 hour PVR/DVRs ("Tivos" to most of us), but over the holidays it was, as is common in American households. This year was the year we flew back to my family's home in St. Louis, and it was the time for celebrating my father-in-law's 60th birthday, and it was when we finally were able to start re-building a relationship with my younger brother's family, this year barracked out in Arizona, one that had been on hold for years due to an excess of complications and budgetary/time issues going back really to before our wedding almost 6 years ago.
Who knows what serendipitous joy had to be discarded un-viewed during that entire period? And all to preserve this one hour of crooning, a musical style I am not generally known to appreciate that much (don't get me started on Ol' Blue Eyes). For comparison's sake, the only other show that had a a similar "highly protected" status to prevent me/Mr. Tivo from having a brain-fart and accidentally deleting was the US vs. Denmark friendly soccer match in January, which I had actually completely forgot about during all of my travels, only to happily find helpfully awaiting me after whatever leg of the journeys I was on when it was being played.
So, it was a bit of a something something that I saved this particular Tony Bennett show. And today I finally got around to taking it the next fateful step on its path to my eventual viewing: archiving to DVD. Archiving is not however a direct line to my eyeballs, but it's a necessary one for things that I think probably will like if I give them a chance, but who knows when the next time might come that my cranky ass actually feels like giving a chance to something I don't KNOW I'll like?*
I generally try to at least watch the beginning and/or the end of a show when I'm dubbing it down if it's on a commercial channel, because who knows when their schedule has been slightly shifted by live programs, or if it's merely off a couple minutes due to the normal vagaries of broadcast schedules, but I can't watch the whole show to pause and stop the recording and make sure it all fits on the disk. This way I can usually just fast forward through the commercials during the first break, which generally offsets this margin enough that I haven't yet found one of these shows being prematurely cut off.
So here comes the first dramatically backlit shot of Mr. Bennett in a spotlight, solo on the stage, really nice, classy-looking imagery, then up pops this crappy little insert on the bottom of the screen for the local news broadcast: "Elderly couple murdered in Northern Virginia, News at 11". Classy indeed. And you see, that's the crap you have to put up with when you try to watch those "free" over-the-air broadcasts: you never know when a complete viewing train-wreck like this is likely to occur.
Say it's not a gruesome, tragic double-murder ruining what's otherwise a thoughtful and moving tribute to an American icon, what about when you do the nice social thing of go to a friend's house (or even better, the friend of a spouse's house) and watch the local team in a game you don't really have any interest in, while you're recording at home the game you really want to watch off the satellite (should you be so lucky as to not a have a freaking massive tree that you can't remove blocking your reception). For me say Missouri is playing Kansas when both are ranked again and slugging it out in the Big 12, while U.Va is pounding on a hapless Maryland. This is the essence of delayed gratification that we're all taught is one of the principal signs of achieving adulthood, right? Making the best of a crappy situation, at least saving your reactions to real- if delayed-time. And there, on the freaking ESPN2 ticker you see the final score.
So what, this is the price of watching free programming right? Well, I thought that's what advertising was. And even though I was tivo'ing and recording the DVD of the Tony Bennett show, partially fast forwarding through the ads, I can still tell you that the primary sponsor of the show was Target**, and the first ads were for Cingular, Target and that Nativity movie. I mean, you know you'll have to one way or the other generally at least see any ads embedded in the breaks of the program, as well as the logos and other bric-a-brac overlaid on the video (hello Mr. Peacock), but why also during the actual broadcast of a non-live sporting event?
So if a broadcast network doesn't even take itself seriously enough to prevent it's own self-inflicted wound, why should I bother to believe that it really matters to them? Why would I expect them to do anything other than the most inept of jobs on any other presentation of what would otherwise be considered high-brow-ish programming?
And like so another broadcast network makes a good argument for it's own eventual demise to people who actually care about what they do, today easily found among the user-contributed and edited content on places like youtube.
I know that the person really cared about what they were doing when they went to the trouble of digitizing this old Bugs Bunny from 1946, youtube link (bizarrely this is currently the only place in my house I can watch what I remembered used to be the most ubiquitous content of my childhood). Yet why didn't Warner Brothers do this, making this kind of stuff available to people like me who grew up with it and have a very strong, latent interest in viewing. You can't tell me the cost is what would be preventing making making this quality of video available for .50 on iTunes.
I only found out that Bugs and Pals appear to not be receiving current broadcast on my friendly local Comcast network when I tried to schedule a Tivo season pass to have a little for a late night, pre-bedtime viewing treat some cold winter night. No luck finding any Bugs or Looney Tunes, but I think there might have been that kind of creepy tiny tunes baby version of the same characters somewhere. I know some of these old beauts are a bit embarrassing these days (to say the least: some superlatively shitty racial stereotypes here, viewer beware, but there are plenty that remain plenty entertaining, even if the Peter Lorre and Edgar G. Robinson references in the earlier non-racist Bugs cartoon need to have a director's commentary to explain to many of today's viewers.
