Showing posts with label cable. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cable. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Rep. Adolf Gump

I can't be sure, but a fat legislative Bubba from Georgia throwing it in reverse with his britches around his feet and trying to use his ass as a battering ram while screaming "AMERICA! AMERICA!" could be one of the signs and wonders Jesus told us would herald the Apocalypse.

It's in the Bible. Somewhere in the back.
THIS HERE? Also from Georgia. This fool is running for governor.

Oh . . . we sooooo doomed.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Joy From Raleigh 2016


Three words: Mom for president.

Not my mother -- Oh, God, no! (It's a long story) -- their mother.


From The Washington Post:
https://www.fastyetitees.com/funny-mothers-day-t-shirts/funny-mothers-day-t-shirt-vote-for-president/Everybody knows that the best part about CSPAN is the unpredictable nature of the show’s call-in segments, where regular hosts and guests do an admirable job of fielding unusual questions with no advance warning. But brothers Brad and Dallas Woodhouse are now the champions of awkward CSPAN calls, after the politically divided brothers ended up taking a call from their mom.

“Oh God, it’s mom,” Dallas Woodhouse said as soon as “Joy” from North Carolina started to speak.

“You’re right, I’m from down south,” she said. “And I’m your MOTHER.”

She’d called to take issue with something her kids said on air: That the brothers’ political bickering — you see, one is liberal, and the other is conservative — is typical of most families. “I don’t know many families that are fighting at Thanksgiving,” she said. “I’m hoping you’ll have some of this out of your system when you come here for Christmas. I would really like a peaceful Christmas.”

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Omaha Picker


You know who have the best jobs in the world? The American Pickers guys.
Put me in a thrift store or at an estate sale, and I turn into the Omaha version of Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz. I see relics of a time long gone, and I start to see who the original owners were and maybe what they did.


What some folks see as junk, I -- like Mike and Frank -- see history you can touch. History you can make your own.

CALL ME continually amazed at the stuff folks throw out that I find in the record stacks at our neighborhood Goodwill.

Retail, this Glen Gray album would be worth a few bucks, maybe a little more. At the Goodwill, 99 cents. And look, it's autographed! That should add a few bucks to the value.

Welcome back to 1956.

I love this stuff. So does 3 Chords & the Truth.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

This is a tornado

The Associated Press

Tornadoes are not "awesome" vortexes.

They are not meteorological Cialis for thrill-seekers and storm chasers.


Tornadoes are not a cost-effective source of the "Holy shit!" reality TV usually seen on The Weather Channel instead of, you know . . . the weather.

God did not invent them so that you might be amused and awed on Facebook . . . by viral videos shot by storm chasers "ready anytime the moment's right."

No, this is a tornado. Look at it hard.

You might have heard about this tornado. Before its arrival, there was a little town in northeast Nebraska by the name of Pilger, pronounced PIL-gur. After its departure Monday afternoon, there pretty much wasn't anymore. People say it "looks like a war zone."

Antebellum Pilger, Neb., was the home to a little girl, Cali. Her proper name was Calista, but she insisted that everyone call her "Doctor Cali," because that's what she wanted to be one day. She was 5, and "one day" will never come.

Because of a tornado. Writes Erin Grace in the Omaha World-Herald:
The Murphree family was new to Pilger. Kandi, who was raised in Kansas, had spent much of her adult life in Alabama. Then Kay said she could use some help. Les, who is 74, has a muscular problem that makes walking difficult. Kay had to have back and shoulder surgery.

In February, Kandi and the girls moved from Alabama to Pilger, into the Labenz home at 200 S. Main St., to help out.
A couple of months later, Kandi got her own place, a three-bedroom trailer about a block away, at 100 N. Main St.
Having everyone so close was a blessing. Kay and Les got to spend time with the kids. Kandi got help with child care.

On Monday, Kandi finished her shift at Prime Stop in Wayne and drove home to Pilger. Around 3 p.m., she picked up her girls from her mother’s home and took them to their place down the street.

An hour later, Les’ son called Kay and Les with a warning. Storm’s headed your way. Get to the basement.

Kay, who had poked her head out the door, thought the sky didn’t look too bad and scoffed.

Les said let’s go anyway.

It seemed to take forever to get to that basement, and they barely made it in time.

