television

BMX? Men’s BMX and Women’s BMX? Water Polo? Volleyball? Beach Volleyball? Badminton? Table Tennis? Kayaking? Basketball? Field Hockey? Trampoline? Race Walking?

Look. I know that Ping-Pong Table Tennis and Synchronized Swimming have been in the Olympics for a long time. That doesn’t mean they need to remain in the Olympics. Can’t we just all agree that these were silly mistakes, sudden displays of horrible taste, fads gone wild? And who fell asleep at the controls and allowed these new ridiculous “sports” into the Games? Good grief.

And I know I’m alone on this one, but I can’t even get comfortable with Basketball, Soccer, Baseball, and Softball. Hello? These are team sports. What happened to the Olympics being all about individual achievement?

While we were waiting for the Olympics to start out here on the West coast, we caught the end of an old Entourage episode on HBO. The track playing over the end credits was Sinnerman, by Nina Simone. That song is also played during the conclusion of The Thomas Crown Affair remake with Pierce Brosnan, which has been on television a few hundred thousand times lately, and I really like it. This time I remembered to email a note to myself from my iPhone to download it.

Since Phelps isn’t racing until 10pm, I decided to grab the song. I’ll gladly pay $.99 for a track on iTunes, so I fired ‘er up and … ugh … Of course that’s one of the “album only” songs. For some mysterious reason every now and then Apple (or the record label, or who knows) sets it so that some songs cannot be downloaded individually. You have to buy the whole album to get the track. While I’m okay to shell $.99 for a great song, I’m loathe to drop $9.99 for an album when I only want one song.

So of course I flip iTunes the bird and fire up Limewire. But for some reason, even though there are apparently hundreds of copies of that song available, none of them will download. (I suspect my ISP is blocking Limewire, actually.)

Torrents to the rescue. I found a copy on torrents.to, fired up Transmission, and should have the whole Thomas Crown Affair OST in about twenty minutes. This is why I love the Internets.

What’s in Jimmy Kimmel’s pants?

With the demise of the Sopranos, West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and with the interminably long hiatus of Friday Night Lights, the best show on television right now is Rescue Me. It has been months since the last episode aired and I had been anxiously awaiting the season premiere last night. Black billboards featuring only a Pink-Floyd-esque, stretched-neck-and-screaming Denis Leary profile started appearing in LA a few weeks ago, captioned with a very simple “rescue me” and “06-13-07″. All day yesterday I was excited to see what was going to happen. (Last season, of course, ended with a dramatic cliff-hanger.)

Now understand this: I have three televisions, two TiVo boxes, and a DirecTV HD DVR. These three machines have yet to fail me in 3+ years. Any time a show was missed, it was always entirely my fault for not double-checking the priorities. I knew that “Rescue Me” was set to ultra-high priority on the two TiVos and I — incorrectly — thought that I had told the DirecTV DVR to record it as well. But it was not to be. I forgot that the (absolutely horrible) software on the DirecTV DVR wouldn’t let me schedule a season pass for the show when I tried a few weeks ago. There wasn’t a new episode set to air in the near future so I couldn’t program it. So that system recorded Mythbusters and Modern Marvels instead. The two TiVo boxes were set to record Rescue Me on the FXP (the Pacific feed of the FXNetwork) channel at 10pm Pacific time. Unfortunately DirecTV dropped FXP and replaced it with the regular, East-coast feed of FX, so not only was the show airing at 7pm Pacific instead of 10pm, but it was now on channel 248 instead of channel 78. So one TiVo recorded Girls Next Door and the other one recorded what was probably its 3000th episode of Law & Order.

So now I have to wait for FX to replay the premiere on Friday night. All three DVRs are set to record it. Damn.

This is the sort of thing that makes me glad I have TiVo. The Discovery Channel is starting a new series: Deadliest Catch, about Alaskan deep-sea crab fishing. The tagline is $140,000 for 5 days’ work is a job some men would die for. And some do. (I’ll ignore the dangling preposition.) How can that not spark your interest?

