Author: NewMexiKen

Why Won’t NBC Follow Its Own Advice On Live Broadcasts?

This one is for a particular reader. He/she knows whom I mean.

Oddly enough, going online during big TV events has the bizarre effect of boosting the ratings of whatever everyone is watching. Like the Super Bowl or Grammys or the MTV Video Music Awards, all of which saw big boosts in popularity in the last year. You don’t care about the show, you care about being able to talk about the show. This is called “community,” which is also the name of a terrible show on a terribly out-of-touch network called NBC.

Seeking to capitalize on the online water-cooler effect, NBC showed the Golden Globes live on both coasts for the first time this year, and the network reportedly wants to do the same for the Emmy Awards this fall, so the entire country can watch (and chat online) simultaneously.

Super-smart NBC has figured out that what all these big blockbuster Twitter-TV combo events have in common is that they are happening live. Shows that are broadcast at different times in different zones (and probably DVR’d anyway) don’t have the same effect. Yet, they have not applied this simple common sense approach to the Olympics.

Frustratingly, Olympic primetime ratings are also up this year and people are marveling about how sports fans will stay up long past their bedtime to watch events that they already know the outcome to, just so they can be a part of the phenomenon. It’s not because they prefer it that way. It’s because they have no other choice.

Deadspin

February 24th

Today is the birthday

… of Abe Vigoda. Fish on Barney Miller and Sal Tessio of The Godfather is 89.

… of Steven Hill. Adam Schiff, my favorite D.A. on Law and Order, is 88.

… of Dominic Chianese. Uncle Junior on The Sopranos is 79.

… of Edward James Olmos, 63.

… of Apple’s Steve Jobs, hitting the double-nickel today.

[Jobs] dropped out of college after a semester, went to India in search of spiritual enlightenment, returned a devout Buddhist, experimented with LSD, and then got a job with a video game maker, where he was in charge of designing circuit board for one of the company’s games.

He co-founded Apple Computers, and in a commercial during the Super Bowl in January 1984 he unveiled the Macintosh. The commercial was filled with allusions to George Orwell’s 1984. The Macintosh was the first small computer to catch on with the public that used a graphical user interface, or GUI (sometimes pronounced “gooey”). In the past, computers were run by text-based interfaces, which meant that a person had to type in textual commands or text labels to navigate their computers. But with a graphical user interface, people could simply click on icons instead of typing in hard-to-remember, precise text commands.

The graphic user interface revolutionized computers, and it’s on almost all computers today. It’s on a whole lot of other devices as well, like fancy vending machines and digital household appliances and photocopying machines and airport check-in kiosks. And graphical user interface is what’s used with iPods, another of Apple’s wildly successful products.

Jobs once said, “I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Eddie Murray, the Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, and Paula Zahn, the broadcaster, are each half of 108 today.

Chester Nimitz, Admiral of the Fleet, was born on this date in 1885. This from his obituary in 1966:

When Admiral Nimitz took over the Pacific Fleet on Dec. 31, 1941, many of its ships lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, sunk by the Japanese in the surprise attack of Dec. 7 on Hawaii.

Without haste–Admiral Nimitz always proceeded with care–he directed the deployment of such carriers and cruises as were left, to hold the line until that moment perhaps two years away, when new battleships could be ready.

With Adm. Ernest King, chief of naval operations, President Roosevelt and the Navy’s other strategy planners, Admiral Nimitz had to undergo the anguish of being unable to answer the cry of soldiers trapped on Bataan:

“Where’s the fleet?”

When the new battleships, cruisers, carriers and destroyers did arrive, Admiral Nimitz and the Navy cleared the seas of Japanese warships in a series of spectacular naval battles.

Eight months after announcing on New Year’s Day that 1945 would be a sad year for the Japanese, Admiral Nimitz sat at a table on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri on Sept. 2 to sign the Japanese capitulation.

Baseball great Honus Wagner was born on this date in 1874.

One of the Hall of Fame’s five original inductees in 1936, Honus Wagner combined rare offensive and defensive excellence throughout a 21-year career. Despite his awkward appearance – stocky, barrel-chested and bow-legged – the longtime Pirates shortstop broke into the big leagues by hitting .344 in 1897 with Louisville, the first of 17 consecutive seasons of hitting over .300, including eight as the National League batting champion. Wagner compiled a lifetime average of .329, and the Flying Dutchman also stole 722 bases, while leading the league in thefts on five occasions.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

Coming Storm

Winslow Homer was born on this date in 1836. The painting is his “Coming Storm” (1901). Click for larger version.