As the sirens screamed, Kay pushed Les up against the corner of the wall, stretching herself to cover him.
She remembers the roar. Then the dust. Then how, in seconds, it was all over.
The tornado just came and went so fast that it hardly seemed real.

When Kay opened her eyes, she saw they were OK. Then she saw their basement filled with other people’s stuff.

Then Kay saw sky and the tornado, moving farther away. The funnel was huge.

All Kay could think about was her daughter and the little girls. She tried to climb out, but Les told her no, she might fall.

An hour later, a relative got there with a ladder, and the two emerged to find their world erased.

Their house was gone. A neighbor’s house was turned kitty-corner and sitting on top of the hedgerow. The co-op grain bins were torn and scattered.

Kay began heading toward her daughter’s place, but the mobile home had just disappeared.

Someone turned her around and wouldn’t let her go any farther.

That scared her to death, and Kay tried to find out what happened. The news, like all the debris, swirled around them in bits and pieces.

Kandi and the girls had been found on Main Street. Kandi was found lying there. Cali was found lying there. Robin was found running, running for help.
PLEASE, go read the whole column in today's paper. You'll have a better idea of what a tornado is than if you had watched a million hours of weather porn on cable TV.

The Associated Press news photo atop this post -- may the copyright gods forgive me -- that's Cali being tended to by rescuers. That's a tornado. And that family, that's what a tornado destroys.

In Pilger, Neb., they can't change the channel. Remember that when you eventually do.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Monday, December 30, 2013

Our top story tonight. . . .

"Mark has a little wiener. Have you ever dressed the wiener up?"
In other words . . . this probably ain't safe for work, even though it all was on the air. Enjoy.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Jesusland 1, Anti-H8 Brigade 0

Well, it certainly didn't take long for A&E to quack . . . er, crack

"Tolerance" is one thing in television. Money is another, and in this case money won. A&E execs could see the network losing a lot of it if Duck Dynasty went away.
"After discussions with the Robertson family, as well as consulting with numerous advocacy groups, A&E has decided to resume filming Duck Dynasty later this spring with the entire Robertson family," the channel said in a statement. 

In an apparent gesture to the advocacy groups, A&E said that it would "also use this moment" to broadcast public service announcements "promoting unity, tolerance and acceptance among all people."
EXPECT THE Forces of Tolerance (TM) to pitch another fit. Because that's what we do in this country.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Ol' Phil from Jesusland


Nuance is dead.

Hyperbole is alive.

Willfully reading the worst into every word out of every mouth, then demonizing The Other for "hate speech" is a growth industry for which there is no apparent ceiling.

OK, so Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty notoriety ain't down with the gay agenda. Considering that he's a 67-year-old evangelical Christian from north Louisiana, that should be no surprise. 

Given that the A&E cable network is raking in record earnings based on the proposition that the hirsute, duck-call-making Robertson clan is a postmodern version of the Beverly Hillbillies -- minus the Beverly Hills part -- and do wacky things because they're wacky rednecks, it beggars credulity that the TV execs are shocked and offended that ol' Phil gave an interview that sounded like something you'd expect from Ol' Phil from Bumf***, Louisiana. For example:
“We’re Bible-thumpers who just happened to end up on television,” he tells me. “You put in your article that the Robertson family really believes strongly that if the human race loved each other and they loved God, we would just be better off. We ought to just be repentant, turn to God, and let’s get on with it, and everything will turn around.”
(snip)
“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
I GUESS some things are too real for "reality" TV. Probably a good quarter of the United States' population is too "real" for TV, actually.

Two things are absolutely true today. First, we are a nation divided and at each other's throats. Second, what a person says is way more important than what a person does, and the muddled things we think -- or haven't thought out, exactly -- will get us written out of polite humanity, regardless of how we actually live our lives or treat our fellow man.

Amid the never-ending tribal warfare that passes for American society today, Phil Robertson made the fatal error of sounding weird in saying something politically incorrect. The man A&E made famous for being a "good ol' boy" -- a rich good ol' boy, but a good ol' boy nevertheless --  has been made a non-person for living out his typecasting.

And 25 percent of Americans just got the message, loud and clear. Throw another stick of dynamite on the fire, wouldja?

