Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Goodnight, Johnny…

I was home with my mom Sunday night when I heard that Johnny Carson had died, which was only fitting, since it was thanks to my permissive parents that I got to stay up late so often as a child and watch The Tonight Show. I think if I could pick an entertainment figure I'd most want to emulate, it would be Johnny Carson. "You should live your life"—I'm paraphrasing Mark Twain here—"such that when you go, even the undertaker will be sad." And that's exactly what it seems Carson did. If you've paid any attention at all to the various obituaries and tributes over the past couple of days, no one seems to have an unkind word for him, unusual in this day and age. It's hardly the usual deferential not speaking ill of the dead. Johnny Carson, it seems, was nothing but genuine and absolutely nice.

That was certainly my experience.

When I was nine years old, I knew with absolute certainty that I wanted to be a professional magician when I grew up. I'd read in some fan magazine or another that Johnny Carson had performed magic when he was younger and so, seeing him as a successful TV star and seeking advice for my future career, I sat down at my mother's tank of an IBM electric typewriter and hunted-and-pecked a note to him, enclosing a Polaroid photo of me holding a fanned deck of cards and wearing an absurdly oversized felt top hat.

Looking back as an adult, I would say the best I could have expected was a form letter or canned response sent by a flunky and mechanically signed. What I received instead a few weeks later was a handwritten two-page note, encouraging me to keep practicing my tricks, and an 8x10 personally autographed photo of Johnny Carson. I still have and treasure them both.

Several years later, I was in Los Angeles visiting a friend who worked at NBC whose office happened to be on the same lot as Carson's production company. While waiting for Marc to meet me for lunch, I glanced across the parking area and, in the distance, saw someone I was sure was Johnny Carson. He was chatting with someone and when his companion walked away, he looked up and almost directly at me. It was him! Impulsively, I raised my arm and waved vigorously. I almost immediately felt the fool but, to my astonishment, he waved back, smiled then turned and walked into a nearby building.

I never got to step through that rainbow-colored curtain. I never got to sit on the couch next to Ed McMahon and plug my latest book. I never got to hob-knob in the green room with Joan Embry and Charo. But Johnny Carson gave me career advice and Johnny Carson waved me a jaunty hello. I wish there was—as those colorful interstitial cards on TV used to say—"More to Come" but there's not.

Goodbye, Carnac the Magnificent. So long, Floyd C. Turbo and sayonara Art Fern. Goodnight, Johnny...and thanks.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

The Pirate Movie on DVD

Give me a happy ending, every time! I would just like to point out for the benefit of a very specific half-dozen or so readers that The Pirate Movie will be released on DVD in March.

The 1982 teen-flick-slash-Gilbert-and-Sullivan-parody contains one of my favorite musical comedy rhymes ever, in its version of "The Major-General's Song", to wit:

I comprehend contemporary culture North American.
I've straightened more piratical erections than Bo Derek can.

Saucy wordplay like that, along with the shirtless Christopher Atkins factor, make this a must-own, must-see. My nearly worn-out VHS will soon be replaced.

Wednesday, January 5, 2005

Fortunately, he does look good…

He's had an alien probe shish kebob his leg to the hull of the Enterprise. He's faced cranky reptiles keen on destroying the Earth. He's even gotten kicked around by a few hellbent mutant humans.

But 15 years ago, Dominic Keating—aka the dashing Lt. Malcolm Reed from Star Trek: Enterprise—faced humankind's most pernicious threat:

Split ends.

Alternate titles considered for this entry: "Set phasers on Conair", "Oh yeah? You try saying 'U.S.S. Salon Sassoon' three times fast", and "Perhaps gayer than Mr. Mott and Garak combined..."

Sunday, August 8, 2004

Video Killed…

It's not quite the video-on-demand we dream about, but it can be a lot of fun to cruise around The Feedroom, which appears to offer footage for sale to television outlets from a variety of sources, including local TV news markets, corporate entities and others.

Among the digital detritus, that surreal clip of Colin Powell singing "YMCA" that was much discussed a few weeks ago.

There're tons more, all in Real format.

Sunday, May 9, 2004

Art, huh huh, huh huh

Some things pass understanding: If you ask TiVo to do a Category search for "Arts" programming, among the shows it lists is Beavis & Butthead.

Wednesday, March 3, 2004

The Singhsons

With all of the recent speculation surrounding a possible feature film for The Simpsons, I think some real potential is being overlooked. After all, America now exports aspects of our pop culture such as Sesame Street in uniquely localized versions to, what, like 177 different countries?

We've already seen multiculturalism on the show in a lot of ways (who could forget Apu's contribution to 22 Short Films About Springfield, "The Jolly Bengali"?). What would happen if the entire show were produced in India?

