Archive for the ‘media’ Category
Class Clown
June 23rd, 2008
I’m a little late to the wake. Gruber and DDay’s salutes to George Carlin have included the seven words you can’t say on television—but, fortunately, can put on vinyl and type on the internets. I think their posts were both tributes and an expression of their feelings at his death.
The one Carlin line that will always stay with me is quoted in the NY Times obituary. It’s a joke that’s so simple and clear you think it must have just grown out of our cultural consciousness, like a folk song. In the voice of Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weatherman, “Tonight’s forecast: dark.”
Hot air and John Coleman
June 13th, 2008
How surprising to look at http://del.icio.us/popular/ this afternoon and find a link labeled John Coleman’s Comments Before the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. The linked article is a fairly run-of-the-mill screed about the evil conspiracy of environmentalists, the UN, and Al Gore to foist the Global Warming Lie on an innocent America. Although it has a few oddities I hadn’t heard before—did you know that environmentalists are responsible for the “folly of ethanol” and the recent rise in food prices? ADM must be relieved to hear that—it’s not the content that was surprising; it was the author.
John Coleman is well known to Chicago-area residents of a certain age as the hyperkinetic weatherman on Channel 7’s Eyewitness News Team back in the early 70s. This was the seminal “happy talk” news show, and Coleman was its happiest player. He invented—or at least popularized—the terms “thorms” and “thowers” for thunderstorms and thundershowers. I thought he was pretty funny back when I was 10-12 years old. Now he’s a cranky old man spewing right wing propaganda from his retirement sinecure at a San Diego station.
He’s still pretty funny, though. Picture a man who’s been on TV continuously for 50 years complaining about how “the media won’t give us a hearing.” That’s good stuff.
The trouble with Harry
January 24th, 2007
For two weeks in a row, Harry Shearer’s Le Show podcast has wreaked havoc on my new iPod nano. Here’s what happens:
I have Le Show on my list of podcasts to sync with my iPod, so whenever a new episode becomes available, I get it on my iPod the next time I hook it up to my computer. I can then play the podcast as ususal; if I interrupt it in the middle of the show, it will pick up back where I left off, even if the interruption is long enough to make the iPod sleep. But if I sync the iPod during that interruption, finishing the podcast gets troublesome.
First, the episode will not play if I select it and click the center button. Doing so causes the display to show the Le Show screen briefly but then jump back to the main menu. Usually, I can select the episode and get it to play by clicking the Play/Pause button at the bottom of the wheel, but sometimes that makes the iPod jump back to the main menu, too.
If I do get the episode to start playing, it starts from the beginning—it’s forgotten where it left off. This shouldn’t be a big deal, because I ought to be able to fast forward to somewhere near that spot, even if I have to do a bit of scrolling back and forth to find it. But no. I can click the center button to make the scrollbar with the position diamond appear, and I can run my finger around the wheel to get the diamond to advance, but as soon as I stop scrolling the iPod goes back to its main menu.
My workaround has been to get the episode playing and then leave the iPod alone until I think it’s back at the spot I want. Not a very good solution.
I’ve tried replicating this behavior with two other podcasts— The Penn Jillette Show and Coverville—but neither have this problem. Apparently the Le Show MP3 is triggering some bug in the software. Since the audio actually plays and the problem has occurred in two different episodes, I suspect the data that’s causing the problem is in the header (or wherever MP3 files store the tag info). I’ll be filing a bug report with Apple tonight, but I don’t know who to contact at Le Show (or what value that would be). I would like to know if I’m the only person having this problem.
Update Feb 6, 2007
Despite what I said at the end of this post, I never got around to reporting the problems I was having listening to the Le Show podcast on my iPod nano. And since the most recent show worked fine, I probably won’t. I did see in my site statistics that someone visited here after a Google search on “le show podcast itunes problem,” so I guess I wasn’t the only one with this problem.
Cultural (!) podcasts
December 1st, 2006
If you regularly check del.icio.us/popular, you may have run across this entry, a list of “cultural” podcasts. Two podcasts I subscribe to, In Our Time from the BBC and Grammar Girl, are on the list.
I’ve mentioned In Our Time before. There’s rarely a clunker, and this fall’s shows have been especially good.
I’m still subscribed to Grammar Girl because I like the host’s personality, but I may give it up because the topics have been too common. There have, for example, been shows on between vs. among, who vs. that, and affect vs. effect. I realize that these are evergreens in the grammar and usage world, but I’m not sure I should spend my time with yet another explanation of any of them.
Anyway, a few of the other podcasts in the list look interesting. I have a few long days of air travel coming up in the next couple of weeks, so I’ll load up the iPod and give them a try.
Here’s a new one
April 27th, 2006
The AP is having a bit of fun with the language today. The opening line of this story is
A Senate inquiry into the government’s Hurricane Katrina failures ripped the Bush administration anew Thursday…
The inquiry ripped the administration a new Thursday? Is that how the kids are talking nowadays?