One thing I appreciate about being Catholic is that Catholicism knows the value of nuance when it comes to things like homosexuality. In other words, we try to make it clear that the person is not the sin, and the condition is not the sin. Only the sin is the sin -- it's what we do that can become problematic, not what we are or who we are.

OR . . . as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says about homosexuality:
2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,141 tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."142 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
I WISH Robertson had the moral, cultural and religious vocabulary to have been a lot more nuanced about this matter. And not flippantly gross. (You'll know it when you read it in the GQ piece.)

Saying the right thing the right way probably wouldn't have kept GLAAD's indignant harpies at bay, and it might not have even kept Ol' Phil in the good graces of Hollywood, Inc. It, however,
would have been more faithful to the biblical truth Robertson seeks to proclaim -- and added just a little clear water to the muck of another culture-war fever swamp.


*  *  *

THEN, OF COURSE, there's what Ol' Phil from Bumf***, La., had to say about race. Which, again, is utterly unsurprising. Which means the man is completely clueless, and perhaps morally obtuse.

As others have said, he's lucky the gays have made such a stink because it's taking attention away from this:

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
OH, GOD . . .  the Happy Negroes live on in Southern lore. This ain't religious; this is the staying power of a disordered and deviant culture. This is how one is formed by that rotten culture, and formed to the point where the deviant looks completely normal.

Where vice looks like virtue. Where empathy not only fails, but moral blindness prevails.

And it's just ignorant.

Well, we
at least can say Phil Robertson deserves a good shunning because of that, right? Well . . . hold on there, Hoss. There's this:
Willie has just come back from Washington, D.C., where he accepted an award at the Angels in Adoption Gala. (He and his wife, Korie, adopted a biracial child named Will and are dedicated advocates of the practice.) As we speak, there’s a film crew outside the house, prepping for a State Farm ad that the family will be shooting here on the property tomorrow. The Robertsons receive more than 500 media requests a day, and Willie had to negotiate down to four shooting days a week with A&E just so the family would have a bit of breathing room. Phil knows it won’t last. He can already see that the end is near, and he’s prepared for it.
MR. IGNORANT REDNECK managed to raise a son who adopted a biracial child. He raised a son who tirelessly advocates adopting biracial children.

I'd say it would be reasonable to assume Phil Robertson loves that half-black grandbaby with all his heart. No matter what crazy s*** he said for the benefit of a magazine writer. Meantime:
“So you and your woman: Are y’all Bible people?”

Not really, I’m sorry to say.

“If you simply put your faith in Jesus coming down in flesh, through a human being, God becoming flesh living on the earth, dying on the cross for the sins of the world, being buried, and being raised from the dead—yours and mine and everybody else’s problems will be solved. And the next time we see you, we will say: ‘You are now a brother. Our brother.’ So then we look at you totally different then. See what I’m saying?”

I think so?

We hop back in the ATV and plow toward the sunset, back to the Robertson home. There will be no family dinner tonight. No cameras in the house. No rowdy squirrel-hunting stories from back in the day. There will be only the realest version of Phil Robertson, hosting a private Bible study with a woman who, according to him, “has been on cocaine for years and is making her decision to repent. I’m going to point her in the right direction.”
OBVIOUSLY, we're dealing with a horrible person here. Absolutely irredeemable. Mandatorily ostracizable.

Life isn't always logical, and neither are the people who live it. A lot of times, the heart is a lot smarter than the brain, and our actions are a lot nobler than our words. God forbid that the total of our human worth should be less than the sum of our all-too-human faults.

Not that that matters anymore. Not here, not now.

Crucify him!

Thursday, August 01, 2013

Heaven had 12 channels and no snow


When you're rummaging through your childhood home, and your family's life, you find things.

You have absolutely no idea why they were saved, but you're amazed and happy that they were.

Cable television came to Baton Rouge, but not all of Baton Rouge, in 1975. Aunt Sybil and Uncle Jimmy lived in north Baton Rouge -- this was '75, so that would have been pre-apocalyptic north Baton Rouge -- and working-class north Baton Rouge had Cablevision, while my working-class east-central Baton Rouge environs . . . didn't.

Obviously, north Baton Rouge was something just shy of the Beatific Vision some 38 years ago, because you could get 12 channels on your TV there with no static at all. Bless them . . . no static at all.