We might end up with something like The Singhsons. [hat tip to John Walkenbach]

Monday, December 29, 2003

*tugs earlobe*

So glad we had this time: Last night, I finally got around to watching The Kennedy Center Honors telecast. While some of the production numbers were too, too cheesy, the heartfelt paean to Carol Burnett by longtime friend Julie Andrews was a pip. But the following story appears to have been edited (for time, likely) from the broadcast:

Adds Andrews with a grin, "We have done some wonderfully silly, crazy things together. She seems to bring out some devil in me." An example she cites is when she, Burnett and, coincidentally, Mike Nichols were each scheduled to entertain at President Lyndon Johnson's Inaugural Gala. The night before the festivities, Nichols arrived at the hotel quite late and suggested meeting them in their suite for hot chocolate. Though they were already dressed for bed, they agreed and decided to meet him at the elevator bank in their "dressing gowns." Wanting to do something silly to make Nichols laugh when he arrived, Andrews suggested "let's be kissing!" which they did when they heard the sound of the approaching elevator. "The elevator doors opened and it was packed with Secret Service men!" laughs Andrews. "Not one of them got out and you could see the stunned look on their faces as the doors closed." The bad timing continued as they kissed in front of the woman who emerged from the next elevator. Says Andrews, "Carol swears to this day that it was Lady Bird Johnson!" Finally, Nichols arrived and didn't even react to their shenanigans.

It's probably just as well they omitted the girl-on-girl story. President Bush appeared to be applauding tensely enough when, during the parade of Bob Mackie costumes worn by stars including Elaine Stritch as Eunice and Reba McEntire as Nora Desmond, Gary Beach made his entrance as Mrs. Wiggins.

Thursday, October 2, 2003

New Who Deux

New Who, Deux: Mindful of the fact that it's just speculation on the part of a former Time Lord, it's an interesting prospect if this is treux...er, true. And we thought Colin Baker's wardrobe was colorful! Heck, with those kicky headresses and fancy gowns, the Time Lord Council is already a bit dodgy, aren't they? What's one more tranny in a TARDIS, more or less?

No fewer than four people have just e-mailed this story to me, all hopeful it's borne out. Who knows? (Ahem!) Actually, this has been a pretty persistent rumor in the Izzard and Who fan circles for a while now. It's still a bit odd seeing it batted around on the Beeb's own site, though.

Heck, I have pretty decent seats for Saturday's concert. Perhaps I'll just shout out and ask 'im myself.

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

A Queer Eye Dyke-otomy

A Fascinating Dyke-otomy: For a number of reasons, Garbo argues, it's unlikely we'll see a lesbian version of Bravo's biggest hit. Among them:

Before Bravo can clone itself a hit by creating a lesbian version of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," the pop-arty network must decide who represents gay women. When the original "Queer Eye" was cast, the producers clearly didn't spend much time finding gay men from different backgrounds. With the exception of Jai Rodriguez, the baby-face cultural consultant, all the makeover masters are white and can pass for upper class.

Monday, September 29, 2003

Enterprise Season Pass reminder

TiVo Geek heads-up: If you're an Enterprise fan and a TiVo user (and the latter is more likely than the former these days, alas), check your Season Pass.

Paramount has officially changed the title of the show to Star Trek: Enterprise and, as a result, the program has a new ID code so old Season Passes for just Enterprise won't work. More details here.

Family Guy resources

All the things that make us laugh and cry: A few good Family Guy resources:

• Family Guy Files
• Planet Family Guy
• Damn You All! (Stewie site)
• The Drunken Clam

Sunday, September 28, 2003

Who Movie on Sci-Fi

Using TiVo for time-shifting: The aforementioned Doctor Who movie, starring Paul McGann as the title character and Eric Roberts as his arch-nemesis The Master, can be seen next month, October 9, on the Sci-Fi Channel, at 2 am Central Time.

The movie was intended as the pilot for a planned Fox television series, but the project was shelved in favor of Sliders. Good for Jerry O'Connell, bad for Who-fans.

Saturday, September 27, 2003

New Who

Knew Who? New Who! Woo! Word from across the pond is that the Beeb is preparing to launch a new series of the programme Doctor Who, the original of which played a significant role in the development and education of this young geek. Time to dig out the old scarf, I guess.

As exciting as the development of the new series is the news that it'll be helmed by Russell Davies, the same chap who created the (superior in every way to the American travesty) original British incarnation of Queer as Folk. Lots of actors' names are being tossed around in the speculation over who'll be Who but, if I may recommend one of the Manchester boys, I'd nominate cutie Craig Kelly. At any rate, I'd play Doctor with him anytime.

(Among the names being batted is Anthony Head. He's already had a run at Who, since he went up for the role in the 1996 Fox TV movie but lost out to Paul McGann.)