So there you have it: this Modern Media Consumer today is annoyed at what I do see when I take the time to watch a high-profile Prime Time foofarah on NBC, and then doubly so for having to look to user-contributed content to find one of the most well-known icons of Western Pop culture. Losers: NBC and Comcast; Winner: Youtube and Verizon (the provider of the series of tubes coming into our home).
*Thus these things go to DVD, then to a holding area on top of one of the tvs for a period of rest lasting between 1 and 3 months, following which I usually will pick them up, realise that they're still unlabelled, requiring me to wonder what the hell the last things might have been that I would have left there.
This can sometimes be an interesting journey through my recent viewing history, assuming I knew what it was that I was archiving, but as is most often the case I wind up confused, but if I have the time I'll go ahead and throw them back in the nearest player so I can finally label them and migrate them on to the next part of their journey, usually in a nearby secondary holding area.
Downstairs this may be on top of the bookcase, which is relatively valuable real estate as it's directly at eye level. But it's just above lots of open shelving, from which it and the latest episode of 2 hours of unwatched VW Gol may never see the light of day (I never know when I might want to track down one of the dozens of goals scored anywhere in the world the week of February 19, 2007, that I also would presumably have no other access to on youtube, or somewhere similar). I have more than a couple foreign language movies, I likely will never, ever see, despite my best intentions, in this category.
**The Target branding actually was prominent enough that I noted it even while fast-forwarding through it, like the Cingular ad featuring my favorite Holiday movie, but I forgot them both when I was actually writing this and had to cheat for the above, so please forgive the temporary deception.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
My Earliest Memory of Bullwinkle
It's not the most explicit of memories, for it occurs back in the fogs enveloping my third and fourth grade years, a Memphis, Tennessee interstitial in my St. Louis-based childhood, but it's the best I got.
Like many working class families, my parents had to leave for work before the school day started, and didn't return home until after it ended, meaning we had babysitters. The first that I can really remember was back in St. Charles, Missouri, when I would have been approximately 5-7 years old, first and second grades (Kindergarten started the year after I would have taken it), Becky David Elementary.
One of the inevitable factors of child care in the working class is that the child-to-caregiver ratio is never as good as most would like, in essence, you get what you can afford to pay for. It's not unsafe, as the fact that the vast majority of our children grow up to be relatively well-adjusted mal-contents like the rest of us can attest, but most of us would still probably choose a little more personal care to our offspring than we can generally afford.
This meant that we had about an hour or so in the morning with our babysitter, and a couple hours in the afternoon during the school year, and the one thing I remember regarding as a true morning treat was my completely irregular episodic encounters with Jay Ward's progeny, most memorably as Bullwinkle J. Moose and Rocket J. Squirrel, but also George of the Jungle, Tom Mix, and my favorite, Super Chicken, Fred and Super Sauce:
lyrics
My school year babysitter was different from my summer babysitter, I suppose because of schedule availability, so I don't remember it too much, other than some mornings in a cramped kitchen with a countertop tv hopefully playing some Bullwinkle. The rest of the time I was in the library. Or shoplifting. I was young. It was the 70's.
Like many working class families, my parents had to leave for work before the school day started, and didn't return home until after it ended, meaning we had babysitters. The first that I can really remember was back in St. Charles, Missouri, when I would have been approximately 5-7 years old, first and second grades (Kindergarten started the year after I would have taken it), Becky David Elementary.
One of the inevitable factors of child care in the working class is that the child-to-caregiver ratio is never as good as most would like, in essence, you get what you can afford to pay for. It's not unsafe, as the fact that the vast majority of our children grow up to be relatively well-adjusted mal-contents like the rest of us can attest, but most of us would still probably choose a little more personal care to our offspring than we can generally afford.
This meant that we had about an hour or so in the morning with our babysitter, and a couple hours in the afternoon during the school year, and the one thing I remember regarding as a true morning treat was my completely irregular episodic encounters with Jay Ward's progeny, most memorably as Bullwinkle J. Moose and Rocket J. Squirrel, but also George of the Jungle, Tom Mix, and my favorite, Super Chicken, Fred and Super Sauce:
When you find youself in danger,
When you're threatened by a stranger,
When it looks like you will take a lickin', (puk, puk, puk)
There is someone waiting,
Who will hurry up and rescue you,
Just Call for Super Chicken! (puk, ack!)
lyrics
My school year babysitter was different from my summer babysitter, I suppose because of schedule availability, so I don't remember it too much, other than some mornings in a cramped kitchen with a countertop tv hopefully playing some Bullwinkle. The rest of the time I was in the library. Or shoplifting. I was young. It was the 70's.
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