posted 2008/06/25 at 20:28
From my previous experience going to school with the children of the owners of our local cable provider (and the local paper as well), I know that the people in charge of my cable are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer. This is a cable system, after all, that thinks that there are enough sports in Toledo for us to have our own 24-hour all-local sports channel. (They actually broadcast some of the gym games from my old private school.) This is a cable system where each of the big three local television networks have their own 24-hour local weather channels, none of which are any good. (I'm hoping that NBC buys up The Weather Channel so we can get a proper Weatherscan channel in here.) It's not like I have much time to watch television right now -- I only watch to keep up on news and the pop culture of the students I teach -- but I don't exactly have that many good options available to me here in Toledo.
Our cable company's latest brainchild is a 24-hour local real estate listings channel. I'm not particularly sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that this channel bowed right in the middle of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, but it doesn't strike me as a good omen. That being said, the idea of having a real estate channel strikes me on some levels as novel; television offers a lot of ways for real estate agents to market their properties that aren't available through traditional channels, such as walk-through tours of properties. The thing is, the only actual motion video on the channel, apart from the commercials, are "handy how-tos" segments from the too-perky, too-plastic "host" of the channel. When they actually show a house on the channel, they only show the same static photos you'd find in a listings magazine, or a Website from ten years ago. Some of the photos even look like they were taken using a disposable camera with a lens that someone sneezed over before using it.
The idea of having a television channel without moving images is silly enough, but at least they have audio on there. Unfortunately, in addition to featuring the same kind of low-grade muzak you'd expect on a channel like this, the audio consists of different people reading the fill-in-the-blanks advertising copy the realtors come up with to try to sell the house. That stuff is bad enough to read, but when people are saying it aloud, and the same key bullshit phrases get repeated every fifteen minutes ("cozy" means you'll feel like a sardine packed in there, "needs TLC" means that the walls are falling apart, etc.), you can literally feel people's opinions of real estate agents drop. I'd laugh at how poorly put together this channel is if it wasn't so sad.
Labels: television
posted 2008/06/09 at 21:31
I can't say that I've been all that pleased with all the airplay that Bill O'Reilly's meltdown on Inside Edition has gotten these past few weeks. Granted, I don't care for O'Reilly much at all, and I won't deny feeling a touch of the old schadenfreude when I saw the video the first few times. The video got really old in a hurry for me, though, and the more I see other people harp on it over and over -- Keith Olbermann is the most famous of these people, but I'm even thinking about liberal bloggers here -- the more I lose my taste for it. You can only tell a joke so many times in a given time frame before people stop laughing and start rolling their eyes whenever someone starts to tell the setup, and in a similar fashion you can only show that video so many times before O'Reilly dropping those f-bombs and blowing his stack gets banal and blasé.
Those of you who remember the pre-.org days doubtlessly remember me doing similar stuff online back in the day. Yes, I'm actually empathisizing with Bill O'Reilly here; it isn't the first time I've done so, and it likely won't be the last. We all have episodes like that, but some of us happen to do it in a more public, amusing, and downright stupid fashion. Doing it on the Internet is the worst of all because it's so easy for someone to make a permanent record of it; it's only been in the past few years that I've really come to understand how everything I do online can and will come back to haunt me. I'm assuming that people in front of television cameras should similarly run under the assumption that anything they do in front of the camera, whether or not the little red light is on, could find its way out into the world later. At least I would assume so today in our satellite and digital recording era; back in 1989, though, I have to assume that not as much was being recorded due to the costs of professional videotape and archiving and all of that. Regardless, I think Bill O'Reilly had an expectation of privacy there that kind of got screwed over, and regardless of how amusing or vulgar or just plain wrong his Inside Edition meltdown was, to be making such a big deal out of it nearly two decades later strikes me as, well, kind of missing the point. Shouldn't people who dislike O'Reilly be spending their time constructing solid arguments against his positions, not laughing over him shouting at his camera crew from nineteen years ago?
