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Things that Robert is thinking about that keep him from accomplishing anything.
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Monday, March 31, 2003
Repeat Customers? Five days into this, I'm curious whether I have any repeat visitors or if all 122 visitors were "one and done." If you have visited more than once and you have no idea who I am, drop me an email to say that you're a repeat customer. The New Weekend Warriors For years the National Guard/Reserve has been derided with this moniker. Here is a sober assessment of American protests from the left, by Geov Parrish. This matches some of my experience participating in the Lysistrata Project. (It was a mildly amusing retooling of the classic, and it goes to show dick jokes are not a recent invention of modern Hollywood.) One of the people who spoke after the performance--a veteran protester of over four decades who had done real hunger strikes and hasn't paid income taxes as a conscientous objector for several decades--hit the nail on the head: depriving the leaders of sex (the play's comic premise) is not anywhere near the answer; implicitly, neither is performing in such a play; depriving them of your money and your vote is the answer. Since I was participating in the reading out of duty to a friend and the opportunity to work on character voices, it was interesting, as an outsider to the group mounting the play, to see the disconnect between passion and planning firsthand. In many ways protesting as practiced now participates in the same multi-lateral media tug-of-war, but with smaller numbers and less money. A photo op here. A press release there. Does it matter? The futility of protest by itself is obvious when you see the counter-protests get coverage, too. The inherent problem is that people who are truly passionate and want to see changes may not have the skill, inclination, or resources to do much more than what they are doing. "I've got class." "I've got to work." "My rent is due." "I've got bills to pay." It's a wonder anything can be accomplished given our own personal entangling alliances to our jobs, food, shelter, and credit card companies. Until people are willing to make tough, personal choices about those priorities (e.g., is volunteering on so-and-so's election campaign a better use of my time than my current job?), the tug-of-war will continue with the usual, predictable results. Even then....Heck, it was seven years after the '68 Democratic convention, six years after Woodstock, and five years after Kent State that the VietNam war ended. Update:I fixed the Lysistrata link. Speaking of E! I caught part of the THS: The Hollywood Squares last night. The funniest straight line was: "John Davidson did a good job of filling the shoes of Peter Marshall." As everyone knows, Peter Marshall's impact on television has been comparable to Milton Berle, Pat Weaver, and Johnny Carson. John Davidson today looks like an ape extra from the original Planet of the Apes. When the Generals Talk... Is it just me, or has every day of this war been "the most intense bombing of the campaign" in Iraq? Does the counter reset at sunset? "Today was the most intense bombing of the campaign since...yesterday!" At this rate, even Malthus would have to question whether such a rate of growth is possible. One of the costs of the continuous coverage seems to be the loss of memory in the system: everyone is so busy reporting the current press conference, updating us on what we just heard in the press conference, then reairing the press conference in case we missed it, that there's no time left--in spite of 24-hour a day coverage--to analyze what has been said. It's also fed by FOX's ability to portray, and the public's willingness to interpret, any media coverage that is at all skeptical as unpatriotic. Unpatriotic => Reduced Viewership => Unprofitable War Coverage => Scaled Back Coverage => Patriotic Coverage => Profitable War Coverage. Also, have you noticed how much repetition of the same footage there is? For god's sake, if you can't run a three minute segment without reairing the same video footage, there's a problem. What is this, Corey Haim: The E! True Hollywood Story? NCAA Gives Up After 3000 viewings of the young woman swimming the 200 butterfly and the young man tossing the shot put and talking about their life's lessons, I've interpreted the NCAA's message as: Don't judge us by the thousands of young men who play the sport you are currently watching; instead, judge us by the many thousands more young men and women who compete in sports that you don't care about, who you will never see, and who have no hopes of earning money from the sport as a career. God bless the NCAA! Perhaps if the NCAA invested more effort in supporting schools in their decision to accept students who compete in athletics rather than pressuring them with huge financial rewards for recruiting athletes that are often only nominal students, the NCAA would seem less hypocritical. Sunday, March 30, 2003
