We don’t have a television in Malta. The only TV we see are shows that I download and the occasional football game at the local pub. So, I’ve been watching a fair bit of TV–just grazing, as opposed to watching specific shows–here in Toronto. I was reminded how weird it is:
Does anybody else think this Irish Spring body wash ad is bizarre? I mean, the guy is rubbing Essence of Irish Lass all over his body in the shower. Weird.
I have no interest in golf, but I was waiting for the highlights and the Grand Slam of Golf (I think) was on TV. All the players (and, I think, their caddies) were wearing microphones, so we could hear their conversations about club selection and so forth. Is this commonplace? How often do they curse on-air after a bad putt?
Who watches Ellen and who watches Oprah? I noticed that they’re on at the same time–do they have different demographics?
Isn’t the subtext of Take Home Chef hilarious? A ridiculously handsome and charming Aussie greets an attractive young woman at the grocery store, helps her shop for a special meal, goes home with her while her boyfriend or husband is away and prepares the meal. It ought to be called The Cuckolding Chef Comes Calling.
Speaking of the Canadian Football League…I was looking for some Vancouver Canucks news today, and accidentally learned that Joost users will be able to watch CFL content on the Internet TV startup’s network this winter.
I tried out Joost a couple of months back, and literally found nothing in their video network to interest me. Hopefully that’ll change, or I’ll develop an interest in Peruvian rugby.
“There is a huge pent up demand for Canadian Sports and the CFL in particular, across the World and with the launch of Wildcard Sports Network on Joost, with the CFL as our featured launch partner, we can now provide this compelling League’s most hard-hitting content to a worldwide audience on today’s most advanced Internet TV platform.”
Really? A “huge pent up demand” for the CFL “across the World”? That just struck me as downright amusing. I see that Wildwave is based in Dublin (ah, Dame Street), where I never heard anyone mention Canadian football for the two years I lived there. And I’m Canadian. Maybe they’ve tapped into some hidden enclave of Roughriders fans in Kilkenny?
We’re not big fans of the press release, and we learned a long time ago not to write absurdly effusive quotes for CEOs. It’s unlikely that Mr. McCormack actually wrote that himself.
Also, I know I’m writing from a grammatical glass house here, but that release shows symptoms of that common marketer’s disease, Over Capitalization Syndrome. It’s a scourge across our industry.
I’ve been helping to promote this Future Shop event (I always want to spell that as one word–FutureShop. Maybe they’ll rebrand?). It’s a debate/discussion about the future of HD-TV featuring Tod Maffin, Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte. It’s being held here at a Vancouver ‘in-store’, as part of FutureShop.ca’s launch of their community forums (which, to my surprise, have already proven quite popular).
The Maffinator wrote a blog post about it, as did Ms. MacArthur. We’ve got about 15 local bloggers/podcasters/documenters-of-all-types coming to the event, but you can watch from anywhere via the magic of the webcast. Here are the details:
Thursday, September 27, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM PST
You need to register to watch the thing.
UPDATE: I’ve had a cancellation, so there’s one spot available for tomorrow’s event. If you’re a blogger or podcaster-type, and would like to attend, please shoot me an email. First come, first served.
UPDATE #2: Somebody asked, so it might not be clear. I’m working for Future Shop to promote this event. Or, to be precise, I’m working for Future Shop’s marketing agency.
Plenty of TV shows get canceled. Some of those have an incredibly loyal fanbase who, upon announcement of a show’s impending doom, leap into action to try to rescue the show. This almost never happens, and can be a lot of wasted energy. After all, it’s only a TV show. Popular examples include Jericho, Firefly and My So-Called Life.
Jericho is a rare, partial exception to the ‘dead show walking’ syndrome. From Wikipedia:
However, after a grassroots campaign to revive the series, CBS officially announced on June 6, 2007 that it had purchased seven new episodes of Jericho for broadcast as a midseason replacement.
This is the fifth time the network has resuscitated a cancelled series due to viewer demand. Fans of Cagney and Lacey, Designing Women, The Magnificent Seven and Touched by an Angel all were successful in convincing CBS to bring the shows back after their respective cancellations were announced.
Interestingly, three of those series would have 18 to 50 year-old women as their core audience–they’re traditionally the most powerful grassroots organizers.
Anyhow, that’s a long-winded introduction to this article (which could do with some subheadings), which discusses the rejuvenation of Jericho and the unfortunate, premature demise of Veronica Mars. As you’d expect, fans are in a tizzy.
We recently started watching Heroes. I have pretty mixed feelings about the show, but I’ve only seen three episodes. I’ll give it some more time before passing final judgement.
