unwiredben

Palm returns to television ads with this one from Sprint for our new Palm Centro smartphone:



I like it; it's got a neat idea with the "more you" clones and it shows off the phone without being too geeky. The last TV ad that I saw for us was a Verizon ad for the 700p that ran back in the spring, and it was pushing their whole "the network" thing a little hard, with the army of peeps following the Verizon guy.

Dan Kois nails my biggest problem with the new NBC show "Thank God You're Here" in his article on Slate.  They're not doing "yes, and" but instead doing celebrity Mad Libs.  Somewhat funny, but not nearly as good as it could be.

This was one of my favorite clips that we would show from time to time on The Show With No Name. It's James Brown interviewed in the mid-80s by Sonya on CNN; he mostly responds with song lyrics, screams into the microphone, and just seems very off kilter. It's good stuff.

(By the way, if you've not heard the news, here's L.A. Style's announcement of the event from 15 years ago.)

The Austin American-Statesman had an article on the "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" house today filling in a lot of details. The family sounds like they were in a pretty dire situation; they were the only family in the country with five autistic kids. The house demolition is later today, and local builders will be putting up a new structure all this week. The family heard the official news on Sunday morning and are now on vacation at a camp for special-needs children.

I wonder if I'll be able to hear the demolition from my place. Work is supposed to be going on 24-hours-a-day until completion; I saw lights in the street near the site last night, but didn't try to go investigate again.

I discovered this morning that "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" has taken over a few blocks of my neighborhood; they will be doing demolition soon and will be working on the new house all this week. The security guard said it was for a family with six children, five who are autistic. It's neat to have a production crew nearby, but I'm glad its far enough away not to disrupt my own travels in and out of my townhouse.

1) Seeing Demitri Martin at the Paramount Theater. Last night, Mr. Martin was in town shooting a comedy special for Comedy Central that will air in mid-January. kazanya and I had tickets for the 7PM show, and while we got there about 20 minutes early, no one was seated until right at 7PM because they were busy setting up the stage and the cameras. About 7:30, the opening act, Irish comic David O'Doherty came out and did a set featuring some pretty clever songs on his electronic keyboard. He got into a bit of a row with a member of the crowd who reacted strongly to him making fun of Dell Computers, leading to him confessing to liking Macs, then saying the might not be the best move to make at a show sponsored by Windows Vista.

Demetri's set was quite long and punctuated with breaks for inserting advertisements. He had to retake a few things, and there were a lot of technical difficulties, ranging from poorly placed props on stage to squeaking noises from the chairs in the Paramount. Still, his bits with the flip chart were hilarious, and Annelies said her face was hurting from laughing so much when we left. Definitely look for this one on TV -- we were in row five, stage right, so it's possible we'll be visible as part of the audience briefly.

2) High-Def TiVo. I ordered one of the new Series 3 TiVo units about a month ago, and it had been sitting around, waiting to be hooked up. I finally got it connected on Thursday, then called up Time Warner to get an installer out to put in the CableCards that will let it receive digital cable and encrypted channels. The first time I called, the rep wouldn't sent someone to install cards into a non-TV, but I called back later, got the same rep, and managed to convince her that it was OK.

The installation on Saturday took about two hours, and the installer wasn't able to get things exactly right -- the cards were working, but they weren't decoding anything that was encrypted. I tried calling Time Warner's customer service, but they weren't super helpful. However, I got in touch with a member of the TW network operations staff via a TiVo message board, and he was able to send the right packets my way to get everything working. So, now I've got both the original TW DVR and the new TiVo hooked up to cable, and it's working quite nicely. After I get a chance to move all of my "season passes" over to the TiVo and watch the shows I've got left on the TW box, I'll take it in to the local shop and just rely on the new box for my program recordings.

I hadn't realized just how much I'd missed TiVo's features like suggestions, the much-better-than-a-grid program guide, wishlists, and the to-do list. It's such a superior interface to finding and recording programs over what TW provided on their box. Even the new remote feels really great in the hand, with its ridges along the backside and a battery door that doesn't offer any attractive snaps that I'll play with and break while holding it.

No real content from slightly stressed out Ben right now, but this YouTube video of early-1970's Morgan Freeman looking all-Jimi-Hendrixy and making jokes about matchboxes makes me smile.

When they release the DVDs for the second season of "Grey's Anatomy", I really want them to have not only director/writer/actor commentary tracks for the last three episodes, but also "Audience Reaction" soundtracks where they tape fans of the show yelling at the TV screen. That would be splendid.