Whatyoutalkin'bout, Roger? Caroline Wilbert writes in Sunday's AJC about FNC beating CNN in ratings during the war. She has this quote from Roger Ailes: "They announced for two months they were going to clean our clocks. My dad always taught me that if someone is bragging about beating you up, stay quiet until the fighting starts. The only thing that matters once the fighting starts is who wins." If I didn't know better, I'd think that was the Iraqi version of Ari Fleischer speaking. Dingbat! I said I'd check on the commerical lengths during overlapping games this weekend. Duh! There are no overlapping games on Elite 8 Weekend. And, "Yeah, Marquette!" I flipped on the game at halftime. When I saw they were up by 18 I decided they didn't need me around to jinx them. Saturday, March 29, 2003
Treat Yourself: Listen to This Week's Rewind The best thing about visiting my girlfriend in Birmingham, AL--besides anticipating the joy her beatific presence provides me (nice save!)--is that the last half hour coincides with the broadcast of Rewind on Birmingham's public radio affiliate, WBHM 90.3 FM. This week's show (3/28/2003) was a "Best of" of their radio sketches. I laughed so hard I nearly destroyed several Jersey barricades as I hurtled down I-65. Run, Don't Walk! to their site and listen to them. My favorite is "Two Straight Men Looking for a Punchline": baseball fans will love the destruction of "Who's on First." The capper though is Ira Glass, of This American Life, hosting Car Talk. Iraq Strikes Back at Dolphins Saddam Hussein has deployed an armada of tuna boats to counter America's minesweeping dolphins. PETA and GreenPeace issued a joint statement condemning the action. Starkist has denied supplying boats and nets. Friday, March 28, 2003
Pranksters Misinterpret Faux Disdain Yes, I actually love our fabuolous paper, The Slant. Here's an easily digestible sampling from this week's TV Guide. And here's a link to coverage of a prank pulled by our illustrious, but deposed, leadership. We apparently made the Drudge Report. I can't find it up there. I guess they pulled it down once it was exposed. Georgia Power in Action Saw this at Baseball Musings. Apparently Skip Caray and Pete Van Wieren have been switched over to radio full time. Here's the coverage from the AJC. First, irritating as it is, this probably shouldn't be a surprise. Last year many of the Braves games were switched to Turner South and the broadcast teams often worked exclusively on either radio or t.v. but alternated from game to game which team worked where. I believe they even farmed out a game a week to Fox Sports South, which means none of the Braves announcers were involved on the t.v. side. Second, I am thankful that they're still on the radio. I can get WSB here in Nashville, and occassionally a local station will be an affiliate and I don't have to fight the radio static. When I work my Skip Caray impersonation, among the phrases that get me in the groove are, "My good friends at Georgia Power. Georgia Power. A Southern Company." So, we'll get to hear him consistently for both games and commercials. Third, this is the most assanine decision in the world. It is yet another sign of new baseball owners not understanding their product and the true assets in their employ. We went through this in Baltimore when Angelos hastened the departure of Jon Miller (now with the Giants), Joe Angel (now with the Marlins), and Josh Lewin (I believe was with the Cubs, but now is with the Rangers). I don't believe this was related, but we also lost Mel Proctor to the Padres from the HTS (now Comcast) broadcasts. Incidentally, I heard him a few weeks ago on ESPN GameDay with Andy Pollin and Mel Kiper. He's apparently a sports anchor in Palm Springs, waiting for a call-up. These people are our link to the team, and our connection to them is much more intimate. We hear their voices every day for years. Often we get to see their faces. They have been the sole source of stability during free agency. And now the foundation has finally been bunker bombed. I guess this was bound to happen. Players don't stay with teams forever. And now, we'll slowly see a bunch of young, interchangeable men replace the voices that made baseball baseball. The Bucks. The Harwells. Soon the Scullys. Eventually, we'll see the ClearChannel-fication of the broadcast booth. Like the Simpsons where the boys at KBBL are going to be replaced by the computer DJ:
