Category: TV

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Mike Rowe

For a while I’ve been steadily getting angry comments on my old post that mentioned the unfunny and annoying TV “personality” Mike Rowe. For a while I could not understand where these women were finding me, but then one of them explained that the my site shows up on first page of an image search for “rowe dirty jobs”.

“Mike Rowe is hunky and I have terrific sex dreams about him. He has one of those personalities that can make you laugh at just about anything” – wrote one of them.

While Rowe is indeed hunky, I still think that he could only be funny in this show. Now, I’d buy that for a quarter!

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Boooo, HBO. Yay, Netflix

My TIVO has fallen on hard times. It seems that the network executives cancel shows faster than I find new ones to watch. The ones they don’t cancel, become bad. Let’s have a moment of silence for the dearly departed…

Futurama, Firefly, The $treet, Invader Zim, Deadwood, Carnivale, The Restaurant, Six Feet Under, The Job, Insomniac With Dave Attell, Samurai Jack, Sex and the City, NYPD Blue, Friends, That ’70s Show

SEO for CTOs and CEOs
Note to those working hard on search engine optimization. How did IMDB get me to give them so many valuable links? Why does it have a pagerank of 9? Why didn’t I use some certain other TV and movie review site? Simple. IMDB does not change URLs every couple of years, the search is simple and fast.

Well, in fact most of the shows that were on my old TIVO list. In particular, HBO has been especially keen on destroying my viewing list. Granted, some of the shows like NYPD Blue and Friends have lived longer than they should have, but on HBO Deadwood and Carnivale have been cut down in their prime, most annoyingly, not even ending cleanly.

In light of this, and to protest the cancelling Deadwood and Carnivale, I cancelled my HBO subscription and got a Netflix subscription instead. I still like Rome and The Sopranos, but I can wait until they are out on dvd. So HBO, I have only one thing to say to you. Booooooooooooooooooooooo. Boo. Well, OK, that was two things.

Compared to $12 a month for HBO, Netflix is a bargain at $9.99. The only problem is that I don’t like the DVD player’s interface – I have to wait for the menus to load, skip the previews. Fast forward and back is not as smooth as in TIVO and there’s no way to watch some other disk, and then come back to where I stopped watching another. I think I need something like Kaleidescape, except cheap and with storage for only a couple of DVDs at the time. Or maybe just a well-designed dvd player.

Sadly, Netflix does not have a particularly impressive inventory. Peerflix has a much better one, and is also a good way for me to get rid of the dvds that I don’t need anymore and get some obscure stuff that I do need.

All’s not too bad in TV Land overall though. I am frustrated with DirecTV TIVO not having networking and online scheduling and for that reason I am not upgrading to HD DirecTV TIVO. Tivo Series 3 does not work with DirecTV and is outrageously expensive. Well, at least there are some new shows that I like.

At the top of the pile is How It’s Made. It’s a Canadian show that mostly takes you inside factories and shows you amazing manufacturing and automation techniques. There’s a number of similar shows around, but they are all suffering from the same problem: TV personalities. It’s annoying to see idiotically grinning morons making bad jokes and drawing attention to themselves rather than to what the show is about.

For instance, Dirty Jobs is not really about messy, smelly, funny and horrible jobs. It’s about messy, smelly unfunny and horrible host, Mike Rowe. The last segment of Dave Attell of Insomniac with Dave Attell often had a segment similar to Dirty Jobs, but Attel, unlike Rowe is both charismatic and funny. Well, at least I think so.

Overall I feel that in a show about working a host is not very important. Take This Old House, for instance. It’s really about Tommy, Norm, and the lesser subcontractors such as Richard and Roger. But you can take one host with another and then with another without the show suffering. I, for one, find the last host least annoying.

Anyway, what’s different about How It’s Made is that it does not have a host, only an invisible narrator. The show walks you through various industrial manufacturing processes accompanied by the Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka-like music and almost hypnotic narration. It’s pure engineering porn. It seems like youtube has pulled down most of How It’s Made clips, but there’s still one on google video.

Now I can’t look at any mass-produced item without trying to picture the assembly line that created it. Some of the machines that I’ve seen are still haunting my mind–the ingenuity with which they are made are just amazing. I wish the show would interview the engineers who made the machines and spent more time on some of the more complicated ones.

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Quotin’

I am currently reading Douglas Coupland’s latest book, “Jpod” and absolutely loving it. My favorite quote so far:

“Here’s my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic–they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes. One of the most common creativity-faking tactics is when somebody put their hands in the prayer position and conceals their mouth while they nod at you and say, “Hmmmmm. Interesting.” If pressed, they’ll add, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” Then they don’t say anything else”.

By the way, according to his website, on 14th of June 2006 at 7 pm, Coupland is going to be at Barnes & Noble Union Square, apparently promoting “Jpod.”

One of the running themes in the book is the never ending references to the Simpsons cartoons. By my estimation, probably good third of my posts have an Simpsons quote. And you know what, I feel rather pathetic while watching old episodes I stumble upon obscure references that are not even documented in very, very obsessive snpp.com.

Here are two latest ones that I found. I’ll let you guess, and then announce the right answer. My hope is that some of you are at least as nerdy as I am for knowing this.