By the way, here's a new collector's edition of QAF on the way which, if you haven't seen it, I heartily recommend.

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

April 29, 2003

A few thoughts on Apple's new music service: I wasn't expecting much of interest to me personally from Apple Computer's much-ballyhooed product announcements yesterday, so it was a pleasant surprise that, in addition to introducing a significant re-alignment of the iPod line, they also rolled out a new music service that shows a lot of promise.

The premise is certainly simple enough: as a feature of the updated iTunes software (included with every new Mac or as part of the iLife package), you get access to a catalog of several thousand songs and albums at applemusic.com. Point, click and purchase: 99 cents per track or $9.99 per album. Sweet. There are a (very) few restrictions on the music, which is immediately downloaded and placed in an iTunes library but, by and large, the service is inexpensive, fast and, most importantly, easy.

Compared to the "free" music sharing networks I've sampled, the iTunes/Apple Music combo is a breeze to search and use, and the ala carte pricing system beats other recently launched subscription services I've looked at. The system suits my style, the way I consume popular music anyway. I'm likely to hear a song on the radio and click through the purchase just that track for my use. While I'm there, though, I'll be inclined to sample other tracks on the album (you can hear a 30-second sample of every song on a service for free). If there are enough songs that interest me, I probably won't buy and download the whole album; I'm still old-fashioned enough to go out and purchase the CD.

That's the first thing that'll limit my use of the system. Although it has a lot of nice cosmetic features (when you download a song or album, for example, you get a digital copy of the CD cover art that's displayed in iTunes while it plays), they're not really complete substitutes for the tangibles that come with a CD, including liner notes, lyrics and other collateral.

The other drawback is the somewhat limited catalog of material in which I'm really interested and, related to that, the limited way in which the material that is available is indexed.



When browsing the library by artist, for example, it's organized by first name first, last name last. If I want to download a song or album by Mark Wills, I have to remember his name is Mark and not Matt. That's not a huge roadblock, but it becomes particularly problematic when searching for the material I'm really interested in.

To wit: the Apple Music library seems to be entirely arranged using the same categories employed by the CDDB, the same service that pulls up the track titles, artist names and other data about a recording when you query it upon inserting a new CD. In some ways, that makes a lot of sense, since it brings the music you download from Apple into line with the music you may already have ripped from CDs you currently own.

But hey, I'm a theatre queen. I'm interested in show tunes. Unfortunately, the CDDB has no category for show music. Original cast recordings and their like get lumped in with "Soundtracks" (ugh!) and, because of the collaborative nature of theatre and the fact that CDDB data isn't compiled from a centralized source but, instead, contributed by thousands of Internet users, the ID3 data for show music is inconsistent at best, hopelessly confusing at worst.

Let's say I want to download a song from Urinetown. I could just enter the title in the search box and it pops right up. But if I'm browsing, I first click on the "Soundtrack" Genre and then must choose an "Artist" category. Now I know that Urinetown was written by Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis, but they're nowhere to be found in the Artist list. So I click on "Original Broadway Cast". True, that's not an "Artist" but, in lieu of its own "Genre" category, someone substituted it here. But the only listings under "Original Broadway Cast" are Jesus Christ Superstar and Porgy & Bess.

Well, that didn't work. As it turns out, Urinetown is there, but under the "Artist" category of simply "Original Cast", along with A Connecticut Yankee, Lost in the Stars, Mamma Mia! and others. Still other show music can be found under "Artists" including "Original 1953 Broadway Cast", "Broadway Cast Recording" and the ever-so-helpful "Various Artists". Still others duplicate the album title for the "Artist" field, creating further confusion.

The CDDB is polluted with this sort of confusing or conflicting data; it's the sort of stuff I spend a few minutes sorting out into my own schema whenever I rip music from a new CD. But what's amazing is that while Apple claims every song in their new service is a pristine digitization, they didn't take the time to provide new or better metadata for the tracks than what was already crammed into the CDDB.

So that's the biggest roadblock to the service being useful to me right now. I just can't be bothered to sort through someone else's half-cocked system of categorizing the music I'm searching for.

The other major shortcoming for me, of course, is that once you do wade through the tracks, you discover there's not a lot of show music there anyway, and certainly nothing I can't get at Sam Goody or Webster Records. If Apple really wants to make a splash with me and a lot of show queens, spend a little coin to license the out-of-print or unreleased back catalogs of Decca and a few other labels that specialize in theatre music (and spend a little time properly sorting it).

There is a ton of stuff awaiting CD release and a ton more that will never be pressed again, or at least not in this depressed economy. Make it available for ala carte download, though, and that dusty back catalog can suddenly generate revenue. I know my credit card would be taking quite a few hits.

