Submitted by GuyGG on Fri, 09/21/2007 - 1:59am
- OK, bit of an absence in posts for the last week (more, actually). They'll be picking up in frequency, finally. To kick things off, we've got a handful of over-due movie reviews that'll follow this posting shortly.
- Neato. USB 3.0 is coming.
- The hilarious and hugely underappreciated series Psych has been picked up for a third season on USA. Psych and Monk are the single best scheduled pair of shows on network or cable TV. Rarely in the history of TV has their been two shows that so perfectly fit together in consecutive time slots. To be honest, and as much as I love Monk, I've enjoyed watching Psych even more lately.
- If you're a Battlestar fan or a science geek, or both, here's a cool interview with Dr. Kevin Frazier, Battlestar's science advisor. It's really a cool interview session, and he amusingly geeks out on 2010, admitting he likes it better than 2001. I've always been fond of 2010 as well, though not quite for all the same reasons as him. Still, a great interview session worth checking out.
- Speaking of Battlestar, here's some info on the state of the show and the network ponderings of late. Now, I know that networks are all about the bottom dollar. Truly, if you think any decisions at a TV/Cable network are driven by anything less than 99% care about the bottom dollar, you are living in a world made of gingerbread and should be waiting for your fairytale prince/princess to walk through that door. But still, as a Battlestar fan, can I just request that the execs at Universal tie their "money people" to a chair and tar & feather them? Just do it for the fan base. They are the pointy haired bosses of such an equasion. What do these money people think their money is driven by? As one of the first commenters on the linked story wonders, have they learned nothing from Jericho? If you've got the choice, KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE NEEDLESSLY IMMENSE GAPS IN AIRING SCHEDULES! Seriously. I'd much prefer it if more shows do what Fox & ABC did for a bit with Alias & 24. When you've got a heavily serialized show like Battlestar (or Alias, 24, etc), air them as close together as possible. And in those examples, do it one a week, with no breaks. It's something else if you've got a very self-contained anthology/procedural like CSI or Psych. I'd still prefer smaller breaks, but it's not as critical a thing. Oh, and on the topic of Caprica, I'd love to see it finally go into production. I think the mini-series test approach is fine. It worked for Battlestar, it can work again. Like they say, at worst, they should be able to break even with video sales if it completely falls flat on the air.
- So, figure I'd chime in on the Emmy's for this year. Overall, a good ceremony. Despite the mocking by many of the presenters, I rather liked the 360 degree approach to the awards, grouping the shows (Speaking of which, it was fun to see Kristen Bell already included with the Heroes cast). Battlestar didn't win the writing or directing awards, but I didn't expect them to. At least they won the visual effects award at the tech ceremony a couple weeks previous, which they most surely should have won. Great to see 30 Rock pick up best comedy series. Absolutely fantastic to know that this was the last and final Emmy awards to include anything Sopranos. Good riddance. The highlight of the awards was the Colbert/Stewart stuff. When Stewart & Colbert presented the award that Ricky Gervais won but wasn't there to accept, they proceded to award it to also-nominated Steve Carrell (and fellow Daily Show alum), who came up and enthusiastically accepted it, I was laughing. But the real highlight of thiers was with the other fellow nominees for writing in a variety or music show. Colbert's montage of writers abusing him and Stewart's C-Span dubbing were hilarious. Somebody saved me the effort of editing that bit out to post. Great fun.
- Pushing Daisies picks up another guest actor, Molly Shannon. I think she'll be a fanstastic addition to the cast. BTW, if you wanna see some truly fanstic acting by Molly Shannon, you need to see Year Of The Dog, a movie from earlier this year. She's fantastic in it. The movie is charming and excellent as well. Can't wait for Pushing Daisies to hit the air at the beginning of October. If you can only watch one new show this year, Pushing Daisies (ABC) should be it. No contest. If you can only watch 2, make the other one Reaper (CW).
- Here's a post that stirred up a little debate & controversy on a handful of sites. It got attention when it made it to the front page on sites like DIGG (where I stumbled upon it). It's worth reading through, as it takes an interesting left turn in topic. It's a write-up I fully agree with. He posted a follow-up second post that's linked at the bottom of the main one, explaining his sentiments, primarily due to the amount of attention it got. I won't spoil what his topic is really about, but I will say that I've seen numerous examples of this over the years (more than most people would believe) and am often times dumbstruck by it.
- So, we all knew this day would come eventually - Google has begun testing the rollout of flash-based ads. It's no big shock, but it still drops their coolness factor a couple points as a company.
- Wow, MediaDefender is getting pummeled upside the head. First, a bunch of their internal e-mail is leaked, and they poorly try to send out take-down orders for them. Then their source code is leaked. Sucks to be them. This time for more reasons than the usual.
- An amusing write-up about DHS's interesting spy tower initiative.
- Wanting to learn another language? Try out the new, FREE online system called Mango. After kicking the tires for 5 minutes, it seems pretty simple and nice.
- Who knows, perhaps the Star Wars TV shows will turn out cool after all. It's possible.
- For those of you like me, who were wondering where all the Blu-Ray copies of Smallville Season 6 were on Tuesday, despite the fact that everyone had the HD-DVD version, here's why.
- Speaking of the HD formats, here's a story with a shocker revelation. Consumers are confused and frustrated by the format war? Well shut my mouth wide open...
- Speaking of speaking of the HD formats, I've been scrounging up whatever Blu-Ray and HD-DVD titles I could get good deals on or just couldn't resist getting lately. While it's awesome to see recent big-budget hit movies like 300 in their HD glory, I get the nicest warm fuzzies when seeing gorgeous HD transfers of older movies. Paramount's HD transfer of Black Rain is beautiful. That movie has never looked better. Seriously. Never. The combination of Ridley Scott and Jan De Bont on that movie resulted in a visual look far surpassing what the material really deserves, and it really stands out in this new transfer. It's amusing how many of the urban Japanese location shots looks like stuff out of Blade Runner. Then again, there are older movies that just CAN'T manage to look much better in HD, like Universal's new HD-DVD release of The Last Starfighter this week. Sure, there are moments that look nice, but much of it just can't look any better than it already did. Hey Paramount, can we get Ridley Scott's 1492 on HD-DVD? Please? You morons never even managed to get the standard def DVD released (though y'all did manage to get a nice 2 disc SE standard DVD releases in Brazil!).
- While the general public has become annoyed by NBC/Universal's split with iTunes, I think it's a good move. If they can do their own version better, go for it. Sure, it sounded like the main reason the split happened was NBCU being too greedy in their contract demands with Apple, but what the heck do I care? iTunes doesn't need to be the end-all/be-all. Heck, I'd prefer they not be.
- For the very small handful of people who couldn't see the downfall of SCO coming YEARS ago, when they started the whole lawsuit fiasco, the delisting of their stock on NASDAQ might actually come as a surprise. For the rest of us, it's more like "I can't believe it took this long to happen."
- More historical proof that Fox's advertising department sucks. And this is probably the best promo they came up with for the show.
- Speaking of Firefly, it's so cool to see the DVD set still popping up into top sales lists (#27 on the linked one). I mean, check out that weeks-in-release number.
- Did we really need more proof that The View is an astoundingly retarded program?
- Google reveals their new "Shared Stuff" platform. I don't consider it useful yet. Once they start tying in their other services to it, then I'll play with it again. Still, interesting to see.
- OK, one of my longer Ponderings posts. Probably cause I waited too long after the previous one. And I refrained from adding more than twice as much as I did include.