From the late 1850s until his death in 1910, Winslow Homer produced a body of work distinguished by its thoughtful expression and its independence from artistic conventions. A man of multiple talents, Homer excelled equally in the arts of illustration, oil painting, and watercolor. Many of his works—depictions of children at play and in school, of farm girls attending to their work, hunters and their prey—have become classic images of nineteenth-century American life. Others speak to more universal themes such as the primal relationship of man to nature.

Source: The National Gallery of Art, which has a fine online Winslow Homer exhibit.

Thought for the day from Bishop Spong

“Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things:

“One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell.

“The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.”

John Shelby Spong was bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark for 24 years until his retirement in 2001. Thanks once again to Jeanne for providing this quote and reacquainting me with Bishop Spong. I’ve ordered his book, Jesus for the Non-Religious.

Hey, Mom

Speaking of moms, can we talk about how offensive that Proctor and Gamble Olympic campaign is? Not because it completely ignores the contributions of abusive, overbearing fathers in the creation of great athletes or glamorizes the most annoying tendencies of stage/soccer parents, but because the underlying message of every single ad is, “Thanks for supporting me, Mom. Now go clean my socks.”

Laundry detergent is for ladies. Don’t ever forget that.

Deadspin

The Real Hurt Locker

My long-time friend Jeanne volunteers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She sent this along yesterday:

Last summer I saw The Hurt Locker with a friend of mine. About a month ago there was a GI at Walter Reed who did exactly that in Afghanistan. The crew is called something like battle (or battlefield) engineers. They ride over a route a convoy is going to take to clear the IEDs. The vehicles are made in South Africa especially to withstand the shock of explosions and cost a quarter of a million per vehicle. He told me much of the necessary functional stuff is on the outside so they can pull off damaged parts and replace them quickly.

I asked if he’d seen the movie and he had. I said I know movies have to telescope events and asked him if any aspect of the movie was realistic. He got all hung up on the details, i.e. no team would go into a building or site alone like they did in the movie. The sense of the adrenalin rush, however, was real, he admitted. He loved his job.

He broke his back and both legs in an explosion. He said it was because the back seats are bolted in place–different from the front seats to save room. This causes beaucoup broken backs when there’s an explosion. He told his Senator that the vehicles should be modified to lessen injuries.

He has all his limbs and will recover. He can’t go back to his old job, however, because his injuries will leave him below standard for strength. He’s getting out of the Army because there’s no other job that appeals to him.

Iron

It is so very easy to goof on figure skating, and the athletes who compete in it. The sport virtually begs you to do it. When it’s not being utterly campy, it’s being utterly corrupt. It is equally easy to goof on American TV’s apparently inexhaustible ability every Olympiad to ladle on the pathos like syrup, as though real life was the 99-cent special at IHOP.

But I do not believe that there is a single athlete in these Olympics tougher than Canada’s Joannie Rochette. Her mother drops dead on Sunday. She skates through her practices. She goes out last night and skates well enough to place third in the women’s short program. I have no idea how she gets out of bed in the morning, let alone how she’s done all of this, but I know which way I’m rooting come Thursday night. Pixies be damned, this is as gutsy as it gets.

Charles Pierce – Boston.com

Valentine’s Day

VALENTINE’S DAY

February 14, 1959.
I don’t remember if we went to a movie
Or just drove to town and rode around.
Eventually we parked near a snow drift
In a deserted railroad yard.

We snuggled together in our winter coats.
We kissed. Then, looking straight into my eyes, he said,
“I love you, Jeanne,” adding as a coda,
“And you’re only the fourth girl I’ve said that to.”

I was amazed…a boy had uttered that special phrase;
Excited…he meant me, personally (I love you, Jeanne);
Scared…did I love him? Did I want him to love me?
But mostly, I was curious.

I’d be seventeen in a few weeks;
He was eighteen-and-a-half.
He’d been in love four times
And I was number four?
Who were the other three?

I never asked.
But I’ve never forgotten.
 
 

My long-time good friend Jeanne sent me this poem in early December. I asked if I could post it here, she graciously agreed and I decided it was perfect for Valentine’s Day and set it aside.

Valentine’s Day came and went, but I had forgotten about the poem. I received a gentle reminder today.

American Progress

… In a recent Times story about the Tea Party movement, [Glenn] Beck’s Fox News show comes up again and again as the bolt of lightning that illuminated the dark sky of Obama’s America for the—mostly aging—people who are turning to radical anti-government politics for answers. One of them is a sixty-six-year-old woman from Sandpoint, Idaho, named Pam Stout.

