Things I Learned From TV

10. When you come home from a long day at work, and you walk into your suburban New Rochelle home, watch out for the ottoman.
9. The most state-of-the-art computer animation techniques are used to depict roadkill, walking intestines and boogers.
8. Use as directed.
7. The best crime solvers are novelists, psychotics, drug addicts and people on the autism spectrum.
6. Anything on HBO has to include the word @#&* every 17 minutes.
5. There’s always next year.
4. Every family has a sarcastic, wise-cracking member who seems to be the “smart one,” and thus is always the outcast.
3. Public television doesn’t show commercials; just long, self-promotional messages from sponsors.
2. We are farmers. Dum-de-dum-dum Dum-dum-dum.
1. Political candidates are all frustrated fiction writers.

Destiny

Created while watching Jeopardy.

Televentuality

Troubled technology company Yahoo, whose previous claim to fame was that it’s named after the stupid, brutish people in Gulliver’s Travels, is now getting into the television business. They announced this week that they’re commissioning two comedy series, and that they’re going to start streaming live concerts every day.

With this move, Yahoo joins the ranks of Netflix, Amazon, Google and every idiot with a phone and a YouTube account. Can it be that these companies have realized that, far from clamoring for new gadgets and Web sites, people really just want to watch TV? (Actually, most of the new gadgets and Web sites are designed for TV watching.) Humankind’s destiny is to evolve into recumbent blobs capable of absorbing massive amounts of televised entertainment, as depicted in Disney’s WALL-E.

Just look around. There are TV screens everywhere. In elevators. In every restaurant or bar. On airplane seats. On grocery shopping carts. In kitchens and bathrooms. I know a lot of parents who treat the TV as a pacifier for their kids, but who’s pacifying us?

Of course, not just anyone can create such crowning cultural achievements as “2 Broke Girls,” “Wipe Out” or “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” This kind of talent will be increasingly in demand. And while I’m glad to see new opportunities for creative people, the current milieu of thousands of channels, Web sites and download sources, all brimming with utter crap¹, does not fill me with optimism.

¹With a few notable exceptions.

If Aaron Sorkin Wrote "Downton Abbey" ...

An Open Letter To CBS

Dear CBS:

You suck!

Sincerely yours,
The Tech Curmudgeon

P.S. - This seemingly harsh critique is not being dispensed lightly. I will, for example, give you credit for coming up with a few reasonably entertaining shows, some of which have actual comic (e.g., Big Bang Theory), dramatic (e.g., The Good Wife) or intellectual (e.g., Jeopardy) appeal. (You do, however, owe humanity an abject apology for Two Broke Girls.)

But you persist in pre-empting or, worse, randomly re-scheduling the quality shows in order to accommodate any programming that might remotely be considered a sport, including tiddly-winks, paper football and coin tossing. In fact, you’ve given the reigning best show on television, Jeopardy, the boot for some idiotic football pre-season talk show! It’s not even football season. What is the pre-season? The whole rest of the year?

Worse, when Sunday night programming is delayed by some late afternoon game, your programming execs (That has to be an oxymoron … or some kind of moron anyway.) move the entire evening line up. Instead of simply dropping the utterly useless and civilization-eroding Amazing Race so the other programs could stay on schedule, which would irritate only those who want to watch a group of desperate idiots perform humiliating and degrading stunts, you insist on pissing off your entire audience.

Technology has given viewers more and more control. People expect to be able to watch whatever they want whenever they want. At the very least, they should be able to watch what they want when it’s supposed to be on. Your approach of blithely ignoring your own schedules is like saying to viewers: “We decide what your going to watch and when.” Yeah. Good luck with that.

P.P.S. - And please stop showing those stupid ads for yogurt that makes you poop.

Commercial Art

The Fall TV Line-Up

The new fall TV line-up has been announced. ABC introduces new shows, Totally Nude Supermodels (Partly Obstructed Views), and Incredibly Good Looking People (Who Are Not Models) Doing Stupid Stuff, as well as the returning favorites Nearly Naked Models, Hot Babes in Skimpy Outfits, and Nightline.

In the game category, ABC will add People Who Have No Business Dancing.

CBS follows up the successes of CSI and NCIS with premieres of new crime-fighting procedurals INCS, CINS, SNIC and NCISSISSIPPI. New situation comedies include Two Incredibly Lame-Brained Idiots and Immature Men (Isn’t That Redundant?) 