I just got done watching the political nerd's version of the Oscars, the annual White House Press Correspondents' Dinner. This year's dinner was a combination of funny and awkward moments. One of the big things they covered is the renovation of the press area, and they showed a droll video tour of crowded news agency rooms with most of the press people poking light fun at themselves. There was also a montage of presidential funny moments that C-SPAN provided, including a slightly too long LBJ story with a great ending. The president's speech was funny, although most of the laughs were delivered by the Bush lookalike that represented his "inner thoughts". The jokes here tended to at the "Jay Leno"-level of political awareness -- if you know that Bush has trouble speaking at times and that Cheney shot a man, you could appreciate these.

The awkward moments were in Stephen Colbert's monologue, which borrowed heavily from material he's already used on his TV show. Colbert's brand of sarcastic irony seemed to fall flat with the press audience, and the material he did on how the gut is the ultimate determinant of the truth just didn't work outside of the cable show context. I did like it when Colbert flubbed a joke about Bush's approval rating and restarted it mid-punchline, doing an apparent ad-lib about the glass being 2/3rd empty. Colbert repeatedly asked for Bush's agreement, but the cut-aways to the President seemed to show a man who was trying very hard not to show disapproval. Colbert was much better later in his speech, and a joke about Washington D.C. being "the chocolate city with the white marshmallow center" gave me a belly laugh. I also appreciated the pretaped segment where Colbert tries out to be the new White House press secretary and succumbs to the wrath of Helen Thomas.

C-SPAN's showing a repeat later tonight, and it's likely there will be another airing soon. I also expect to see parts of it popping up on Google Video and YouTube within hours. It's worth checking out.

Update: Here's Colbert's speech on YouTube in three delicious parts, and here's a transcript for those of you who like your comedy all old-fashionly wordified.

I'm not sure where this came from, but it's hard to look away once it starts. As seen on YouTube, Captain Picard does an alphabet jig

I recorded the premieres of two new series on IFC last night. The first was "The Henry Rollins Show", a new series that continues from Mr. Rollin's previous IFC show, "Henry's Film Corner". The new name and format gives them more flexibility to go beyond just filmmaking and look at the whole spectrum of pop culture. When I saw Henry Rollins at SXSW, I knew I had to check out the new program after hearing how excited he was with the broadened scope.

The first show had an interesting interview with Oliver Stone where they talked about the parallels between Nixon and Bush, what we didn't learn from the Vietnam War, and Stone's view of his films as historical dramas. It was too short; I wish they could have had fifteen more minutes with Stone and really gotten into more of the context of his work. Then, there were two Rollins bits -- a funny "Letter from Henry" to Laura Bush, offering sympathy for having to live with GW, and "Rollins Reconsiders", a sarcasm-filled ode to the Blackberry that didn't quite work for me; I guess I'm too close to the technology, being a bit of a Treo fanatic. Finally, the show closed out with a great performance by Sleater-Kinney doing their song "Entertain". The sound was good, the camera work was a little more creative than the usual TV spot, and there was no censoring of lyrics. They've got another performance clip, "Jumpers", on the web site.

The second show was "Samurai 7", a futuristic anime retelling of Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai". According to the guide, this is being serialized over 26 episodes. The visual style was standard anime, but there was some nice work done with processing footage to provide different points of views. The story's been altered quite a bit, introducing the standard tropes of the "magical" girl and guys in robot suits, but it's certainly recognizable. I've setup a season pass for this; I'm curious how their version of the story evolves.

Both shows re-air on Thursday night if you want to catch them, and new episodes premiere next Saturday -- Henry hosts Chuck D and Jurassic 5 for episode #2.

I went looking on News 8's website to find the footage they shot of the "Darkon" players, and while I didn't find any of that on the site, I found these reports of interest:

Sunday premieres, including "The Cassidy Kids"
Story on Interactive fest (I appear in the shot of people using laptops in the hallway at timecode 0:07 during the main report)

All of their SXSW coverage is collected at http://www.news8austin.com/content/sxsw/stories/.

all about E alerted me to the Statesman's call for people to design their own personal cable television lineup, so I responded too. It's odd -- I really don't think of TV as channels anymore, it's all just a lot of program content that I reuse at my leisure. The idea of sitting down and just watching a channel rather than picking a show from a menu or folder seems quaint.