There’s nothing new about Mrs. Stout. She’s a familiar figure in American life, always latent, but coming to the surface in national emergencies. Richard Hofstadter described her mental world in detail. In the seventeen-eighties she lived in Sheffield, Massachusetts, during a period of tight credit and land foreclosures and was sympathetic to the farmers’ uprising known as Shay’s Rebellion that began there. In the eighteen-fifties she was a non-voting constituent of Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. In the eighteen-nineties she was the wife of a Nebraska farmer who joined the People’s Party and voted for William Jennings Bryan and free silver. In the nineteen-thirties desperate poverty drove her to fall for the simple solutions of Huey Long’s left-wing demagoguery, or Father Coughlin’s right-wing demagoguery, which often sounded similar. In the nineteen-fifties she listened avidly to radio personalities like Fulton Lewis, Jr., and Walter Winchell, thought President Eisenhower was a knowing agent of the Communist Party, and was a passionate supporter of Senator Joe McCarthy. In 2001 she knew that the Bush Administration orchestrated 9/11. In 2008 she showed up at Sarah Palin rallies.

…

George Packer, from a piece about Glenn Beck at The New Yorker

65 years ago today

Within a month, three of the six pictured were killed in battle. The remaining three marines became celebrities in a savings bond drive. The photo, the second taken of a flag raising on Mount Suribachi that day, won the Pulitzer Prize. The flag and the smaller one used in the earlier flag-raising are in the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia.

Buena Vista

United States General Zachary Taylor was victorious over Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna in the Battle of Buena Vista on February 23, 1847. Santa Anna’s loss at Buena Vista, coupled with his defeat by General Winfield Scott at the Battle of Cerro Gordo in April of that year, secured U.S. victory in the Mexican American War.

The Battle of Buena Vista was fought near Monterrey in northern Mexico. The 5,000 men fighting under General Taylor’s command used heavy artillery fire to turn back nearly 14,000 Mexican troops. During the night, the Mexican army retreated, but Taylor did not pursue.

Library of Congress

Best lines of the day, so far

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – The reputation of the Toyota Motors Corp. received another black eye today as the president of the embattled company missed his scheduled appearance at Congressional hearings after he overshot Washington, D.C. by 150 miles.

Toyota president Akio Toyoda said he was having difficulties with the brakes on his 2010 Toyota Prius, which finally came to rest after crashing into a blacksmith’s shop in Colonial Williamsburg.

. . .

Borowitz Report

More Pierce

And yet, in its infinite wisdom, the NBC mother network gave us another retrospective on the 1980 Lake Placid miracle in the middle of which Al Michaels–who, at this point, seems firmly to believe that he landed on Omaha Beach or something 30 years ago–said, “It seemed like we went from burning flags to waving them.”

Oh, Jesus H. Christ On A Power Play, just shut up already, please?

Slacker Monday

The Father of Our Country

Rembrandt Peale George Washington… was born 278 years ago today on February 11, 1731*.

To describe George Washington as enigmatic may strike some as strange, for every young student knows about him (or did when students could be counted on to know anything). He was born into a minor family in Virginia’s plantation gentry, worked as a surveyor in the West as a young man, was a hero of sorts during the French and Indian War, became an extremely wealthy planter (after marrying a rich widow), served as commander in chief of the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War (including the terrible winter at Valley Forge), defeated the British at the Battle of Yorktown, suppressed a threatened mutiny by his officers at Newburgh, N.Y., then astonished the world and won its applause by laying down his sword in 1783. Called out of retirement, he presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787, reluctantly accepted the presidency in 1789 and served for two terms, thus assuring the success of the American experiment in self-government.
…

Washington was, after all, a magnificent physical specimen. He towered several inches over six feet, had broad shoulders and slender hips (in a nation consisting mainly of short, fat people), was powerful and a superb athlete. He carried himself with a dignity that astonished; when she first laid eyes on him Abigail Adams, a veteran of receptions at royal courts and a difficult woman to impress, gushed like a schoolgirl. On horseback he rode with a presence that declared him the commander in chief even if he had not been in uniform.

Other characteristics smack of the supernatural. He was impervious to gunfire. Repeatedly, he was caught in cross-fires and yet no bullet ever touched him. In a 1754 letter to his brother he wrote that “I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the Sound.” During the Revolutionary War he had horses shot from under him but it seemed that no bullet dared strike him personally. Moreover, when the Continental Army was ravaged by a smallpox epidemic, Washington, having had the disease as a youngster, proved to be as immune to it as he was to bullets.

— Forrest McDonald in his review of Joseph J. Ellis’ His Excellency: George Washington.

__________

* By the Julian calendar, George Washington was born on February 11, 1731. Twenty years later Britain and her colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar, the calendar we use today. The change added 11 days and designated January rather than March as the beginning of the year. As a result, Washington’s birthday became February 22, 1732.