Episodes like this really make you double back on your own steps to make sure that you're not doing anything that could come back to haunt you later. I mean, I like to think that I blog openly, but there's lots of stuff I want to say on here that I don't say because I'm worried it could be used against me later. (Hence my relative silence about Dad's death, at least for now.) I've been using Twitter for several weeks now, though, and that's just adding another layer of coverage about me, by me, that is part of a permanent record about my life and the things I'm doing. Now that Apple's incorporating GPS into the next generation of iPhone (and I have to admit, between the new features and the lower price, Apple's actually impressed me), soon we'll even be creating records of the places we've been on a minute-to-minute, metre-to-metre basis. Orwell wrote about the perils of Big Brother watching over us all, but now we're doing Big Brother's work for him. I don't think I've wanted to go on a vacation into the wilderness of Michigan more than I do at this exact moment.
Labels: personal, television
posted 2008/02/09 at 15:32
It says something about this election campaign that the candidate I'm most appreciative of right now is Mitt Romney, as his withdrawl from the Republican nomination means I'll only have about half as many candidate spots on my television to deal with leading up to Ohio's primary next month. Ohio doesn't look to be in play for Huckabee, and by the time Ohio rolls around I think Huckabee's momentum will be completely drained so McCain won't have any real need to buy more but a sprinkling of ad time locally. The Democratic nomination will still definitely be in play by the time of the primary, though, and although part of me feels like I should be excited that there's finally an Ohio primary that might matter, I am not looking forward to a month of dueling Clinton and Obama spots on every show on the dial. I got sick enough of those spots leading up to the Michigan primary (even though only Republicans bought ad time on Fox Sports Net Detroit), and I'm tired of watching the Obama and McCain spots that air on Countdown. Given how tight the Democratic race is right now, and given how close Ohio was in the 2004 election, I'm guessing that any moment now I won't be able to watch a half-hour of any commercial network on cable without seeing a Clinton or Obama ad buy.
I'll be skipping the primary vote, because there won't be anything else on the ballot that day and because I can't vote in the "official" state primaries because doing so automatically registers me as a member of whatever party's primary I vote in. I would much rather see Obama as the Democratic nominee than Clinton, but I'm probably not going to vote for him in the general election anyway. More to the point, I still remember several registered Democrats in my first-semester MA classes who got hassled by Ohio Republicans that year as the Republican Party challenged the voter registration of several people I knew, holding off on submitting the challenges until the legal deadline so that the students couldn't call off of work on such short notice to attend the hearings about their registrations. I can't help but wonder if Ohio Democrats might not try something similar with we Greens this year, given how ridiculous they were last time around in making sure that not even Nader's write-in votes would get counted. (Seriously, if they'd put that kind of effort into promoting their own candidate then Kerry might be in the White House now.)
Ohio's Green Party will handle its primary at their convention in April, although people who won't be attending can mail or e-mail a ballot before then. I think I may actually go to the convention, though, even though it's all the way across the state and there's no way I could reasonably make a daytrip of it. I'm still hoping that Nader gets in the race again, because I don't like the prospect of Cynthia McKinney winning the nomination; I'm still not getting a good vibe off of her. If Nader doesn't come in then I'll probably vote in the primary for Kent Mesplay, but I think the Greens need Nader more than ever now. Particularly if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, people are going to need an alternative to the spectre of four or eight years of DLC neoliberalism, and even if there isn't a realistic chance of winning the presidency, at the very least we might stand a chance of getting that magical 5% of the popular vote that would give the Greens tens of millions of dollars of federal matching funds in 2012. I haven't been too directly involved with the Green Party itself since I first registered to vote, but more than ever now I feel compelled to do what I can to help the party along.
Labels: commercials, greenparty, politics, television
posted 2008/01/14 at 21:11
Judge grants Kucinich entry to NV debate (AP via Yahoo! News)
If you were watching Countdown tonight, then Keith Olbermann did, in fact, inform you of this decision, as well as the fact that NBC was going to appeal it. However, in the resulting discussion Olbermann had with Chuck Todd, Kucinich's presence at the debate was never mentioned again. Todd even went so far as to ludicrously claim that tomorrow's MSNBC debate would be the first debate where the "Big Three" of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama would be "seated down" and talking about the issues, when the most recent debate on ABC -- the one from which Kucinich and Mike Gravel were excluded -- featured the Big Three and a fourth candidate who wasn't polling as well, in this case Bill Richardson, sitting and discussing the issues. MSNBC wouldn't even change their graphic advertising the debate during Countdown, either by adding Kucinich's photo to those of the Big Three or by simply scrapping the photos altogether.
