Last night we were watching an episode of “Scrubs”. It featured an anime-eyed, ukelele playing actress who I vaguely recognized. Here she is in a romantic duet with the hapless, sweaty lawyer Ted:
Apart from being an actress, I remembered that she was in a musical comedy duo. I couldn’t remember their name, but I did recall the title of one of their songs: “Pregnant Women Are Smug”. Depending upon your state of mind, that video may either anger or amuse you. Proceed at your own risk.
So I started to google “pregnant women are”, and was amused by the possible results that Google suggested:
What an odd set of suggestions, eh? The results raised a related question in my mind: why would somebody phrase their search as “pregnant women are hot” or “pregnant women are moody”? It seems way more natural to search for “hot pregnant women” or “why are pregnant women moody?”
As you’re no doubt aware, hockey season has begun. In the furnished apartment, there’s only a crappy, old, 20″ CRT television. Broadcast television, of course, is getting more and more widescreen. Watching hockey broadcasts on a traditional TV, I have the sense that I’m missing a good 20% of the action beyond the edges of the square screen.
So, I want a 26″ widescreen LCD TV. We’re going to get a whole home theatre setup when we build our house, so ours is a temporary need. I hoped to lessen the impact of the purchase by buying used, and selling or giving away the TV in a year or two.
That’s proven surprisingly tricky. For three weeks, I’ve been keeping an eye on Craiglist and Used Victoria, and there are very few televisions that fit that description. I’ve also searched on eBay, where there are more options. However, the shipping charges generally make the TVs more expensive than going down to Future Shop and carrying it home.
Finally, I visited a pawn shop here in Victoria. They had exactly one TV–an old CRT among the dozens of speakers and stereos. I asked about this, and they explained that they’d just been through the ‘back to school rush’. Bloody university students, eh?
Here’s what I’m seeing: stores mark down new televisions so much that there’s little incentive to buy a used one of a similar calibre. Or maybe few people are done with their first LCD TV, and the used market will expand in a few years. What do you think?
UPDATE: Here’s another possibility. The prices of these TVs have dropped sharply in the past three years. When people are ready to upgrade, they’re bummed to find out that their three-year-old $1200 TV can be bought for $400 new. So they don’t bother selling it used.
I snapped this photo while having a quick dinner at the Fernwood Inn before an event at the Belfry Theatre. It’s the lower-right corner of a TV set showing Monday Night Football. As far as I could figure, there was no sound issuing from the TV:
Interface designers never fail to surprise me in the ways they can screw up. What do you suppose ‘1/2 Mute’ means? Because, as it happens, mute means ’speechless’. So you really can’t be half-mute, can you?
I’m reminded of a story about a decade old, which I recount with affection, not mockery. My aunt come over to our house. She’d just arrived, and turned to notice our TV. “Oh,” she said, “there’s a mute on the screen.” In fact, the TV had been muted, and was displaying ‘MUTE’ in the lower-right corner.
An a related note, I tried to search for a URL for the Fernwood Inn. Claiming that I was headed for the Fernwood Inn, Google pointed me to an Australian fitness centre. The following screenshot illustrates the unusual error:
James emailed and asked why I hadn’t written about the Conservative government’s recent cuts to cultural programs. In truth, I kind of missed that whole debacle. Plus, it looks like they’ve been sufficiently raked over the coals for that one.
It’s an odd move, because up to now it seems to me that the Harper government has been relatively benign on cultural funding. I certainly remember deeper cuts from other Conservative governments. And their cuts only amounted to less than CAN $50 million. Was saving that money really worth all the grief they’ve suffered in the media? Or maybe it’s meant to be a gesture to their base?
Section 120 is a Joke
I have, however, been meaning to criticize the Harper government’s planned Bill C-10. That link goes to the CBC’s rather critical analysis of the proposed legislation. If ever you wanted an example of the CBC’s liberal bias, there it is. Here’s a summary of the problematic section of the Bill:
The issue that concerns Canada’s film and television community is Section 120, which would allow the Heritage Minister (currently Josée Verner) to withdraw tax credits from productions determined to be “contrary to public policy.”
The minister would create a set of guidelines for film and television producers. The guidelines have not yet been established but would cover violence, hatred and sexual content in film and TV productions, or anything else the minister believes should not be financed by Canadian taxpayers. Committees within the heritage and justice departments would be charged with vetting productions and implementing the guidelines.
In essence, the legislation gives the federal government carte blanche to bypass existing vetting mechanisms to deny funding to cultural works of which it disapproves. On top of infringing on free speech (even this conservative agrees with that), it will have a chilling effect on the kinds of movies which get made in Canada. Would The Boys of St. Vincent or Eastern Promises have been made in a Bill C-10 world? It’s worth mentioning that the Liberals had similar plans to restrict arts funding. It was a lousy idea then, and it’s a lousy idea now.