Cablevision was amazing. So amazing that I begged this Dec. 20-26, 1975, edition of Cablecast off my aunt and uncle. And I saved it. And almost four decades later, it turned up in a forgotten box on a dirty shelf in a blazing-hot utility building in the back yard.

NOW, almost four decades later, I'm sitting here thinking, "We were ape over 12 lousy channels, and none of them were Turner Classic Movies or ESPN?" Of course, in 1975, there wouldn't be an ESPN for another four years, but that's not important now.

Then again, if you lived in Baton Rouge in 1970, you had your Channel 2 and you had your Channel 9. One was NBC, the other CBS and they divided up what anybody wanted from ABC.

We got Channel 33 -- and ABC full time -- in October 1971.

And we finally got public television in 1975, about the time we got cable TV. Yeah, getting 12 channels was a big frickin' deal.



SUCH A big deal, I'm sure the very prospect made News Scene on Channel 9.

Thursday, September 06, 2012

Catholicism today


You may wonder why I've not been all over last week's deal where a national Catholic newspaper published an interview with the Rev. Benedict Groeschel in which the Franciscan friar, psychologist and popular EWTN host called Jerry Sandusky a "poor guy" and said that, sometimes, a kid will seduce a poor, poor priest in the throes of a nervous breakdown.

Because we all just know kids want it and, besides, poor Father just can't help himself.

And you also may like to know why I didn't call bullshit on Groeschel and his order stating that he "misspoke" because he's old, sick and just not that sharp anymore, and that he really didn't mean to "blame the victim." Even though what he said in the National Catholic Register interview -- during which Groeschel wasn't challenged on his contentions, and which blithely ran online . . . until it didn't -- was the same thing he's been saying for years.

Saying amid angry attacks on the "satanic" mainstream press for even covering the Catholic sex-abuse story to start with. Saying to abuse victims themselves.

Yes, you may be wondering why I didn't call bullshit on that in this cyberspace.


LIKEWISE,
you may be wondering why I didn't point out that the Register's uncritical, incurious interview wasn't terribly surprising, being that Groeschel was a marquee personality for the Eternal Word Television Network, and that EWTN is owner of the newspaper. Or why I didn't express my bemusement at why EWTN, in announcing Groeschel's "retirement" from television Monday, noted the friar's advanced age and illness, that his comments to the Register were a sign of that . . . but didn't mention it never had a problem with such sentiments when he was a decade younger.

You may be wondering why I didn't Hank Aaron that one right out of the ol' ballpark.

And what about Bishop Robert Finn getting convicted of not reporting a child-pornographer priest to the authorities? Nice example of Christian propriety the prelate of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., was setting for the flock, eh?

I bet that if I had been all over that one today, I would have said the judge was wrong for not throwing him in the pen for a year.

Yeah, I probably would have. But I'm not going there . . . or there . . . or there. Frankly, I'm weary unto spiritual death of it all. I'm weary of the arid slog that is this church that's so compromised and confused.

If I wade into that tar pit, I'm going to convince myself that a "hapless bench of bishops" and a cultish, boring-ass Catholic cable network matter a hell of a lot more than they do in the spiritual scheme of things. If I give 'em all what's coming to 'em, I'm going to think I matter a hell of a lot more than I do in the scheme of things, and I'll end up telling the Catholic Church to kiss my righteous ass.

There's one small problem with that, though.

I got nowhere else to go.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

If you can fake being sincerely annoying. . . .


Oh, thank God.

The people on House Hunters aren't that priggish, superficial and annoying all by themselves. That's just who they play on TV. Just like they're playing at actually looking for a house.

Because the HGTV "reality" series is a great big ol' fake. We heard the news today -- oh, boy!


Er . . . I mean, Yahoo!

The blog Hooked on Houses is giving fans a dose of reality about the HGTV series "House Hunters." According to an interview with a former participant, Bobi Jensen, much of the popular show, which has been on the air since 1999, is faked.

The premise of 'House Hunters' is that viewers follow a buyer as they anxiously decide between three different houses. Jensen says that, in fact, one house has already been purchased--the producers wouldn't even finalize her as a subject until after the closing. "When I watch other episodes of the show now I can usually pick out the house they were getting based on hair-dos alone," says Jensen. Houses are sometimes shot months apart. While the two rejected properties may be on the market, in Jensen's case, "They were just our two friends' houses who were nice enough to madly clean for days in preparation for the cameras!"