Given how much big corporations, big media, and conservatives have tried to dumb down our political and social discourse over the past thirty years, given how they have tried to make everyone lower their expectations about the behaviour of anyone else but themselves, it is all too ironic that, when faced with a court order to actually make their debate fully informative and to let people know that there are still more than three Democrats actively campaigning for their party's presidential nomination, NBC would act like a petulant child. MSNBC not only continued to ignore Kucinich's campaign by failing to make any mention of him on tonight's Countdown except for the parenthetical about the court order, it not only continued to abandon its role as a journalistic organization by arbitrarily deciding which of the candidates deserve to be mentioned on its broadcast, but it went so far, even after the court order, to still talk about and promote its upcoming debate as if Kucinich weren't even there. The closest analogy there is to this situation is to a group of bratty kids, who decide that the best way to not have to deal with the "brain" of the neighbourhood is simply to ignore him or her, treating that child as if he or she were visible and didn't exist.
That there has been no great national dialogue, either in this presidential campaign cycle or the previous one, over the media's role in determining which presidential candidates do or do not get airtime to have their voices heard, is a sad testament to just how thirty years of rule by misanthropic Republicans and Democrats have affected this country. Perhaps Dennis Kucinich doesn't have Mitt Romney's Reaganesque hair or Barack Obama's boyish grin or Hillary Clinton's breasts, but his campaign is trying to provide an alternative for Democratic voters who are tired of a party that has sold its soul for the past sixteen years, abandoning all the social justice issues it stood for in a misguided effort to retain its own power and relevance at any cost. Kucinich not only provides that voice to Democrats and like-minded independents, but polls in which voters are asked to judge candidates based on issues, not names or money, have shown time and time again that, if this primary were to be decided on the issues themselves, Kucinich would not only be a front-runner but he would stand a damn good shot at being the eventual candidate. With money comes power, though, and just as the financial machines of the Clintons and Obamas and Romneys allow them to down out the Kuciniches and Gravels and Pauls, NBC and its team of highly-paid lawyers look set to silence Kucinich from tomorrow's debate, all for the ratings the "first debate between the Big Three" might provide.
That's what this is all really about, is ratings. Keith Olbermann has often said that television news got it all wrong a long time ago, back before even his youth, when it was decided that television news would be commercial, that the companies of this nation would so easily be able to exert control over the newscasts with the threat of pulling advertising and cutting the newscasts from the funds they needed to survive. On this point I could not be in fuller agreement with Olbermann, but perhaps now Olbermann needs to reexamine his own adherence to this statement. For years now Olbermann has profited quite handsomely as being the alleged voice of the left in the mainstream media, as the one who would not only stand up to the wrongs perpetrated by Republicans in all branches of office, but who would stay true to his principles no matter what. If Olbermann truly believes that the influence of corporate interests in television news is one of the great ills of our society, then he needs to look at NBC's actions in trying to silence the one candidate who most embodies the positions Olbermann posits in his "Special Comments," and at his own role in that silencing. Until then, all of Olbermann's talk about the evils of corporate media will ring distinctly hollow.
Labels: kucinich, politics, television
posted 2008/01/13 at 19:31
Last month when I was so sick, I really didn't pay attention to politics as much as I normally would, since I didn't feel up to taxing my mind so much. On the plus side, this did get me to stop reading the Huffington Post, which I had basically just come to "accept" as a site to keep me marginally informed on certain issues but I'd always openly loathed for caving in to the political centre time and again. Doubtless I'm missing all number of anti-Ralph Nader blog entries right now as everyone there at once bemoans the Democrats potentially nominating Hillary Clinton for President while simultaneously warning readers that a vote for the Green Party is a vote for the Republican candidate. I've since tried to make due with other Websites to get the pulse of the American left (as well as those who continue to falsely claim to be liberals), but apart from the Green Party's own Website, I'm not having much luck.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann is another of those outlets that I think is portrayed as being far more left-leaning than it really is, but I continue to catch it on a regular basis. Not only does it help keep me informed on certain aspects of the political scene, but I've been a fan of Keith's from his days with Dan Patrick on ESPN, and I like his wit. That being said, I was somewhat shocked late last week when Olbermann announced that this Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate on MSNBC would be the first debate that was between just Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are both still in the race, of course, and a quick trip to Kucinich's Website reveals that both had been invited earlier, but that NBC News, specifically Chuck Todd, recinded that invitation last week, presumably for the sake of being able to market this upcoming debate as the first between the "Big Three" Democratic candidates.