What is the significance of Bob Terwilliger’s prisoner number, 1211 in episode [9F22] Cape Feare? (this one’s is too easy for some of my friends :)

Answer: Newscorp headquarters are located at 1211 Avenue of the Americas

In episode 9F19 Krusty Gets Kancelled what is “Eastern Europe’s favorite cat-and-mouse team” based on?

Answer: They are based on Kazimir Malevich-designed costumes for a futurist opera “Victory Over the Sun”. This 1913 opera was written in Zaum, an artificial avant-garde language, similar to glossolalia or “speaking in tongues”. And I thought that Malevich only drew black squares…

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“We Also Build Poor-Quality Cars and Inferior-Style Electronics”.

Oh. My. God. My blog is actually useful. See, livejournal user n0w emailed me about this show called MXC, telling me that it’s a new version of “Takeshi’s Castle“. This is some useful information.

Here’s what TVHome.com has to say about it : “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (or “MXC”) is the ultimate in reality sports, where contestants comprised of two teams are physically and mentally challenged and eliminated through crazy and challenging games.”

This was not encouraging description. I recorded one episode, expecting a new American Gladiators type show. But oh no no no no no! It’s nothing but. This is a creation of a few of mentally challenged Spike TV producers who somehow got their hands on vintage Takeshi’s Castle footage and proceeded to anally rape it.

Here’s what these brilliant minds did to the poor thing:
* They renamed the main characters. General Tani became Captain Tenneal, Count Count Beat Takeshi became Vic Romano. Count Takesh’s advisor whose name I don’t know became Kenny Blankenship.
* They edited the footage to somehow give the impression that the original one hundred something contestants are broken up into two teams.
* They completely replaced the dialogue Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, but with a lot of crude, frequently homophobic and sometimes even racist comments.
* They removed the actual storming of Takeshi’s castle, although you sometimes can see the castle in the background. Instead they show replays of the more painful falls and scrapes that the contestants suffer.

Of course, it is possible that the owners of Takeshi’s Castle footage sold it under the condition that it should be disfigured like this. Or Spike TV did not have enough money for a Japanese translator. Or some bigwig came up with these brilliant enhancements and the poor producers had no chance but to go along. Then I apologize for calling this mutilation one of the dumbest things on TV.

The original Japanese show had so many things going for it, no wonder I remembered it for 12-15 years after seeing a couple of episodes. It has hundreds of regular people facing almost impossible tasks. Most of them failed at these tasks, facing painful and humiliating falls. Yet they showed fighting spirit, hanging on as long as possible, getting up drenched in dirt and mocked by Takeshi’s henchmen, yet not loosing face. Instead of concentrating so much on humiliating falls, in the original show they replayed attempts that showed the most determination, to this day I remember the guy who tilted at about 20 degrees to the ground on the stepping stones challenge, yet made one more jump. The actual storming of the castle was a great thing to look forward to at the end of the show, even though the contestants succeeded only a couple of times through the whole run of the series.

Well, I guess this mutant of a show is still watchable if you mute the moronic braying of the idiotic remixers. “Now, our game shows are a little different from yours. Your shows reward knowledge; we punish ignorance“. Well, our shows do not rewards knowledge. They punish the viewers. I so wish I could enact that Tivo commercial, where a couple of guys throw a network boss out the window, with MXC creators.

General Hayati Tani renamed for us, “average American Joe Salaryman waiters”.

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Cloak and Chef’s Knife

A few days ago I saw the funniest ad while working out. It was a recruitment ad for the CIA and its tagline was “Why work for a company when you can serve the nation?” I almost fell from the treadmill.

I am pretty sure that they wanted to do “Why work for a company when you can work for The Company“, but then decided that not everyone would understand the humor. Intelligence community slang always cracks me up. They could do an ad spot with a dude looking for a place to send his resume and getting the response “No Such Agency”.

I wonder if chefs call their school “The Company”. I own a book called The Professional Chef’s Knife Kit published by that CIA. I also know a guy that owns an official CIA chef’s knife (which is very cool), but I can’t find one online – searches for CIA and knife return very wrong results.

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Tivo! Tivo! Tivo!

Ok, I am a dork. A dork with a tricked out Tivo.
So far I struggled through:
* Installing TurboNet ethernet card
* Installing a 120 gig drive instead of the two 20 gig drives that came with my Tivo
* Getting telnet to work
and finally, finally!
*Installing Tivo Web

One of the coolest features of Tivo Web is ability to undelete shows.

Here is a list of my “season passes” that I grabbed with Tivo Web.
(I would like to note that I don’t watch “Enterprise”. does.

# | Show Name | Channel
1 Futurama WNYW
2 The Job COMEDY
3 The Sopranos
4 The Job WABC
5 Sex and the City HBO
6 Six Feet Under HBO
7 ER WNBC
8 Friends WNBC
9 That ’70s Show
10 Farscape SCIFI
11 Firefly WNYW
12 Enterprise WWOR
13 The Simpsons WNYW
14 The Man Show COMEDY
15 Antiques Roadshow WNET
16 Malcolm in the Middle WNYW
17 Scrubs WNBC
18 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation WCBS
19 This Old House WNET
20 NYPD Blue TNT
21 Antiques Roadshow UK WLIW
22 Insomniac With Dave Attell COMEDY
23 New Yankee Workshop WNET
24 Samurai Jack TOON
25 Monk USA
26 John Doe WNYW