- Number 9, number 9… I’m in there somewhere.
- Dear god, it’s a pig on wheels!
- Noel Murray:
It doesn’t take much tweaking to turn a great idea for a TV series into something ridiculous. Want to make a show about a diverse cross-section of humanity forging a new society? Or about race relations in Manhattan? Or the dangers of humanizing automatons? Slant it the wrong way, and you may end up with Gilligan’s Island, Diff’rent Strokes, or Small Wonder.
His whole review of the latter’s 1st season DVD set is interesting — though it will come as no surprise to anyone who saw the show growing up (or who has been forced to cap it regularly on HCC) that it’s pretty terrible.
- Is it just me or does the Authors Guild’s argument here seem to be: “we could lose, so we won’t fight, because even if we won, we’d have to keep fighting, so we’ll just give up”? Frankly, I think I may be with Ursula K. Le Guin on this one.
- And finally, you wouldn’t think an episode of the ’90s Hollywood Squares would be particularly funny, but I think this one’s definitely worth it, just for Gilbert Gottfried [via]:
tv
Tuesday various
- The headline reads, Vegetative state patients can respond to questions. This seems significantly more scientific than some other recent stories in this area. [via]
- All I can really say to this argument — and to James Cameron’s own insistence that his actors were snubbed in the Oscar nominations — is that hey, if you want sci-fi films to be nominated more often, make better sci-fi films. Avatar an important movie (and so are Up and District 9 to some extent), but Avatar is not a particularly good movie. That’s just my opinion, but I think it’s a defensible opinion and one easily shared by members of the Academy. Maybe these movies aren’t being snubbed out of some lingering genre bias; maybe they’re just genuinely not as good.
There’s maybe some bias against computer-assisted performances like you’ll find in Avatar, but as Mark Evanier writes:
There may be a solid argument that in Avatar, Sigourney Weaver is “acting” her role just as certainly as she acts any roles she plays. But you can’t argue that when we see her performance, we’re only looking at the work of Ms. Weaver with the guidance of Mr. Cameron. There are a lot of other people making that character like that…enough to make it feel inappropriate for an award that honors individual achievement. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. But I think that’s how it is.
- Word to the wise: don’t look at porn while at work. And definitely don’t look at porn while your office computer is on live television. [via]
- I have to say, I really loved this Previously On Lost 2: Lost In Five Minutes video. Huge props for actually covering all the big moments of the past five years — though also huge spoilers if you’ve never seen the show. [via]
- And finally, speaking of Lost, Todd VanDerWerff (who might just be my favorite television critic at the moment) explains why, while it’s okay for a show to have a plan, it’s usually better for them to work around it:
Could you plan out a TV show to the extent that some Lost fans seem to want the series to be planned out? As a matter of fact, you could, but it almost always ends up being a lesser series. Look, for example, at ABC’s big Lost replacement hopeful FlashForward, now off the air until March in hopes that absence will make viewers’ hearts grow fonder. The series’ creators—David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga—entered the series with a hard and fast plan for where all of the plot points would lead and for where all of the characters would go. This was one of the things that made the show so attractive to networks, who’d been burned by serials that often seemed to have no idea where they were going before. In practice, though, it’s been woefully terrible. The plot, confined by the fact that it knows exactly where it’s going and what all of the characters are going to do, can’t make any of the organic evolutions that any TV series needs to make to be successful. Everyone’s trapped and hemmed in by a plan that has no wiggle room. (A similar thing happened to the vaunted ’90s sci-fi series Babylon 5, though unplanned and uncontrollable events there forced enough of a sense of organic evolution onto that series that it had a little breathing room.)
Sunday
Today was an awful lot like yesterday, only with nicer weather and the Sunday crossword. I haven’t quite finished the crossword just yet, but the weather did allow me to go for a nice walk and get caught up on a backlog of podcasts. (Did you know, when they’re designing a new typeface, they’ll typically start with the letter H?) Not a particularly exciting day, but pleasant nonetheless.
I’m not watching this year’s Super Bowl, even for the ads or the halftime show or whatever. I’m just not really all that interested. Instead, I’m watching some other television online — man, I love QI (and this was a particular funny episode — and trying to finish the crossword.
Hope you’re having a good weekend too!
Wednesday various
- A whole lot of talk today has been about Apple’s new iPad. (You shouldn’t have any trouble finding plenty of links on your own.) Almost despite myself, I’m guardedly optimistic about its future and genuinely interested in its application — in a way, I should add, that I generally wasn’t interested in the iPhone. I think I’m going to wait a little before I try to justify buying one for myself, at least until a few more in-depth reviews are in. As Brad Stone notes in the New York Times, “Nothing ages faster than the future when you get it in your hands.”
- Rachel Swirsky: “Genre is a tool. It’s not a prophecy.“
- Here’s a fascinating article on confessions of a book pirate:
TM: Do you have a sense of where these books are coming from and who is putting them online?
[TRC:] I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me – bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.
I’m sure that there are others – the compulsive collectors who download and re-share without ever reading one, the habitual pirates who want to be the first to upload a new release, and people with some other weird agenda that only they understand. [via]
- Meanwhile, the world’s largest book — it’s five feet tall by six feet wide, and it takes six people to lift it — will be displayed with its pages open for the first time. I like how the Guardian calls it “almost absurdly huge.” How big does a book have to be before they’d drop that “almost”? [via]
- And finally, a movie made by chimpanzees. All the obvious jokes aside, I wonder if this is really as impressive as it may at first sound — since, as the BBC notes:
The apes are unlikely to have actively tried to film any particular subject, or understand that by carrying Chimpcam around, they were making a film.
This seems less like a film from the chimps’ perspective than footage they accidentally shot. Still, the study as a whole does sound intriguing. [via]
Monday various
- Would you have spotted the fraud? I’m not convinced I would have. A good reason to avoid any unattended debit or credit card reader. [via]
- Mark Evanier further defends Jay Leno:
What I don’t get is why some people think Leno had a moral obligation to retire and disappear. They didn’t like that he did that 10 PM show. They didn’t like that he was willing to do the half-hour show at 11:35 when that was proposed. They don’t like that he’s going to take back a show that he and his crew didn’t want to give up in the first place. I know some of you don’t think the guy’s ever funny but you oughta try what I do. If I don’t like a performer, I don’t watch him. It’s just as effective as if he did disappear and it saves a lot of time.
- Speaking of Leno, he’ll apparently be hosting this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner. I guess it’s better than Rich Little, but not by much.
Then again, Leno’s hosted the event before (in 2004), and, Stephen Colbert’s 2006 appearance notwithstanding, they haven’t really been known for making memorable choices for host. Anybody remember Yakov Smirnoff’s routine from 1988 or Elayne Boosler’s from 1993? Me neither.
- Last week on Twitter, I joked that in the new movie Extraordinary Measures, Harrison Ford is entirely computer-generated. By law, Brendan Fraser’s co-stars must be at least 35% CGI. Turns out I maybe wasn’t so far from the truth: Ford’s character didn’t exist in real life. I guess they figured he’d be more convincing as a Nebraskan than as a Taiwanese.
- And finally, speaking of Twitter, the first live tweet from space! [via]