Poised, Disciplined and On Message
But don’t listen to me on this. Listen to the excellent interview (MP3) that Sarah Polley gave on CBC a couple of months back. If you’re ever going to advocate in the media for a cause, this interview is essential listening. Ms. Polley is incredibly poised and disciplined, articulates her position clearly and remains on-message. She never needlessly attacks the Harper government, nor does she sound like some hippie artist who’s making porn on the taxpayer’s dollar. She makes an impassioned but rationale and professional defense of her stance.
I so often see advocates of environmental and social causes on the news, and they waste their sound bite on lame, slightly nutty critcriques of whoever they’re railing against. Plus they’re frequently dressed shabbily and look frumpy. That sounds trivial, but in a world governed by televisual aesthetics, it’s not. I don’t care if you’re just back from a week of protest and bongo drumming in Clayoquot Sound. Shave, comb your hair and put on a suit before you go on TV.
“I think as Canadians there is a bit of a tiredness in seeing all American stuff,” Shaun Donnelly, president of Real Productions, said during an interview on Friday.
“There is always that thrill for something that is local and you get the sense that these are people you can meet at the supermarket.”
It just struck as the most ludicrous quote to offer. We can finally enjoy Newfy accents in our porn? Is that really a priority for Canadians?
I’m not sure how I decided to watch Generation Kill. Maybe I was looking for something to download while Julie was away (and thus something she’d be uninterested in watching). In any case, I’m glad I did.
“Generation Kill” is a riveting 7-part HBO mini-series about a Marine platoon engaged in the early days of the invasion of Iraq. It’s written by the creators of “The Wire”, a show I continue to not watch, and based on a book by Evan Wright. Having seen a couple episodes of “The Wire”, I believe that “Generation Kill” is made in a very similar, naturalistic style. Alessandra Stanley agrees:
The script is faithful to Mr. Wright’s account, respectful of the soldiers he befriended and as opaque and ascetic as “The Wire,” an opus that forced viewers to parse multiple plots and a huge cast of characters without directions or subtitles.
The dialogue is remarkable–it’s all either military jargon or epithets. But it’s also remarkably real. The characters sound like young men in difficult circumstances, compensating for fears and anxieties with their training and a lot of gay jokes.
The show strikes me as quite Shakespearean. There’s a massive, entirely male cast, plenty of ribald humour and plots which are sometimes hard to track or make sense of. The show feels particularly Henry V when senior officers gather to listen to a raspy monologue by Lieutenant Colonel Stephen ‘Godfather’ Ferrando.
Like the best war movies, the battle scenes are rare but intense. Tom Shales calls it the Platoon of the Iraq War:
At the very least, “Generation Kill” — as written mostly by executive producers David Simon and Ed Burns of “The Wire” fame (Wright co-wrote some episodes) — qualifies as the “Platoon” of the Iraq war: an often poignant, sometimes shattering and occasionally criminally funny account of men trapped on a battlefield of confusion, uncertainty and cross-purposes. Wright and the filmmakers know it is not enough to say that war is hell or that war is evil. The point here also seems to be that war is stupid, this one more so than many others, and that the higher one goes in the hierarchy of command, the stupider the commanders tend to be.
That’s not entirely accurate, because Platoon relies on the conventional plot structure of the Hollywood movie. “Generation Kill” trades standard plotting for remarkable verisimilitude. The Marines drive, sit around and wait, drive some more, grouse and, on occasion, shoot at people. It all feels tremendously accurate.
I’m not sure I could watch 22 episodes of “Generation Kill”–the monotony would get a little trying–but I’ve been riveted by the mini-series thus far.
Via Reddit, I read this Variety article (written in a peculiar style) discussing a study released by Magna Global. It reveals that, for the first time, the average age of a TV viewer has reached fifty:
Fueling the graying of the networks: the rapid aging of ABC, NBC and Fox. The three nets continue to grow older, while CBS — the oldest-skewing network — has remained fairly steady…
For the just-completed 2007-08 TV season, CBS was oldest in live viewing with a median age of 54. ABC clocked in at 50, followed by NBC (49), Fox (44), CW (34) and Univision (34). When live-plus-7 DVR viewing is factored in, the nets (except CW and Univision) drop by a year — which still reps the oldest median age ever for the nets.
Don’t confuse Fox with the Fox News Channel like I did. At 65 years old, the latter’s daytime and primetime programming has the oldest average viewer among the cable networks. I’d expect that for the Hallmark Network, but that seems pretty old for Fox News (and I have no way of appraising the legitimacy of the study).
The writing seems to be on the wall for live television. As producers and advertisers react to this, expect some creative and hyper-irritating new advertising strategies.
I’m a casual soccer/football fan (I struggle with which term to use). I’m a long-suffering supporter of Canada’s national side, and enjoy watching European matches whenever I get the chance. I look forward to the big tournaments–the World Cup and European Championships–every two years.
The second most popular sporting event on the planet, Euro 2008, is on right now. As I’ve mentioned, we’re a TV-free family. I really only miss the thing for watching sports. I’ll go to my parents’ house or the pub to watch a game, but I like to watch the video highlights of each match on a daily basis.