Burn in hell, owners. Ensign Flipper With all this coverage of dolphins in the Navy, I'm sure you're thinking the same thing I am: watch out for Tailhook 2003! Hang on, ladies! Four hundred pounds of wet, slippery, mammalian love coming your way! CBS & NCAA Tourney I'll take a moment now to vent about CBS's coverage of the tournament. I typically will not bitch about advertisements per se. They pay the freight, and I'm a cheap bastard who knows how to work his remote control. That said, last night's coverage typefied something that has pissed me off about their coverage for the past several years. Scenario 1: The Kansas-Duke game goes to a commercial at about the 5-minute mark because of a time out. I forget now if it was the under-8:00 media time out or team time out. We get the commercials for that game, and when we come back we're switched to the Marquette-Pitt game, just in time for that game's media time out. When we come back to the KU-Duke, it's time for the under-4:00 media time out in that game. Scenario 2: Both KU-Duke and Marquette-Pitt are under 1:00 to play. They cut from the KU-Duke game mid-action to the other game, we get the reset from Gumbel...just in time for another timeout. At least this time, they switched back to the KU-Duke game right away, but since it was in the middle of the action and Gumbel had been talking, about :30 ran off the clock and Duke had cut the KU lead to (I think) 4. We got another round of switches that caused us to watch more of the "Road to the Final Four logo and hear more of Greg Gumbel than any of either game. Cutting away from one close game to see another is idiotic because it reduces the drama of each game. Fortunately, I didn't have a rooting interest in either game. I did have an interest in seeing the game that was forced on me by CBS to its conclusion. If something interesting happened in the other game, show me the last 1:00 or so immediately after the game. If CBS and the NCAA can embargo the video and scores, then it's live to me. And if the last 1:00 proves to be nothing but timeouts and missed foul shots, then there's no need to show it. The worst thing about CBS's monopoly on the coverage of games is that its switching behavior often is less about showing you the game and more about maximizing the number of full media time outs per hour. In one half of basketball, if you can get the four media time outs for one game plus one or two from a concurrent game, then voila! Instant money. I'll try to time out an hour of coverage this weekend to see how it compares to regular shows. You have 21:00-22:00 per half-hour sitcom, so we're looking at 16-18 minutes of commercials per hour. We'll see how they compare. Thursday, March 27, 2003
Memo: Bush Speechwriters I was watching the president's speech to CENTCOM in Tampa on Wednesday morning. Toward the end of the speech he has this wonderful moment: "The 24 million people of Iraq have lived too long...odd, long pause...under a violent criminal gang calling itself a government." Talk about shock and awe. If you know that your speechmaker is not the most verbally adept person, do not write text like that. Are these guys on the Iraqi propaganda staff? Cue up the audio or visual for yourself. It's just after the 22:45 mark. Signs of Addiction Already Forming I see now how the Blog becomes a monster that must be fed. I've received my first piece of email, from my good friend Michael. He forwarded me this blog about America's most famous fragger. Fortunately, the protections against cruel and unusual punishment are slowly eroding to the point where we might be able to pitch this as a pilot reality series for the fall. I'm sure the point of "Runinng Man" was lost on its audience. Soon it will be pitched as an actual show. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to my new celebrity reality series. We take a celebrity from the "where are they now?" files. Paging Elisabeth Shue! We then inject her with both Ebola and Botox and let them fight it out for microbial supremacy. Hack Alert!: Speeding Up the Game Since nothing is troubling me in the world of baseball right now, but I feel it is my duty to write something about it to satisfy customers from Baseball Musings, I'll pull out a stock issue: speeding up the game. We'll start on the pitcher's side of the equation for now. I've never seen this rule enforced in my lifetime that I can recall. (1970 for those of you scoring at home.) However, there is talk of enforcing this rule against pitchers.