A former subject of the spin-off "House Hunters International" confirms that one house on the program has already been bought before filming begins. Ted Prosser, who did his real estate search in the Virgin Islands, said in an interview with a St. John blog: "The show is not really a reality show. You have to already own the house that gets picked at the end of the show. But the other houses in [my] show are actually the other houses we considered buying."

Hooked on Houses originally busted the program for using houses already in escrow in 2010, but now they are providing more dirt about other phony details. Jensen says producers tweaked her storyline to make it more TV-friendly. "The producers said they found our (true) story--that we were getting a bigger house and turning our other one into a rental--boring and overdone." Instead they had Jensen emphasize that their old home was too small, something that she claims makes her "cringe" with embarrassment when she watches the episode.
I GUESS at HGTV, if you can fake insufferable, you've got it made. Such is life in this land of bread and circuses.

Saturday, July 02, 2011

And now a word from our sponsor. . . .


OK, so I've pretty much been addicted to BTN's "Nebraska Days" coverage marking the Huskers' entrance into the Big Ten Conference.

The warm glow of exceptionally pure Husker crack bathes my brain as I nod off in front of the HDTV, and I keep seeing this commercial from Omaha's own food and agribusiness conglomerate, ConAgra. If I've seen it once, I've seen it 20 times.

And I cannot get enough of it. It is my new favorite TV ad.

It just strikes me as pitch-perfect in depicting the life of college students and the parents who love them.
Particularly the dad. Dad is awesome.

I ALSO love it when Mom surveys the mass if comatose young-adult humanity crashed before her in the "student residence," then asks "Are they dead?"

"That one's breathing," Dad reports back.


Perfect. Just perfect. More, please.
"That's your son."

"That's our son."

"Don't remind me."
IS IT just me, or is anybody else really craving some Manwich right now?

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Do as I say, not as I make my living


When a big-time NPR reporter gave a speech at a Norwalk, Conn., awards banquet Thursday, the local cable-access guy figured there would be no problem taping it for broadcast.

Happens all the time. Most journalists hawking books welcome the prospect. That's why God invented PR people.

Only in the case of Dina Temple-Raston, NPR's national-security and counterterrorism reporter, it turns out that the Darien/Norwalk YWCA found a broadcast correspondent who's camera shy. A radio journalist who, outside of working hours, just can't abide audio recorders.

The local cable-access TV guy couldn't believe it. And Jim Cameron, a former NBC Radio anchor, didn't like it. Didn't like it at all.


HE LIKED Temple-Raston's attitude so little, he wrote about it for AOL's Darian Patch:
A day before the event, at my request, the Y sponsors circled back to me with more information. Apparently her agent was wrong. It was not an NPR's rule about no taping, it was Ms. Temple-Raston's rule. Clearly, the Juan Williams case (of NPR Staffers speaking off-air) has had a chilling effect on those NPR staffers' outside, money-making speaking gigs.

The day of the event I decided to give full coverage a final try. Arriving at the Woodway Country Club, I told the YWCA organizers that the community deserved to see the award winners and I promised to record only that... if I could speak to Ms. Temple-Raston and make a final appeal. Seconds later, she appeared and we shared a rather contentious two minute conversation.

"You know you cannot tape my speech"' she said. "So I've heard," I said, "But why? Is it really an NPR rule?". "No," she said, "It's just my personal preference. I am on vacation today."

Then I tried appealing to her as a fellow fifth-estater. "As a journalist are you comfortable in stopping my coverage of your speech?”

"Absolutely," she said without hesitation. "You're lucky I'm allowing you to tape the awards presentations!"

"That's not your call," I told her. "I'm here at the invitation of the YWCA."

"Well, that camera better be off. That's an ethical issue," she said, and then added icing to the cake... "and this conversation is off the record."

"No, this conversation is ON the record, Dina, and it is part of my coverage," I said.

At this point two other videographers arrived, one from The Patch and the other from News12, our local cable news operation. Dina visibly flinched, turning to both and reminding them they too could not tape her speech. "No problem," said one of them.