Grammy watch
February 8th, 2006
All I can say is, “Thank God for Sam Moore.” In fact, everyone in the last set did so well that it almost made me forget how bad the Sly Stone tribute was. They could all sing and/or play an instrument and they all had enough years on them to bring some depth to their work. Moore is the “Sam” of Sam and Dave, and if you didn’t know that when he came on, you could figure it out quickly from his distinctive voice and the necklace he wore that said “Sam.” Even the muffed lyrics during his duet of “Midnight Hour” with Springsteen were fun.
I felt sorry for Sly Stone even before he came out. When the most talented people doing your songs are Aerosmith—and they seem vaguely embarassed by those around them—you know you’re in trouble. And when poor Sly did come out with his head twisted in an unnatural position and his hands moving hesitantly across the keyboard, it was almost more than I could bear.
And while I have the horror of that set in my mind, let me make a plea to the great music award show masters to stop with the Joss Stone already. I’ve seen her in a couple of these shows now, and I get it. Really, I get it. She’s a young white girl—from England, even, and you can’t get any whiter than that—who sings the blues. Oh, oh, oh, and what’s even wilder: she doesn’t wear shoes! That about covers it, right? I’ve passed the test and can move on to a Jossless existence? Thank you.
Wait—one more thing. Does it really reflect well on your industry to have a truly talented musician like Herbie Hancock playing backup for Christina Aguilera? The man played with Miles Davis, for Christ’s sake! And now he’s noodling along while she completely misinterprets “A Song for You.” Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
World Service
January 31st, 2006
A while ago, I mentioned a series of radio shows on John Lennon that the BBC was running at the time. The BBC Radio streams itself live and makes its program streams available for at least a week after they run. The streams are in Real format, so they can be listened to on Mac, Linux or Windows.
My habit is to capture the streams with Audio Hijack and move them over to my iPod for listening in the car or while biking or walking. Last summer I listened to a history series, This Sceptred Isle: Empire, while biking to and from work. The series went on hiatus in November after 30 episodes (there are going to be 90 in all!) and has come back this week. I have Audio Hijack set up to record the show as it is streamed live, then I convert it from AIFF to MP3 and import it into my iTunes library. I think I’ll upgrade to Audio Hijack Pro to automate the conversion and import.
While poking around on Radio 4’s site, I found three series by Simon Singh, who wrote, among other things, a nice popular history of cryptography. The series are Five Numbers, Another Five Numbers, and A Further Five Numbers. For some reason, the BBC has kept these streams available long after the shows’ first run. And there’s another series, Five Shapes, not done by Singh, that has a similar mathematical theme.
Still bigger than Jesus
November 30th, 2005
This coming Saturday, December 3, BBC Radio 2 is running a program (or programme) about the event that gave this blog its name. It’s part of a Lennon Remembered series running on the various BBCs in early December, commemerating John’s death 25 years ago.
The BBC is pretty good about making its stuff available over the Internets. They have a live stream and most programs are available as an archive for a week after they’ve aired. Everything is in Real format, but you can make it your own with one of the various “stream ripping” programs. I use Audio Hijack.
Who do you love?
September 12th, 2005
Flipping through Attaché, the US Airways in-flight magazine, I saw that one of their music channels is called “Blues Festival.” You can tell that the US Airways folks are real down-home from this photo and caption included with the playlist. (Sorry about the poor photo—low light, bumpy ride, and too embarassed to draw attention to myself by using a flash.)
As we all know, B.B. is famous for his rectangular guitar, giant glasses, cowboy hat, and of course, that “B.B. King beat.”
Addendum: I wrote the snotty stuff above while on a flight yesterday. When I got home that evening I read this cliché-ridden article in the Tribune. The Trib is doing this “Seven Wonders of Chicago” series, and Chicago Blues is one of the nominees. Why they assigned this article to Howard Reich, who spends most of his time mooning after cabaret singers, I’ll never know. Here’s the opening paragraph:
It’s rough and gritty, raucous and raw and, at its best, a searing expression of life in this city. Part myth, part reality, the Chicago Blues are everywhere in this town - if you know how to listen. For though it’s true that the heyday of the city’s most celebrated blues clubs is long past - the demise of shrines such as the Checkerboard Lounge, Gerri’s Palm Tavern, Theresa’s Lounge and scores more attest to that - the music still sings out fiercely.
Somehow Reich forgets to mention that Chicago is a blue-collar town—he may get fined for that—but maybe he just couldn’t come up with a clever blues/blue collar metaphor on deadline. So I guess Attaché shouldn’t be too embarassed by their mixup of Bo Diddley and B.B. King when the premier paper in the capital city of the blues pumps out this sort of bilge.