Must do this. Flash made Camino so slow on my old G4 — all it took was a couple of “rich media” banner ads to drag the entire machine down to a painfully slow pace. And hey — now there’s a pref pane to make it even easier.
Monthly Archive for March, 2005
Amongst all the tweaking of Rather’s ethics and mannerisms, as well as numerous ruminations on the future direction of TV news, this tribute from one of his writers really stood out.
Well, we lasted almost nine months with no TV in the bedroom, but it was getting to be about time to be able to lie in bed and watch Curb — I mean, Trading Spaces. And so we are jumping on the LCD bandwagon — the cheapest one of its size by a country mile that, should it not quite live up to our expectations, we can actually return to a brick and mortar store over here. [We could've saved $20 and bought one from a leading online retailer, but I hate doing wholly virtual business. I once paid far too much for the first commercially available mp3-cd player, an off-off-off-brand that arrived dead.]
Using my patented customer research method [googling "{manufacturer} sucks"], I found only one complaint — dealing with the manufacturer’s customer service, and if I have any problems with the set I’ll just take it back to the local Costco store. Case closed. Time to check order status again.
Could I be the only one who thought to myself, when watching the half-season finale last weekend…
[HEY, WE GOT SPOILERS -- IF YOU MISSED ONE OF THE DOZEN OR SO SCREENINGS THIS WEEK AND STILL PLAN ON WATCHING IT SOMEDAY, SKIP BOTH THAT LINK AND THE REST OF THIS POST! NOT LIKE ANYTHING EARTH-SHAKING HAPPENS, BUT STILL.]
…that surely, in San Francisco, there must be an well-off, well-adjusted gay couple — they might even have been married, during Mayor Gavin’s brief officiating period — that would take better care of this child than the scheming foster couple who had him at the beginning of the episode, and the kid would never have waddled out of the forest with a severed digit to begin with [the severed digit was not his own, thankfully]. I’d sort of understand if Monk lived in the Bible Belt, but come on, it’s San Francisco.
Granted, it would’ve made it even more contrived to get Monk together with a toddler and have a Very Special Episode, but did you really buy Monk as seriously considering taking care of a baby boy? I wash my hands almost as much as he does and I couldn’t get past the diaper thing. I stuck poor Abbey with diaper duty the whole time we visited the nephews. I get a shiver just thinking about it now.
And while I’m talking about this, how did the guy who plays Stoudemire not get cast in that Inspector Gadget movie as Chief Quimby? It’s uncanny.
I hope they get back to finding his wife’s killer in the next series of episodes this summer.
This new Wikipedia parody has moments of inspired ridiculousness. I particularly liked its explanations of That One Time, At Band Camp and The Slim Shady Algorithm.
Someday, everything will won’t will be a wiki.
Even if you don’t agree with the views of Sun-Times [and now, NY Daily News] columnist Neil Steinberg, you may well admire the flair he displays in his boilerplate response to trolls.
A key reason cited in Slate’s “Decline of CBS News” article:
Then in May 1994, Fox Broadcasting Co. chief Rupert Murdoch fractured CBS distribution with an investment deal that persuaded eight television stations to flip their network affiliation from CBS to Fox. In big markets such as Detroit, Atlanta, and Milwaukee, CBS’s replacement affiliates were low-rated UHF stations.
I remember this clearly. Yes, in Detroit, the top of the dial is the home of quality fare like “Married by America.” I clearly remember one night in the late 90s when I bought a brand-new VCR and connected it late on a Saturday night, and the first thing it, and I, witnessed was MadTV tackling the topic of vivisection with its trademark grace and style. That VCR is long-gone and I still can’t get that out of my head.
Desperate to maintain a Detroit presence, The Tiffany Net acquired the third-ish largest UHF station [WGPR, which aired Detroit's legendary dance program "The Scene," not to mention "The Dwight Hurlbut Show," taped at NutriFoods] and tried to turn Channel 62 into a powerhouse — perhaps most notably grabbing Seinfeld reruns and commissioning Jerry to intone “Bi-i-ig 62″ in station IDs.
CBS signed famous local anchors like Rich Fisher, utilized resources from its sister station Channel 50, which had a 10pm newscast back when, perhaps even before, it was the original Detroit Fox station — but eventually threw in the towel and gave up entirely. They even eliminated Ch. 50’s news, at first outsourcing to Channel 7 and finally replacing it with sitcom reruns.
Nowadays, they don’t even use the channel number in their identities — it’s all “CBS Detroit” this and “UPN Detroit” that. Granted, in the modern world of cable systems with their various channel lineups, UHF and VHF channel numbers are less important than ever, but still.
Oh, and if you guessed that WGPR stood for “Where God’s Presence Radiates,” you’d be right.