NBC will be rolling out new episodes of Old Actors Trying Desperately to Revive Their Careers, as well as the newly retitled You’re Fired. (Research indicates the audience had trouble with the words “celebrity” and “apprentice.”)

MSNBC will extend it’s line-up with a new prime time commentary show, Cherry Picked News with Innuendo, while Fox renews its long-running faux-reality show, Fox News.

Of course, Fox’s real attention-getter is Seth MacFarlane's new prime time animated series, &@$# You!

Unreality TV

Commercial Messages

TV commercials can sometimes overwhelm us with audio and visual effects so their actual message is obscured. In this season of heightened football activity, it is even more important that we can correctly decode the commercials put before us. Therefore, as a public service, we present this guide to some of the more popular current commercials.

The Sheriff and the Lieutenant

The soft-spoken but all-knowing sheriff of Mayberry and the boisterous, anti-authority lieutenant commander of PT-73 passed away within about a week of each other. And these two opposing views of authority more or less defined the decade these TV characters inhabited.

As Sheriff Taylor, Andy Griffith played the gentle, fatherly leader … the voice of reason when the whole town was a little nuts. Of course, that rationality came at a price. He was also the most boring person in town. It’s hard to imagine him doing anything offbeat. (“Why Helen Crump, I’m surprised at you! Those handcuffs are for law enforcement!”)

I’m sure there are some really good comparisons I could make with Ernest Borgnine’s Lieutenant Commander McHale, but I haven’t seen the show on TV Land, so I don’t remember it too well. I know he was anything but soft-spoken, and he referred to his commanding officer as Leadbottom.

Anyway, we lost both of these wildly different characters this month. Luckily, though we no longer have Hugh Beaumont, the father on “Leave It To Beaver” … we can look to his doppelgänger, Mitt Romney.

Do It Yourself

TV Ads

TV Facemash

As recounted in the movie, The Social Network, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg originally created a site called Facemash, in which viewers were shown pairs of photos of Harvard students and asked to pick which one was hotter. To update this concept, we'd like to use more familiar faces from TV.  So here's our TV Facemash.

Who's hotter?

Progressive Insurance	T-Mobile
Jess (Domino's Pizza)	Pat (Saturday Night Live)
Geico	Mucinex

Maybe 3D Would Help

What I Want

Technology is close to solving some of the pesky problems of daily life. The big issues? No way! But a number of minor annoyances could certainly be eliminated in the next year or so. So here's what I want:

More cell phone bar code apps

SnapTell is a mobile app that uses the device's camera to read bar codes on products, and then tell you where else to buy them, on- or offline. Very cool! But I'd also like to automatically look up the product in Consumer Reports or epinions.com and see if it's even worth buying.

Better caller ID

When someone calls, I can see who it is and decide whether I want to answer. But if my wife's on the phone, I can't see who she's talking to.  Fix that. Yeah, yeah ... privacy. I'll bet Facebook knows who she's talking to.

Smarter remote controls

I have to go through about 47 levels of on-screen menus to browse through the video-on-demand movies or TV shows on my system. By the time I've found something tolerable, it's too late to watch it. I know the cable companies keep these ungodly search paths out of obligation to the content providers, but someone should make a touch-screen remote where I can add buttons that will just jump right to the set of choices I want. Click .. HBO HD movies; click again ... Showtime HD movies, etc. That simple.

For extra credit, just put all the movies in one freakin' list, and let me choose.  I really don't care which channel is so graciously agreeing to take my money.

And speaking of TV how about ...

Baysian commercial blocking

The most effective email spam blockers work by learning to recognize certain types of content as spam.  Why can't we do that for TV commercials? I could click the CRAP button on the remote when a commercial starts, and the system would learn what signals are just noise, and would blank the screen and mute the sound. Then I wouldn't have to sit through the animated boogers and the animated road kill and the animated whatever else six times in every half hour.

Better software upgrading

I have two PCs and a MacBook Pro, and I'm convinced they all spend most of their time upgrading their own software. I think they've got a little keeping-up-with-the-Joneses thing going amongst themselves.  "Oh, have you seen my new Thunderbird?" How about if they only upgrade when I'm not using the computer? How about if they learn how to upgrade without having to restart the whole machine? Better yet, how about if software companies TEST their products before delivering them?

Smarter GPS

Do I even have to explain this?

What else do I want? Well, I'd like a share of anyone's implementation of any of these ideas. After all ...