Your homework project:
Compare and contrast the information contained in the article quoted below with Keats’ assertion (poetic, true, but an assertion nonetheless) that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

NBC is planning to make a movie about Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the rescued American POW, even if it doesn’t get her permission. Can the network do that? Doesn’t NBC need to buy the movie rights to her life?

Yes, it can, and, no, it doesn’t - so long as NBC sticks to the facts.

I just about never watch television in the morning. I catch about five minutes worth of the Today Show each month. Katie is just as cute as a button, and Matt is the least-threatening male in all of media. This I know not from watching the show, but because these two happy-morning-people are pop culture icons. (They were also the first two people I saw on tv on September 11.) I know there’s a show called Good Morning, America on CBS or ABC, but I wouldn’t know its anchors if you wrapped them in a fish and slapped me in the face with them. That’s not the point.

There’s also a weatherman. For some reason all television news programs must have a ridiculously annoying self-possessed hyperactive ham reporting the weather. I don’t know why this is, but I do know it is a universal truth. The local guys are even more full of nincompoopery than the national ones. (It should be noted that The Weather Channel is the sole, curious exemption from this truth.) Are Americans too scared of weather predictions to take them without a shot of comedy that only a septuagenarian could enjoy?

For as long as I could remember, there was a chubby guy named Willard Scott who told us the weather. When I was a kid my mom always watched the Today Show while we got ready for school. Willard was balding, but he sometimes wore a toupee. Willard looked to be incredibly unhealthy, ready to keel over at any second. He always told us about people who were 100 years old (or more!) who wanted us to know that they got that way by smoking a cigar a day or drinking whiskey every night or having bacon every morning or something else that was completely contradictory to what medical science seemed to think was good for you. Willard frightened me. I didn’t think he was funny; I thought he was scary.

The new Today Show weatherman is Al Roker. Al doesn’t frighten me. I like Al. Al is hip. Al is so hip that he has Al’s Journal, a blog! What could be hipper?

Generally I enjoy watching Biography on A&E. I really don’t like their new tagline, though. “You’re either Biography, or you’re not.” What is that supposed to mean? Are they saying that I am not Biography? I think it’s insulting. Hmph.

“Ten years ago I might not be sitting here today.” - from a commercial for America’s Pharmaceutical Companies

Here’s an idea. How about a television show all about nothing? I wonder if that would be popular. Maybe Jerry should have read NBC’s helpful tutorial, “How to be a TV Writer“.

The Discovery Channel web site is really excellent. They are doing so many things right. If you join their ‘community’ you can have them eMail you reminders when certain episodes or specials are going to air. What a terrific idea!
(They could make the site a smidge friendlier to the bandwidth-impaired; I’m only on a 33.6 dontchaknow?)

Good gravy! I’ve been suffering from a severe case of non-fiction addiction lately. I managed to grab three of the five Oscar movies over the weekend, but otherwise for the last month or so I’ve watched almost nothing that wasn’t on TLC, Discovery, or A&E. I’ve seen specials on mummies, temples, “the Iceman”, pyramids, tombs, the U.S. Mint … and Biographies on everyone from Ron Howard to Saddam Hussein. I just finished reading Cod, started that book on the coelacanth, and was enraptured this evening by an article in The Atlantic on the American Lobster. I need to get a job.

Six Feet Under is - by far - the best show on television. The series started again this weekend. My girlfriend got me an advance copy of the soundtrack and it’s awesome. In addition to several remixes of the title theme, there are 14 killer songs. I’ll be posting the ones I really like on my (recently redesigned) Song of the Moment blog.

(Law & Order is my other favorite show. Reruns are on A&E every night at eleven.)

I know this may be hard to believe, but I became addicted to “Temptation Island 2″ on FOX this season. I saw every episode. Unfortunately, I saw every episode except the last one! What happened?! There is a summary on the FOX site, but I’d really rather get to watch it. Did anyone tape it? TiVo it? Can I get a copy? Help!