My anger at Kucinich (and to a lesser extent Gravel) being excluded from yet another debate should go without saying. However, after Olbermann has campaigned so hard against keeping our troops in harm's way in Iraq, after not only ripping the current administration's Iraq policies but also lambasting the Democrats for caving in to last year's Iraq funding bill -- going so far as to compare Harry Reid's explanation for his vote to Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" proclamation -- the question begs to be asked of just where Olbermann's voice is now, now that his own network is excluding from their debate the only two Democrats who are promising to pull our troops out of Iraq in their first term of presidency. For all of Olbermann's legendary personality clashes with his places of employment, he has always prided himself on showing backbone, and not just because he was born with an extra lumbar vertebra; in one famous instance he wrote a one-thousand word memo to his employers to complain about the poor treatment of lower-paid workers at that network. If Olbermann does not now take his own network to task for excluding the two demonstrably consistent anti-war candidates from their debate for the sake of marketing, then my viewing of Countdown may well go the same way as my reading of the Huffington Post.
Labels: kucinich, politics, television
posted 2007/11/26 at 21:17
Bam! Emeril Leaves Food Network (mediabistro.com)
I had heard a while ago that Emeril had planned to leave Food Network, or at least discontinue Emeril Live, and I've been pained to see Food Network begin to transition to Alton Brown as the "face" of the network. I haven't watched Emeril regularly since before the fire, but back when I first got DirecTV in the late 90's Emeril Live was probably the show I watched the most back then. Mom owns several of his cookbooks, and my world-famous brownies are pretty much a slight tweak of one of his recipes. I haven't watched Emeril on a regular basis for several years now, although that's more due to lack of time than lack of interest, but this news kind of saddens me.
It should go without saying that I'm not happy with Alton being promoted to the network's most promoted star. I disliked Good Eats from the very first episode, and I think Alton himself is, pardon my language, a smug jackass. I can't stand how Alton thinks he knows the only "right" way to cook everything, and how he presents himself as the Goddess's own gift to cooking and television. I understand how shows like Mythbusters are hot properties these days (and that's one show I haven't been catching enough of lately), but at least Mythbusters is informative and entertaining. I usually catch at least one absurdly incorrect statement or atrocious recipe on every episode of Good Eats I'm forced to suffer through (it would figure that everyone else in the house is a big fan of the show), and I shudder at how Alton could possibly consider his awful puns to be anything even approaching entertainment. I can't figure out how Food Network could basically build itself on the back of a goofy, fun-loving chef who always reminds his audience that good cooking "isn't rocket science," and has now turned around and made a conceited jerk who turns everything into rocket science its primary star. Don't even ask me what I think of Iron Chef America, seriously.
Funnily enough, though, the one cooking show I have been catching on a regular basis is also from another former Food Network star. I had heard about Ming Tsai getting a PBS cooking show a while back, but it was only in the past couple of months that I found where I could watch it locally. Since it airs here early Saturday afternoons, when I have a bit of free time, I've been watching it regularly. I can't say that I've ever been a big fan of Asian fusion cooking, and no one would ever dare to say that Ming has a larger-than-life personality built for television, but I always liked East Meets West on Food Network back in the day, and I've enjoyed watching Ming's new show. If nothing else, watching Jeff Smith and Mary Ann Esposito on PBS Saturday afternoons when I was younger was what got me into cooking in the first place, so being able to watch a friendly face (and a good chef) on PBS these past few Saturdays has been nice and kind of a trip down memory lane.
Labels: food, television
posted 2007/11/12 at 21:15
Several months ago it was hard not to notice just how many piles of entertainment media I had in my room. These piles had started accumulating a little over a year ago as my time just got completely sapped up with finishing my MA, but even after graduating I noticed that the piles just kept getting bigger and bigger. It wasn't that I didn't have free time, but I lacked the initiative to go through them for some reason. Granted, in some cases I was kind of dreading that I wouldn't like things as much as I was hoping I would -- particularly new CDs by Björk and Tori Amos -- but a lot of this stuff was stuff that I actually wanted to listen to or see or read, and I just couldn't force myself to go through them. Finally this past summer I did force myself to go through these piles, although I never did get through the DVD pile.