NETWORKS:
KTBC-DT (Fox)
KVUE-DT (ABC)
KXAN1 (NBC)
KEYE-DT (CBS)
KLRU (PBS)

ENTERTAINMENT:
ME-Television (our local music channel)
Cartoon Network (for [adult swim] mainly)
Comedy Central (duh!)
G4 (mainly for X-Play)

MOVIES:
HBO HD (high-def movies)
Showtime HD (more high-def movies, and "Arrested Development", I hope)
Sundance Channel (my favorite of the two "indie" movie channels)
Independent Film Channel (IFC) (still good, but more of an "indie film greatest hits" channel)

NEWS AND INFORMATION:
News 8 Austin (love having serious local news in a loop)
C-SPAN (late night replays of policy briefings get me excited)

Back in November, I posted about the shows I watch on a regular basis. On review, I think it needs a little update to match the realities of the last few months. Several shows have moved a bit higher on my list, while others have been dropped completely. Some aired their final episode, and some finally hit their stride.

WATCH WHILE FRESH ON THE HARD DRIVE:
House (FOX)
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS)
Grey's Anatomy (ABC)
Scrubs (NBC)

( ...and the others )

The first five minutes of tonight's "Grey's Anatomy" recorded with only the music track, none of the character dialog for the first five minutes. So I just watched the recap of previous shows and the immediate aftermath of last week's episode without being able to tell what anyone said. It looks like I didn't miss too much based on the dialog that just became audible, but it's still very annoying.

I guess I'll be looking forward to the Television Without Pity recap in the next few days. I hope the sound doesn't drop out again... it's fun to watch these characters be so uncomfortable.

Literally, OMG. I saw this earlier today on X-Play, my favorite video game review/juvenile humor/political commentary show. Seriously, they did a whole episode devoted to balls that had a long Howard Zinn ("A People's History of the United States") reference in the middle of a review of Pac-Man World 3.

Here's the link to today's disturbing video:
X-Play presents "The Passion of the Christ 2: Judgement Day".

I just got a bulk email from Time Warner about their coverage of the Olympics, and I noticed that they mentioned "Universal HD". This is a network NBC Universal owned network that mostly shows old TV shows and movies from the Universal library. They've got Knight Rider, Quantum Leap, and Monk running frequently, but it looks like TWC added it to the lineup because they would be carrying a lot of the sporting events. OK, I'm not that excited. However, UHD also runs the new Battlestar Galactica in high def (albeit a bit later than the original Sci-Fi channel run). I'd just sent Time Warner a mail a few days ago asking them to add this channel for that reason, and now I find it sitting at channel 1612. Very cool -- the next HD airing is Sunday night with the early season two episode "Home".

This has been a very busy Sunday. Lots of socializing and some interesting fun with food.

1) veggie sushi and tempura with lizardprincess and her fiancee, followed by viewing episodes of "Little Brittan" and "Good Eats".

2) After getting home, I took a hike to the local coffee shop to spend about 90 minutes on work stuff.

3) When I got home, I took my new kite out to catch some wind in the local school yard. I got it airborne, but it's listing to the right, so I need to make adjustments before the next windy afternoon.

4) I got to prepare a few of my spicy chipotle bean dip (a cooked mixture of refried black beans, refried pinto beans, whole black beans, and pured chipotle peppers), and I also setup a habenero cheddar cheese tray with crackers and a plate of refrigerator pickles, garnished with salt and freshly-ground black pepper.

5) Several friends from "The Show With No Name", including poyboy, came over to watch the Super Bowl in high def. I got to reconfigure my couch and some tables, and we had a really great time. I got to make a lot of jokes at the expense of the teams and officials, and we saw several really exciting plays and a pretty good half-time show by the Rolling Stones.

I'm now down here on the re-reconfigured couch, watching the recording of "Gray's Anatomy", and winding down a little before heading off to bed. Let's hope there's plenty of excitement to come this week.

Watching tonight's recording of "Battlestar Galactica", I noticed a new Wendy's ad where they use their menu items as units of currency to emphasize their $0.99 value menu. It's not very memorable, but my brain went "huh" during the last scene. A husband and wife are getting dressed to go out, and she asks how she looks. He replies, "Like a million crispy chicken nuggets." Assuming that an $1 order of nuggets includes four to five pieces, the husband just devalued her to the vicinity of $240,000. That's probably not a smart move for long-term happiness.

Since arriving in Georgia, I've seen the first 12 episodes of season one of "House, M.D.". The first disc was inhaled in an all-night coding session, with me switching to the DVD window while waiting on compiles. The second disc was watched with my mom and my sister. The third disc was watched yesterday with my sister, mom, and dad. My sister already liked the show, but I think I've made converts out of my parents.

I will say that while I love the characterizations, the show is a bit formulaic. I really like the second season episodes more, since they've been adding more history to Dr. House's character with the arrival of his ex-wife. However, the shows have all been really fun to watch, especially for those "I wish I could say that" moments where House just abuses people with the truth :)