The most prominent argument I hear against the rule is its unenforcability. Even the best intentioned umpires will try to enforce it initially, then slowly let up. Differential application of the rules, both within umpires (i.e., game to game by Umpire X) and across umpires (i.e., game to game between Umpires X and Y), make enforcement unfair, in the sense of inconsistent. You hockey fans have seen this all year with the obstruction rules. My first question is, why not take the responsibility for monitoring this rule out of the hands of the head umpire, but give him the power to enforce it. What the hell does that mean? In every major sport, umpires are aided either by technical devices (e.g., the 24-second shot clock) or non-game assistants (e.g., shot clock operators) or officials (e.g., the goal judge in hockey). In all of these situations, the referee has the power to enforce the rules. However, the duty of monitoring the rule is shared outside of the crew. So, in the case of baseball, one way to enforce the rule and achieve consistency is to create an external force. The umpires union is one source of resistance. Sandy Alderson is doing his part to standardize umpire performance, so it may be possible to get by the union. Alternatively, one way to gain the union's support is to create an extra job per game for the union might earn their support. Since this is a game rule, I'm not sure whether the players' union has any say. They'd no doubt have an opinion. I would expect that in the next ten years you'll see baseball come into the 20th century and rely on at least some outside assistance, mechanical or human, for umpires. My second question is: if it were systematically enforced, would this change baseball statistics? Would we count pitched and non-pitched balls? My guess is pitchers would learn pretty quickly given the penalty, so it may be moot. Bigger than all that though, is whether this is all that big of a deal since the rule only applies with no runners on base. Texas will be lucky if starts its games with no runners on base. I'm not aware of any data on the average time to pitch for players, but I don't imagine that the the number of pitches per game above :20 is that high. Even then, it's probably not way over :20, so the amount of time saved is likely to be very small. (Your homework will be to report in with your own time counts for some upcoming games.) For the game to speed up, I think you'd have to hope that pitchers who routinely take :15-:19 seconds get worried about the penalty and speed up on every pitch. Otherwise, I don't think there's much room to squeeze here. Interactivity Time This is Procrastination Nation. The chronic procrastinator always believes he or she is the worst procrastinator in the world. I want your tales of procrastination. A prize of some form will be provided for the funniest and most destructive story. Note: This is a non-fiction exercise. Send me your stories in the text of an email. Consider the deadline to be April 11. Obviously, late entries are expected. Welcome Baseball Musings Fans Many thanks to Dave Pinto for announcing my blog to the world. I'll babystep into some baseball discussion shortly. I Fished My Wish My friend Ann recently served on a jury, and I mentioned to her how I longed to be on a jury myself. It's like getting to be a judge, but without having to go to law school. The gods must have heard my prayers. I got my first jury summons! Of course, there's no guarantee that I'll get to serve. But, it's an honor just to be nominated. Foreign Weather Reports With the war underway, our local news stations are including weather forecasts for the Iraq and Afghanistan. Great, now they can be wrong twice as often! Have these folks demonstrated any mastery of weather forecasting or special knowledge of weather trends in their own region of the United States? Actually, they may be better at predicting foreign weather. Check out Dan Goldstein's research. He has some interesting observations about decisionmaking and prediction. Progress at NBC NBC expects that within the next three weeks Soledad O'Brien will be a perfect replica of Katie Couric. On that happy day, GE will throw a kegger outside the Today show studio. Wednesday, March 26, 2003
Celebrity Speak Out My friend has been pestering me about celebrities speaking out in public about anything except whatever creative venture they're promoting. I, of course, am thoroughly ambivalent about it. What troubles me more than artists speaking out about political issues (informed or not) is the vehemence of people who oppose this. Anti-abortion protesters in Kansas don't get this riled. Their argument is, "I did not pay to see this" (even when it's on free tv) and "They're taking unfair advantage of their celebrity." The latter is the more telling argument, and I think the true source of resentment. They sense, rightly, that their own opinions don't matter to anyone, or at least don't have the power to persuade and influence others. Every time a celebrity opens his or her mouth, it's a reminder: "Celebrities have power and influence, I don't." And what makes it more hurtful is that the offended person, or the pubic in general, has conferred this power upon the celebrity by buying their wares. "What? The Dixie Chicks are anti-war and anti-Bush? But, I spent my $16.99 (plus tax) at Wal-Mart for their music. How can they have turned against what I believe in?" So, if you're against celebrities speaking out about things, great. Can you take a page out of your own book and just stop talking about it? The Art of Shameless Self-Promotion
I've been meaning to do this for some time, but...you know.
Why am I doing this? Like other bloggers, I'm swollen with hubris. I also hope to accomplish some things. First, I would like to declutter my brain. If I can just get some of this stuff "out there," maybe I'll stop thinking about it so much. A dubious strategy, but for now, as they say at CENTCOM, I'm "on plan." Second, I'm a wannabe writer. Editing this blog will provide me with just the amount of reinforcement that I'm a writer while keeping me from being truly productive in that direction (e.g., my dissertation, sending that query letter, that sitcom spec script). This is Procrastinnation Nation after all.
Finally, I apologize in advance for violating any standards of blogiquette. Please do not invade me.
Sincerely,
Your fearless leader
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