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Hip-deep in pie

A THOUSAND WORDS: Y'know, kiddo, if you'd like to put that webcam to some productive use, I'd be more than happy to help you look for your twin.

HIP-DEEP IN PIE: I've returned home to a pile of e-mail and other reading, by far the best of which was this news that every episode of SportsNight is to be released in a DVD package. Anything that increases the amount of Peter Krause in my diet is a very, very good thing. [heads up from Dan]

Monday, June 25, 2001

June 25, 2001

Var'aq is an open-source Klingon programming language. Today is a good day to code.

It's really something of a Klingon Basic, a simple, loosely-typed programming language designed mostly just to be used for programming things like command displays and high-level control systems. In its eventual final incarnation, we're looking at concurrency, advanced mathematics, and even native support for distributed programs (try finding that in the C++ standard library).

Unhip: The Socks-Shorts Combo: Ugly at Any Speed. Hey, I just spent a weekend in the park with several thousand homosexuals. You won't get any argument here from me.

The Official Rube Goldberg Website.

(WEB)LOG-ROLLING: I've really been groovin' on Wood s lot — a lot — these past couple of months. Go there. It'll grow on ya.

I'M SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER: A brief history of The Carol Burnett Show(s) — now available on video from Columbia House — at TV Party.

JUST MY "TYPE": OK, so maybe the Big Trouble trailer wasn't the only good thing about seeing Swordfish. After all, Hugh Jackman spent at least 10 minutes in the movie with his shirt off, so I suppose that's gotta count for something. Not nearly so naughty is Hugh Jackman in ASCII. (More at ASCII Babes.)

Monday, February 12, 2001

February 12, 2001

I wondered whatever happened to Voice Farm. Now I know. Hey, free thinker! Something good is going to happen to you today, free thinker. Isn't that right? Isn't that right?!

Saturday, November 11, 2000

Guilty pleasure TV

Ok, I'm man enough to admit it...I adore Grosse Pointe. I'm also hooked on Trading Spaces. Unfortunately, there's no one living near me I trust enough to redo the basement.

Wednesday, September 27, 2000

Maybe more Regis?

I just saw a television promo for a re-run of the celebrity edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, promising a "special 90-minute episode" with never-before-seen footage. What could they have possibly left out of the leaden original version? Thirty more minutes of comically-clueless TV stars saying, "Um..." and "Er..."?

Tuesday, July 25, 2000

Give us this day…

Today, we "soft-launch" a new feature here in The BradLands, a half-baked deli serving up slices of life on wry. It's called The Daily Brad, and it will — for the most part — supplant the wildly popular LIFE <META> bits that have been littering the weblog these past few months. Is it a journal? Something like that, but I prefer to think of it as a conversation over a cup of joe and a cruller. C'mon in, and let me know what you think.

I'M BEYOND KAREN: If you only know actress Megan Mullaly from her wickedly funny portrayal of Karen on the sitcom Will & Grace, you don't know the half of it. This spirited gal got her start on Broadway and she's got the chops to be a major diva, in every good way that counts. Her new one woman shows are, by all reports, divine, and her website — well, let's just say it's a well-designed place to meet the dame behind the diva.

Monday, July 27, 1998

Buddy Cole does not go quietly

Some new additions to "Cute Guys With Cool Webpages": Xzigboy, Mark Chou, Eric Powers.

After four (!) years on the New York Times bestseller list, John Berendt contemplates life and another novel after Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. [Washington Post]

Rating the Willie Wonka kids. [Brunching Shuttlecocks]

A few years ago, I read a compelling book — the title and author of which escape me at the moment — about the birth and subsequent ascendance of CNN. Of course, this was before the Gulf War when the network really took off. Now, a similarly compelling cable success story might be spun about kid's web Nickelodeon. [Philadelpha Inquirer]

Talk about "portals" on the Web is all the rage right now, megasites that are mere launch sites to other parts of the great untamed net. AOL wants to be one, and so do Snap! and the Mining Company. But portals work best when, like this weblog, they're free — or relatively free — of commercial interruption and influence. And so concurs the Net Skink with this look at alternative portals. [San Francisco Examiner]

Speaking of commercial interruption, I am thisclose to boycotting GeoCities. Don't get me wrong: providing free webspace is a great thing and there are tons of worthy sites thereabout, but their stupid pop-up Java windows with ads seem to perpetually crash whatever browser I'm using. Let me know if this happens to you.

The Kids in the Hall are more or less splitsville, but Scott Thompson is doing his best to make sure Buddy Cole does not go quietly, and tells about Buddy's latest adventures in Salon. (Also, check out Scott's very own domain, the ever-amusing ScottLand.) [Salon]

Plenty more links to add, but so little time, so little time. More soon!