Unlike North American sports, it’s ridiculously difficult to watch Euro 2008 (and World Cup, if I recall correctly) highlights on the web. No domestic network website–CBC, TSN, Sportsnet–shows them, and I’m denied by my IP address from accessing the BBC’s video. As far as I can tell, my only options are:
Spend CAN $30 to watch highlights and ‘full match reruns’ of all the games. Given that every North American league makes their highlights available for free, that seems pretty steep. I don’t actually want to watch many games–just the highlights.
Resort to ‘illegal’ highlights sites like the usually reliable FootyTube.
The Euro 2008 doesn’t offer a cheaper price if I don’t want to see full matches. Plus, they don’t give me any kind of preview of the video for which I’m paying. Am I going to pay $30 for YouTube quality streaming video (”hey, that pixelated blob scored on that other pixelated blog!”).
If I wasn’t going to Chicago next week, I might actually pony up the $30. Instead, I’ll rely on the less legitimate but free options.
They’re all middling to bad reviews (reflective, I guess, of the growing criticalconsensus). What’s interesting to me is that the first three reviews I mention are structured very similarly, and pretty much emphasize the same things: the writer’s feelings for the TV series, the crappy script, the haute-couture fashion, how Charlotte gets diarrhea and how the men are mute window-dressing.
I guess movie reviews, like so much of journalism, have a kind of formula, and veteran reviewers tend to look for the same things. Dana Stevens from Slate stands out for a more original and possibly overly-serious review. Here’s a sample:
Samantha disappears entirely for stretches, and her story arc contains some of the movie’s most painfully unfeminist jokes (in which we learn, for example, that vigilant pubic grooming and toned abs are essential to female self-esteem). And an attempt to address the series’ endemic whiteness by adding a subaltern black character—Jennifer Hudson as Carrie’s designer-bag-toting Girl Friday—is a major misfire that only underscores our heroine’s oblivious entitlement.
Regardless, I’m sure the movie will have a rompin’, stompin’ weekend at the box office.
We’ve gotten into the habit of watching an hour (well, a TV hour, meaning 42 to 50 minutes) of commercial-free TV before bed. Not every night, certainly, but probably four to five nights a week.
We don’t have a TV–we watch downloaded shows on a laptop. They’re what I’d judge to be ‘quality’ shows. Television has experienced a renaissance in quality in the last decade, and these shows are the result. They’re mostly critically-acclaimed–”Dexter”, “Veronica Mars” (though the acting on this show is appalling), “30 Rock”, “Battlestar Galactica” and so forth.
I got to wondering. If we, hypothetically, watched four or five episodes of quality television each week, is there enough out there for an entire year?
Let’s make it 230 TV-hours a year. What are the best shows that add up to about that number? I’ll use these critics’ lists as a starting point, and tweak them a bit for my personal preferences. I’ll also assume that the writer’s strike didn’t exist (so that there would be complete seasons). The numbers refer to the total hours for a season:
“Dexter” - 12
“Mad Men” - 22
“30 Rock” - 11
“House” - 22
“Big Love” - 12
“The Wire” - 22
“Battlestar Galactica” - 22
“Friday Night Lights” - 22
“Pushing Daisies” - 22
“Rome” - 10
“Damages” - 13
“Californication” - 22
“The War” - 7
No Project Runway at My House
I haven’t seen a single episode of many of these shows (this season or past ones), so I’m basing my notion of ‘quality’ on critical response and word of mouth. It’s in the eye of the beholder. If you think “Project Runway” is quality TV, well, all power to you. You just can’t watch it at my house.
Plus, back in Canada, I spend plenty of time watching the Canucks, so that qualifies as my brainless viewing. I was hoping I could come back to some local playoff hockey, but that’s not looking all that likely.
My list gets me to 219 hours of TV. That sounds like a lot when you say it like that, but it’s only about 3.5 hours of TV a week (as each TV hour probably averages 50 minutes or less).
That’s encouraging, in a way. If you’re disciplined in what you watch, you really could spend a reasonable amount of time enjoying just the cream of the television crop.
Plus, there’s plenty of good TV (I’ve never seen more than one episode of “Deadwood”, “Arrested Development”, “House” and so forth) that I’ve missed from the past five years to fill in the gaps
There isn’t a ton of English-language media floating around our village. However, some ex-pat friends of ours (she’s from Vancouver, if you can imagine) lent us season 2 of The Wire. I’d never seen an episode of the show, but a couple of people had recommended it to me, and it’s quite popular over at TVTorrents.
We watched episode one of season two, and I’ve got to admit that I was pretty lost. There seemed to be no affordances–to borrow a term from usability–for new viewers. And frankly, we were pretty bored. ‘The Wire’ is the talkiest cop show I’ve ever seen.
The show definitely seemed very gritty and realistic (I’ve never worked on the docks in Baltimore), and strongly influenced by the men-with-men tone and dialogue of David Mamet. Plus, the acting was strong. Still, it didn’t really float my boat. I guess I like my TV more in the middle-brow escapist mode of Weeds or The West Wing.
If you’re a fan of “The Wire”, why do you like it?
