Entries Tagged 'TV' ↓

I need to lighten the picture unfortunately, of all the pics I took, the clearest was the darkest for some reason, and you can’t see the grey/awesome Jeffersonish sideburn curve even. But for that I have to spend 4 hours reinstalling CS4.

Until then, this is good enough!

I totally need to Photoshop in a blood eye, too.

I never thought I’d really learn anything from MSNBC’s weekend programming that would be of use. You know how it is, right? Lots of sensationalist fluff pieces about various kidnappings and murders combined with 12 straight hours of Lockdown a day. Okay, aside from some prison terminology and culture, and the “holy shit, prisons in the rest of the world treat you like a human being because they’re not for profit” realization of the international episodes, you don’t pick much up.

Turns out, though, that sometimes things you didn’t expect to need in your life are useful. Today, I had to take a birdbath.

A birdbath, in prison, is where you don’t want to use the communal showers, so you use your sink, usually with some tubing if you’ve got it to direct water onto you. If not, a cup, some rags, whatever you’ve got does the job. I had some washrags and some towels, which I set on the floor beside my shower.

Why, you ask? Because somewhere in the last day, a clog went vesuvian. I can tell by the lint and hair that stuck on the bodywash scrubber thing, which is about a meter off the surface of the tub, and these were on the upper half. The rest of the tub was laden with stubble that had made it down a sink drain, and hair that had made it down…well, I guess any drain. So, “YUCK” is the keyword here, and as much as I wanted to clean it, I had class in an hour. No time to properly clean a tub that bad. Not to mention the potential a clog still lurked, waiting to come up any of three possible exits in the house, or to simply not let the shower drain properly, thus submerging my feet in nastywater.

Oops.

So today, I took a birdbath. Getting the soap and water on is pretty easy, frankly. Getting the soap off, that’s the part that takes time. You don’t really feel particularly cleaned, but hey, next time I’ll get a stool and go full Japanese bathhouse on it. Today I made due, and I did pretty well.

Tomorrow, though, I’m going to scrub like I’ve never scrubbed before. After drain snaking the shower, of course, to remove what clog may be left. Ick.

Me? A big ol’ nerd slacker? Work at Hollywood Video? Oh yeah. That was the majority of the clerks at that chain, in fact. Slacker nerds who’d watch Justice League and The Lion King on the TV.

Because the company screwed us all over by withholding raises, constantly cutting hours, etc., two main things happened. One, people stole a lot of stuff. Mostly concessions, the irony being that if they paid us the extra dollar an hour they were supposed to, we’d have just bought the drinks. But they didn’t, and they never refilled the water cooler, so we just took them.

Second, we screwed off all the time. We made shit, messed with shit, and watched a lot of DVDs instead of cleaning.

One night, my friend Haru and I were bored and because the district manager was coming around a lot lately, we were limited on our viewing options. The official rule was nothing over PG, and nothing that’s not animated. We’d already seen enough Pokemon and had been watching Lilo and Stitch anyway, but we felt like a change.

“Hahaha, dude, look! Garfield and Friends! We should totally ironically watch this”, I declared. “Oh wow, yeah!” says Haru.

See, here’s the thing. As a kid, I really liked Garfield. Maybe it’s because I had the older collections, the ones with Lyman and Jon’s sad, sad life, and where Garfield was an exceptionally fat fuck who didn’t even stand on two legs. But I knew in retrospect, it was pretty bad. At least the show was. Hit or miss with the comics, I’ll say, to be nice and because hey, sometimes they were funny. Not so much these days.

And we made a sport of bad movies and TV there, because sometimes that’s all we had to watch.

Haru and I both ended up physically ill that night, so much so we almost had to close the store early. It started around 10-15 minutes in, just after one segment of Garfield and Friends followed by one US Acres. We turned it off, I got a pizza from the Little Caesar’s in the shopping center, and we were okay. Nobody else who came in that night got sick, before or after, even other employees who hung around a while, as we were all wont to do because it was a fun place when you’re not working.

Just the two of us, watchers of Garfield.

The lesson we learned is that TV really can be bad for you, but it’s the quality, not the quantity.

They’re presenting it as the adaptation of life, and people learning to live within the twilight bands and probably underground like we’re Twi’leks or something, but guys, it’s been done before, and in a WAY more awesome way by Mr. Ryan North via T-Rex.

Click it for the full comic! It doesn’t fit in my meager central column, T-Rex cannot be constrained by these proportions!

PS, Dinosaur Comics are awesome in general.

“If you’re using the leading toothpaste, you may be missing a key ingredient for a healthy mouth.” 10 seconds later, “Crest is the leading toothpaste, with all the key ingredients for a healthy mouth.”

Wait, what?

“Crest? Man, fuck that guy. He’s number one, woo!”

Does anything ever go right at that hospital? Are these all just the worst surgeons around? Why do people still go there, there’s like a 2% success rate, and half of those have some horrible thing happen anyway, like you don’t have colon cancer now but your eardrums were removed.

Also, why do people still watch that show?

MSNBC runs live all day, based off the eastern feed.

The Ed Show, Hardball, Countdown, Maddow, same time for everybody. This is how most news channels work, really, with repeats later on in the night. And that seems to work fine.

But the Olympics get a tape delay.

On a live network.

The Olympics that are happening right now in Vancouver will not be seen by west coast residents until 3 hours after the events are over on the network that runs everything else live.

What the fuck? Is this a secret plan to keep The Ed Show off of the west coast? Does LA not deserve Dylan Ratigan? The only effect of this delay is that shows which wouldn’t be pre-empted suddenly are, but only for half the country. If they kept to one feed, they’d be able to break in for news and events as needed, and they’d certainly not have to worry about repeating coverage to make up for the separation.