As you probably know, the show’s brightest star is Hayden Panettiere. She plays Claire Bennet, who has a (as Wikipedia puts it) ’spontaneous regenerative ability’.
Last night we were watching episode three, and Julie raised a good question:
In a lot of TV shows set in high school, the cheerleaders often wear their uniforms to school. That is, they showed up for class in their uniforms. At our high schools, cheerleaders never did this. Do cheerleaders actually do this (or did they when you were in school), or is it an invention of television?
I haven’t run a poll for a while, so here’s an easy way to respond.
It turns out that Ms. Panettiere is releasing an album this month. You can hear some of the tepid pop on her MySpace page.
I’ve just returned from the local pub, where I watched Malta and Turkey play to an exciting 2-2 draw in Euro 2008 qualifying. I’m not aficionado of Maltese international play, but given the difference in populations (400,000 and 71 million) and FIFA Rankings (115 and 22), I assume this must be a historic result. Unimportantly, Malta’s squad may also be the baldest team in international football.
It’s extra sweet, because today is the 442nd anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Malta, when the Ottomans were sent packing by to what’s now Turkey.
Hopefully some highlights will be available tomorrow on FootyTube, my newly-discovered source for football highlights on the web.
We don’t have a TV, so it’s nice to be able to get my fill of goals and incidents from the English Premier League and international play. The site is unquestionably illegal, so we’ll see how long it lasts. If anybody knows of similar sites (besides good ol’ BitTorrent), let me know.
I’ve also got a question for my Maltese readers: during the game, I saw that some people in the crowd were wearing black t-shirts with big white Maltese crosses on them (and no text, as far as I could see). Do you know where I might procure such a shirt?
UPDATE: Here’s the second Malta goal. Unquestionably, it’s the ugliest goal scored last night. But, as the saying goes, they all look the same on the score sheet:
Tod Maffin made a little discovery this weekend about a little homophobic channel organization on Shaw Cable:
But I couldn’t find OUTtv on my Shaw channel guide. I like supporting upstart Canadian broadcasters, so I called Shaw to add it to my package. Turns out, I already had it.
That’s it, buried way up in the 300s, right between the porn pay-per-view, Hustler, and Playboy. Literally, it has three porn channels above it and three below it.
Huh?!
For the record, OUTtv doesn’t play any porn movies. Not even the soft-focus romantic stuff.
I agree with Tod, that is problematic. When I checked out a channel guide for Vancouver, I see that OUTtv is preceded by a bunch of foreign language channels like ‘Alpha Punjabi’ and ‘Deutsche Welle’, as if to put all the minorities in one place.
Seeing as OUTtv is part of the basic digital TV package, it definitely deserves a much lower channel. #154 is available Why not put it there, next to (the way butch and popular, no doubt) ESPN: Classic Canada?
Geeks in their late twenties and early thirties had been very, very excited for the recent release of the Transformers movie, roughly twenty years after the original animated TV series. John from the Movie Blog, for example, apepars to have written several hundred posts about the movie.
I’m of the right age, gender and a movie geek. Why wasn’t I excited, too? In fact, I was so unexcited, I listened to the two hosts of Slate’s Spoiler podcast disclose and soundly mock the movie’s apparently obscure plot.
My initial theory was that I was just the little bit too old to really have fallen in love with The Transformers. But then I thought of something else, possibly to deflect my attention from that age theory.
Around the same time, I discovered and fell in love with the Japanese animated series, Robotech. I liked it so much that I got up at 8:30am on Saturday mornings to watch and record (on Beta) every episode in my parents’ bedroom. Patient people, my parents.
Robotech featured cheesy plot lines and transforming machine, too. Maybe there was only room for one such show in my childhood? Maybe I was just drawn to those enormous anime eyes? Plus, Robotech seems a lot darker. For probably the first time in fifteen years, I watched a clip from my favourite episode. Earlier in that episode (if I recall correctly), 75% of the Earth’s population is vapourized from space. You won’t see the Decepticons getting up to that on American television.
The BBC produces so many odd, original shows. Many North American shows beg, borrow and steal from the Beeb. Here’s a new series that, judging from the ad I just saw, looks fairly amusing:
The villagers of Harby in Nottinghamshire are about to experience an altogether different way of life when their village takes part in an ambitious observational documentary series by the BBC looking at how an English village community copes when the women are taken away for one week.
The Week The Women Went is a week long experiment, commissioned by BBC THREE, to enable the men of Harby to take a fresh look at the roles they play at home and in the community and for viewers to see how a community of men rise to the challenge of filling all the roles in village life.
Heh. I wrote that first paragraph without knowing that, as it turns out, the CBC is producing its own version. The town they’re using even sounds similar–Hardisty, Alberta. They’ve got a blog about the project on Blogspot.
