Talk Shows Without Writers

I heard the executive in charge of Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien on the radio last night. He said that most of the shows -the late night talk shows- were not written by Screen Writer’s Guild writers anyway, so they could essentially go back on the air.

I love that George Bush’s presidency has made it possible for anyone to believe anything just because they think it. I feel sorry for Jay and Conan because this will be painful for them. They need the writers, maybe going back on the air will prove it more quickly, but the time in between will be really icky and probably not funny.

Qui Tacet Consentit

It means silence implies consent. It’s also one of the more articulate and important blog posts I’ve read in a little while.

It’s an article that is questioning why Dick Cheney is able to continually profane the Constitution with his actions and why the media is hardly mentioning it.

From the Washington Post.com, “Cheney is not subject to the executive order, she said, “because the president gets to decide whether or not he should be treated separately, and he’s decided that he should.”

More constitutional shenanigans, but that’s not really the point of the blog post. The real point is that while this happens, very few places are talking much about it because they are so busy with other key topics. Paris, the slain pregnant woman and the Iphone are all at the top of the list. Silence is approval. If our journalists don’t challenge this kind of overreaching behavior (again) from the Vice President, well no wonder they are trying to dis bloggers all the time.

Oh Ralpie…..

CNN is not news. I cite the following example.

Twice, Anderson Cooper let him say it twice.

Ralph Reed was on CNN tonight and

he said,

‘same tired discredited liberal agenda of higher taxes, government run health care, abortion on demand, cut and run in Iraq, a retreat rather than a foward strategy in the war on terrorism…….’

and again said,

‘ not going to respond to a liberal , big government, abortion on demand agenda’

He was criticizing the Dems for going religious.

Wow, that’s a lot of hate for someone that claims to love God so much.

Live and let live Ralpie. I’m not thrilled that religion is dominating the conversation but apparently people need to hear about it. This has been a wedge issue and he’s probably upset that there is an attempt to redefine the space of ‘abortion on demand, big government wussies.’

How is this ‘news I can trust’? Isn’t that what they say? Sigh.

Pop Culture on Steroids

If you are looking for something to do this weekend and you luv the Simpson’s, you should go see this. It’s the Scottish play done (quickly) by the Simpson’s characters. It’s really good and my face hurt from laughing.

Oh an the encore is Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” by the 25 most annoying voices in the music industry! Bonus.

Here’s the info:

Apr 10th – Apr 15th
The O’Shaughnessy
St. Paul, MN
More Info
Buy Tickets
Box Office: 651.989.5151

The Apple TV

I haven’t taken the time to properly rave about my new AppleTV. It took me a week or so to stop calling it the ITV. There is another product with that name. This one is the AppleTV.

AppleTV on AppleTV

Anyway, this product was pretty much custom made for us. We went to basic cable about a year or so ago. We’ve been getting our content through ITunes, which has worked, but it’s too easy to get way behind on your Daily Shows, so it wasn’t optimal.

Now it’s all in our living room thanks to the Apple TV.

This is going to change things. The biggest discovery that hit me when I sat down to watch it. (I was out of town when it showed up and my husband set it up while I was gone-thanks Thomas) Anyway, the biggest discovery that hit me was that all of a sudden, anybody could be in my living room. Same as network TV, cable TV, etc. Because of the podcasts I subscribe to on ITunes, anyone can be in my living room entertaining me.

That may not seem like a big deal, but just wait. Just think about that for a minute. Right now I’m watching old zefranks because there aren’t any new ones.

ZeFrank on AppleTV

One of the first things I brought up was my podcast. Little ol me with my microphone and my photoshop put this podcast together weekly, PoemOfTheWeek, which is sadly behind schedule at the moment, and that podcast can be in anyone’s living room.

Evol on the Apple TV

It uses ITunes (which is free) and this device, the AppleTV, which is under $300 and all of a sudden all the Internet content, doesn’t have to be watched on the computer.

I like Apple, they make things for me. Maybe I’m in a small little group, but it definitely feels like they understand us.

Rocketboom Rocks.

I loooovvveee Amanda congdon. NOt so much that I love her, it’s just her performance on RocketBoom. It’s so funny, quirky, silly, demonstrative, kitcshy and diverse. If you haven’t seen this video blog and you like quirky, you must see it.

This content is also available via TIVO. Way to go Rocketboom.

No Computer Graphics Were Used in the Making of this Ad

You may have seen or heard about the Honda that makes setting up dominoes seem really easy ad. It’s playing in the UK and it’s 2 minutes long. My husband always says, if the commercials are good, I’ll watch them. (mostly the commercials are not very good) This commercial is one of those exceptions.

Here’s the story:

6 million dollars.
606 takes.
weeks shooting night and day
three months to complete including full engineering of the sequence
two minutes long
becoming the most downloaded advertisement in Internet history
There are six and only six hand-made Honda Accords in the world. To the horror of Honda engineers, the filmmakers disassembled two of them to make the film.
Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls, floor, ramp, and complete Honda Accord) is parts from those two cars. The voiceover is Garrison Keillor.