But to hell with that. Tape delay it. Show it live on the east coast, delayed on the west, they decided, for a reason absolutely nobody can figure out.

I’m starting to think NBC just wants to go bankrupt and get it over with, I really am. They’ve got a decent Thursday block, Chuck, Heroes, and Saturday Night Live. The rest of the time is a big festival of “No thanks.” Unless you’re the one person excited for The Marriage Ref or Who Do You Think You Are, then I guess NBC’s doing well.

Maybe NBC is just trying the Bush theory of promotion. You know, Michael Brown fucks up FEMA, gets a Medal of Freedom. Harriet Miers fires US attorneys out of political motivation and calls Bush “the most brilliant man she has ever met”, she gets sent up for a Supreme Court nomination. Jay Leno bombs on primetime but says how great NBC’s programming and sponsors are, gets sent to the Tonight Show.

I know I find a commercial series to hate daily, usually locals, but what is this crap Dentyne is pulling with the “friend request?”

It’s such an obvious grab at “the youth culture” as seen by a sixty year old “youth expert.”

I can’t help but even feel a bit patronized by the commercial. It features your standard awkward commercial male, a little geeky, fairly shy, who just goes around asking everyone “Friend request?” and passing them a piece of gum. Then narrating “accepted!” Because that’s how reality works. You see a random person, give them gum, and hey, friends! And at the end they’re all at a party together, even the people who didn’t take the gum! And like a smurf, every phrase the man speaks is replaced with “Friend request.” Bad breath? “Friend request please!” A date? “Friend request tonight?” Caught in bed with someone’s wife? “Friend request?” Sure, two are made up, but let’s see how long before they make it 100%.

Okay, maybe that IS how it works with some people, but we’ll get into my dislike of the concept of MySpace friends (random people you add to your list who you never have and never will meet or even email) later. For now, I’m sticking it to Dentyne’s terrible ad series. Because it doesn’t just end on TV, now there’s prevalent banner ads with hipster-approved drawings. With, of course, the “friend request?” caption.

For some reason ad companies seem to think co-opting some piece of popular culture, particularly when they don’t understand it, will get customers. The masses will say “they understand us!” and flock to the product. Because…you know, I can’t follow the logic here, even having worked in advertising.  If there’s one thing the kids hate, it’s their culture being abused by the squares, the old people, the grups!

I’d like to blame focus groups, because I know they’re hand-picked these days as the most easily malleable and receptive subjects, but did nobody see this ad, place their forehead and cheek firmly to the palm, and declare “uuuuugggghhhh”? Followed by someone near him saying “I know, right? Yeeeecchhh.” But instead, Dentyne continues to put money into an awful campaign. And they can go friend request themselves with this banality. It’s like…

Aw smurf. I get it, this appeals to Grey’s Anatomy fans doesn’t it? Anyone who still says “McDreamy” and “McSteamy” (by still I mean EVER said it without cringing) probably thinks this is just amazingly clever.

Is that show a hit still? I think it might be time to kill myself.

What’s the point?

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I mean hi-definition channels running standard-definition shows. This isn’t something like running SD shows from 1995, mind you, I mean recent shows which air, otherwise, in hi-def.

For example, TBS HD is airing My Name Is Earl. But they’re airing the 4:3 version at a stretched aspect ratio. The show is filmed in high definition, and aired in hi-def on NBC. Cartoon Network HD labels The Clone Wars as “Available in Hi-Definition”, and yet runs the show at a stretched 4:3 aspect. Same with The Venture Brothers, the third season at least, which is drawn in an HD ratio and is even on blu-ray.

It seems that Turner does this on all their channels that aren’t CNN, for some reason. TNT airs originals in HD, at least, but plenty of other shows are stretched and are fully headache inducing.

EVERYTHING on Cartoon network gets the treatment of stretched ratios. Okay, that may be wrong, there could be some of the CN:Real abomination not being stretched (exception for Destroy Build Destroy, which has the best title…ever). But right now, Ultimate Avengers 2 is on. Again, a movie mastered in 16:9, run in 4:3 stretch. To make it worse, CNHD doesn’t just stretch, they zoom. CNHD actually crops the top and bottom of any 4:3 show to an extent, in addition to stretching. This may apply to TBS HD, I haven’t checked because my brain is already swelling.

Okay, I checked. It does. They’re airing Men In Black right now, 4:3, stretched/cropped. What the fuck, y’all?

Why? Why not just preserve the ratio properly? People who want a stretched image are extremely rare, and most televisions have the option to stretch the image anyway. Why make your channel unwatchable by the majority of HDTV owners?

I don’t see why aspect ratios are so complicated, but local stations do apparently. In Phoenix, mind you, not Nowhere, Arkansas. Routinely, footage which is 16:9 is shown at 4:3 and vice versa. I’ve seen times when footage was formatted for 16:9, but was run through the program to process 4:3 for 16:9 ratios, compressing the image horizontally until it looked like a strip of paper. Or a 5×8 photograph, run the other way so that it fills the screen, ending in a 8×13 picture of one amazingly fat person. Alternately, a healthy looking Olsen twin or slightly less mega-chinned Heidi Montag.

Television and competence clearly don’t mix.

Local Fox News Affiliate reports that Philadelphia and New York have the most single women compared to men. And I quote, “Researchers believe this is because young women like to date attractive young men, but as they get older they become less concerned with appearance.”

And how does that statement apply to this story? Does it mean guys in Philly and New York are butt ugly? Does it mean women are moving there for hot guys, and there’s not enough to go around?

Does it apply at all, because the story made no mention of age, purely that there are more single women than men?

You tell me, Fox Affiliate. You tell me.