Her final comment came as a somewhat rhetorical question... "why are you being so hard-assed (about this)?"
ARROGANCE LIKE THAT, as Temple-Raston is finding out from the resulting Internet kerfuffle, can be every bit a bad thing for you, your career and your employer's public-relations bottom line as any inflammatory thing you might say during a speech. And didn't want electronic proof of.

Mostly, though, it's just really, really funny.

Why is that?

Well, just wait for the punch line. It will come up right . . . about . . . now. Courtesy of an article on the banquet in the local newspaper,
The Hour.
Dina Temple-Raston, National Public Radio National Security and Counterterrorism Correspondent, spoke of her experiences in the Arab-speaking world, suggesting that female journalists can often succeed where male counterparts can't.

"Women are instinctively more aware of their surroundings than men and more alert to dire developments," she said.
SAID THE "instinctively more aware" woman journalist who never saw this one coming.

Monday, April 25, 2011

M'm! M'm! Good!


Martha's widening her appeal, apparently.

Today on The Martha Stewart Show, it's an easy-to-make recipe she picked up from the culinary professionals at Club Fed, where she spent some serious time doing, uh . . . research.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

It's not April Fool's yet. Right?


I thought what I just read a little bit ago was an April Fool's joke. Then again, it isn't April 1 yet.

And I'm pretty sure this article in Variety is dead serious. I'm equally sure them what's got are convinced that them what's not are blithering idiots.

I wish I were more confident that the greedheads in charge of every level of our society were horribly wrong. After all, if they were, it would be terribly difficult to explain how we got to where we are right now in America.

IF YOU DARE, read what Variety says Hollywood has in store for us gullible simpletons. Read it and weep . . . or read it and think "COOL!" Whatever.
Warner Bros., Sony, Universal and 20th Century Fox are the first studios that have agreed to launch Home Premiere as the official brand under which the industry will offer up movies to rent for $30 two months after their theatrical bows for a viewing period of two to three days, depending on the distributor.

DirecTV will exclusively launch Home Premiere nationally to its nearly 20 million customers, while cablers including Comcast will introduce the service in certain cities for an undisclosed period of time some time around the end of this month.

The first films expected to launch include Warner Bros.' actioner "Unknown" and Sony's Adam Sandler comedy "Just Go With It," sources close to the new service say.

The launch plans come months after studios started to float the idea to experiment with higher-priced rentals of pics closer to their theatrical runs as a way to boost their homevid operations with film campaigns still fresh in people's minds.

WB, U and Fox have already succeeded in fending off companies like Netflix and Redbox, forcing them to wait 28 days after a film bows on DVD to offer those titles for rent through their online services and kiosks. Those same studios wouldn't mind lengthening that window even longer and have considered pursuing such talks.

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Simply '70s: Good night, HBO


Life was different in 1977.

For one thing, I had lots of hair (I mean LOTS of hair) and a 29-inch waist. For another, television went to bed at night in 1977, expecting that you did, too.

In 1977,
HBO (which folks still knew stood for Home Box Office) wasn't a 24-hour affair. Like many of your local TV stations back then, HBO signed off overnight.

Good night, sleep tight. And don't let the cable box bite.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Conan: Very Funny


OK, Conan's back. And this opening had me about to fall off the couch laughing.

Just sayin'.

Monday, October 11, 2010

OK, this is addictive


In case you missed it the first time around . . . 29 years ago . . . here's how the rest of that first hour of MTV went.

As we learned on Sunday's edition of
Your Daily '80s, the first video played was from the Buggles. The first VJ was Mark Goodwin, but not really, because the videotapes of the VJ intros got mixed up, making Alan Hunter the first to introduce himself. But Goodman was the first to sit down and talk awhile.

Is that clear?
Well, nothing has been too clear since 1981 anyway, so don't sweat it.





And you'll notice that the VJ intros weren't the only thing to get out of order that first hour. Keep watching.



Sunday, October 10, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Video kills the radio star


Nah . . . just kidding.

Radio, as we all know, committed suicide. And you'll have to go to some lengths to find a music video on MTV today.

At any rate, we present a flashback to the launch of
MTV on Aug. 1, 1981. OK, everybody knows the first video played on MTV was the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." But what was the second?

Stay tuned and find out.