Here’s the link:

Go Watch and remember, no computer graphics were used in the making of the ad.

Last Updated Daily Call….

The Tivo’s have safely landed. That is to say, the Tivo adventure my husband and I embarked on over a week ago has come to a happy ending. After two different trips to our friends house so Tivo could make all the right phone calls and the span of over a week’s time, the Tivo’s are in their locations and working effectively. We got two of them and they actually talk to one another. It’s great now that they are all hooked up but the process of getting here was pretty grim. The friend’s house that we took the Tivo’s to told us stories of their co-workers that had not gotten as far as we had and just returned the Tivo’s thinking they were broken.

They were broken. We worked our way through that and now they are happily connected to the Internet (not a land line!).

So, to sum it up.

We bought two tivo’s to replace our cable DVR’s (which sucked and we paid rent to have them every month)
They have USB so should have no problem connecting to the home network-
OH WAIT, gotta make a land line call before anything else works, don’t have a land line? just go over to a friend’s house
oh, ok. so now you want me to impose on my friends because your product lacks some significant features—ok……
so we go to friend’s house not once, but twice–apparently it has to make 2 phones calls from the land line, the second of which is about 1 1/2 hours long.
after the second visit to said friend’s we leave the second Tivo there to complete it’s second call
product add-on, we need special equipment to get the Tivo’s onto the home network, first we buy generic and those don’t work, we are stuck with them as returning them would cost us a ‘re-shelving fee’ so it’s not worth it—-SO we had to purchase the Tivo branded products to get the Tivo’s on the home network

The Tivo’s made their calls. They are on the home networks. Tivo’s go.
But man, that was a lot of work. They should really fix this problem. Soon.

I know this is one of those things my friend Mahtab call’s ‘problems of the upper middle class‘. I really have no right to complain about anything. My life is good. But I feel I need to let my product experience with Tivo be known. This is the participation age after all.

Tivo No Go?

Let me just preface this post with a little history.

I’ve had Tivo in my life for a long time. My husband and I got our first Tivo in 1999. We loved it soooo much that I sold my car and carpooled with husband for 3 months so we could save up and give one to everyone in our family.

In recent years we’d been sucked into the DirectTV Tivo’s. Last fall we bought one that was HD. The only one. Being an early adopter has it’s perils. We found out that DirectTV was coming out with it’s own DVR and the Tivo model would not be supported. This made us upset. We had just bought it. Also, it never worked with our VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phone so the software kept degrading. So, since DirectTV had made us unhappy campers as customers, we got cable. If you read my previous post, you can see how that’s working out….

Anyway, on to today. So with cable we had DVRs from the cable company. After Tivo, these DVRs were not such a good experience. They had awful interfaces for finding programs to record and a killer feature, if the show wasn’t on for a couple of weeks, it just forgot about it! So we had to remember to remind our DVR to record programs we liked. Nothing like having electronic equipment with memory issues.

So we went down to basic cable and returned their DVRs. We needed to replace the barely passable cable company DVRs (happily). We were so excited, we were finally going to have Tivo again.

So we went to Best Buy and got Tivo. Everything was happy, happy until we got home and tried to connect it. You have to set it up with a phone connection. Not just any phone connection, but a land line. It has full capability to connect to the Internet, but you can’t set it up that way. You have to freakin call.

I just kept thinking. So, this is a company that makes products for early adopters. Don’t most early adopters have VOIP? Don’t at least some of them? And what about people that just have cell phones.

So we actually had to sit in our living room and brainstorm how we were going to get our Tivo set up. Because once it’s set up, we can use the internet for updates. So, we went through our list of friends to figure out who had a land line. Less than half of our friends do. We did find a good friend with a land line and we’ll go get it set up tomorrow, but WTF is up with that?

So for now, Tivo no go.

A New Kind Of Content Freedom

Just the basic cable. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve downgraded. Most people didn’t have the crazy amount of content coming into their home that we did. But this weekend we realized after months of suspicion, There is nothing on tv. There are so many channels. There is nothing on. It’s on the Internet.

We had recently (within the past year) switched from DirectTV to Time Warner cable. It was a definite downgrade to do that. We had our reasons at the time. I don’t remember what those reasons were anymore……

Then there was cable. And cable is even worse. So bad in fact that we have freed ourselves from it. Again, all the content is on the Internet. We did the math. If we bought everything non-network (which is what basic cable gets us…) we’d have to watch over 50 pieces of content in a month at $2 a shot. (that’s the going rate on iTunes) It’s not likely that we’ll do that, so, bye bye cable, hello iTunes.

If you’ve got good content, people will pay to see it without commercials. Huh.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I love the future.