I've been trying to go through the DVD pile a bit at a time here, and a few days ago I finally finished going through the boxed set of Chef! which I'd been watching an episode or two at a time before going to bed. Chef! is one of those great British comedies that appeals to my darker, less nice side, and I hadn't been able to watch it for several years since our local PBS station took it down due to viewer complaints about all the cursing in it. However, I can't say that I was too thrilled to watch the final season, which I hadn't watched before and had heard didn't live up to the expectations set from the previous two seasons. Still, it was something of an accomplishment just for me to get all the way through that set, and now I can only hope that I can start going through the rest of my DVD pile in similar fashion.
That being said, all of a sudden I have a book pile starting again, and it looks like it's only going to get bigger over the next several weeks. I've said before that for someone with two degrees in English, I seemed to play video games a lot more than read books when I was growing up. Now that seems to be changing, though. (Let's forget my dancey games for a moment here, since for me they're more exercise than video gaming.) I've got a lot of books that I really want to get through in my pile, not even counting stuff on my shelves that I've either never read or want to re-read. I just can't seem to find enough time in my days to get through all this stuff, and considering my teaching load is being doubled next semester, I'm starting to wonder just how to make the most efficient use of my time. I'm certainly not doing a good job of it right now.
Labels: books, dvds, entertainment, television
posted 2007/11/11 at 20:39
Happy seventh birthday, seanshannon.org. I will have a .journal entry to commemorate the anniversary, but as has been the case so often these past few years, I've got to put off writing it until I get to Thanksgiving break and have some time to write it well (and also finish dealing with some personal stuff that's kind of weighed me down here lately).
On a mostly unrelated note, last night I think I came the closest to throwing up that I've been in several years. I had the late game of Hockey Night in Canada on my television, and this commercial aired where this young woman with a chef's outfit was talking about how great her life was and how she had gotten engaged recently. A somber look overtook her face, though, and she said that she wasn't going to get married to him the following weekend like they'd planned because she was about to have a horrible accident. She started to talk about how she should have cleaned up the grease spill earlier and how she shouldn't have put the deep fryer in the position it was in, and in mid-sentence she turns and slips on the spill, throwing a huge amount of liquid out of the pot she was carrying, covering her face, splashing behind her and causing the stove behind her to catch fire.
Now, up to this point I'm thinking that this is a highly effective commercial. At this point, though, the woman lets out this blood-curdling screen as another chef bends down by her to help her, and then, for about a half-second, the shot snaps to the woman, the skin on her face and hands completely scalded, before snapping to black, finally showing the URL of the Website people are supposed to go to in order to learn about safety. I'd been noshing on Doritos just before the commercial aired, and for about a good twenty seconds I thought I was going to lose it. I ran to the upstairs bathroom and lifted the toilet lid, but nothing came out. Needless to say, I kept my eyes glued to my flat panel here whenever the commercial came back on, as it did several times throughout the rest of the night.
I know that we're living in a post-Saw world and that some people argue that you need these kinds of jarring images in order to attract people's attention these days. I can remember a debate several months ago when Volkswagon started showing car crashes from inside the cars in a line of their commercials, the ones that famously ended with the person driving the Volkswagon saying "Holy shit" at the end (with the -it cut off by a similar snap to a black screen). However, I think there is a world of difference between showing car crashes (which despite all of the twisted steel never had a drop of blood or even the slightest hint of injury) and flashing to a shot of a woman with third degree burns on her face and hands. Even though Poppy Z. Brite is one of my favourite authors and I've written a bit of horror myself, I really have no desire to see horror on television or in films, and it couldn't be more obvious that this commercial was trying to play on horror-film schlock here, particularly given that they cut away from the burnt woman so quickly.
More to the point, this is not a commercial that should be airing when children are so likely to be watching it. The commercial only started airing during the late-night game, but even assuming that it aired only in eastern Canada and they didn't show it in the west, there are still a lot of children watching CBC that late on a Saturday night during hockey season. Hockey brings Canadians of all ages together in a way that the NFL only wishes they could get football to do here in the US, and little kids don't need to be seeing stuff like that. I'm too much of a libertarian on these issues to say that the Canadian government should outlaw the commercial, but given some of the ridiculous things some Canadian bodies (in particular the CRTC) does to regulate Canadian television, I would have thought that they'd never allow this commercial to air, much less during Canada's signature sports broadcast.
Labels: canada, commercials, freespeech, hockey, television
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