Archive for March, 2008

Klaatu barata vegan?

By Keith, 31 March, 2008, 1 Comment

Oh brother… the geniuses in Hollywood have decided to turn The Day the Earth Stood Still from a movie with the fairly straight forward idea that blowing eachother up wasn’t a good idea… to one that says that all of us (except Al Gore of course) need to shrink our carbon footprints:

“The first one was borne out of the cold war and nuclear détente. Klaatu came and was saying cease and desist with your violence. If you can’t do it yourselves we’re going to do it. That was the film of that day,” Reeves explained. “The version I was just working on, instead of being man against man, it’s more about man against nature. My Klaatu says that if the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the earth survives. I’m a friend to the earth” Adding: “We’re trying to reach beyond the idea of [just] environmentalism.”

If Gort walks out of the spaceship wearing a bandanna and a tie-dyed t-shirt I’m going to walk out of the theater. I think the powers that be behind this movie should watch its source material again. Sure it had a vaguely peacenik message (I think we can all get behind the “you shouldn’t nuke yourselves” message), but at least the whole movie wasn’t exclusively about lecturing people.

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Weekend links

By Keith, 29 March, 2008, No Comment

I’m surprised no one punched him for hinting that they were alive to see the 1908 World Series. Showing the cemetery across the street was a nice touch.

I was at the Braves/Indians exhibition game Friday night, and they said it was the 100th anniversary of Take Me Out To The Ballgame… could it be that the Cubs are actually cursed by their signature song?

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“Laser” plane

By Keith, 28 March, 2008, No Comment

Do you think this came about because Robert Gates was in a meeting one day and said that he wanted “airplanes with fricken laser beams attached to them”?

Laser plane could destroy tanks from 10 miles:

The United States Defence Department has developed a prototype of an aircraft armed with a laser gun that could destroy tanks 10 miles away.

The Airborne Tactical Laser weapon is to be mounted on a Boeing aircraft and is capable of destroying targets up to 15km (10m) away, according to Defense Update online magazine.

The ten-centimetre-wide beam will heat targets almost instantly to thousands of degrees and will slice through metal even at maximum range. It is intended both for battlefield use and for missile defense.

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Night time arrival

By Keith, 27 March, 2008, 2 Comments

STS-123 landing

I’m Mr. Know-it-all when it comes to the space program and all, but does anyone know what those flames are?

I have two theories: a) Left over heat from re-entry or b) left over fuel being burned off…

UPDATE: The jets of flame are the exhaust of the APUs (auxiliary power units) which power the hydraulics that move the Shuttles control surfaces. After landing, they need the hydraulics to put the main engines in a “rain drain” position so rainwater doesn’t pool in the engines. They also move the body flap on the bottom of the Shuttle. The flames are the exhaust of the APUs.

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How I met higher ratings

By Keith, 27 March, 2008, No Comment

Maybe I no longer have to worry about How I Met Your Mother getting Jericho’d, the ratings for their post-writers strike debut were great, and the ratings for the Britney episode were through the roof. Hollywood Reporter says that they are in pretty good shape to get a fourth season:

A guest appearance by Britney Spears on Monday gave the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” its highest rating ever.

“Mother” spiked to a series high 4.5 preliminary rating among adults 18-49, even as the rest of the CBS comedy lineup fell from last week’s record-setting return to original episodes.

The second week of strong “Mother” ratings (10.6 million, 4.5/12) assures the one-time bubble comedy will be renewed for the fall. “Mother” was the fourth-highest-rated show of the evening, and CBS won the night (averaging 12.5 million, 4.4/11).

It’s kind of ironic that Sarah Chalke from Scrubs was also a guest star this past week (I’m also starting to think she has a shot at being “The Mother), because HIMYM seems to be in the same situation that Scrubs has been throughout its run… it’s an extremely popular show with a very loyal fan base and tons of critical praise, and yet CBS never seems to be in much of a hurry to announce that it is coming back. As a matter of fact, last year I was beginning to think that they would cancel both Jericho and HIMYM (Instead, 40,000 lbs of peanuts later they both came back).

Scrubs has always been “on the bubble” seemingly every season, and now they will likely be heading to ABC to end the series… I can only hope that CBS treats How I Met Your Mother better in the future. Announcing that they are renewed would be a good start.

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Wally Phillips

By Keith, 27 March, 2008, 1 Comment

There was some very sad news out of Chicago today, Wally Phillips has died at age 82:

The WGN mainstay hosted the morning show from 1965 through 1986. During that time, he ruled the roost in morning drive, at times attracting half of the market’s listening audience.

“Wally’s voice was the first millions of Chicagoans heard every morning from 1965 to 1986,” said Tom Langmyer, Vice President/General Manager of WGN Radio in a statement. He was one of a kind, and he was a “Broadcaster” in the truest sense.”

Phillips arrived at WGN Radio in 1956. He retired from a weekend show in 1998. His lasting legacy at the station is the “Neediest Kids’ Fund,” a children’s charity. Phillips had been battling Alzheimer’s disease for the past five years.

WGN will be running an interview with Phillips from the Museum of Broadcast Communications back in 1996, and they have also set up a page where listeners can leave their memories of Wally Phillips

I can’t tell you how sad this makes me. Obviously since I’m only 25 I barely caught the tail end of his career, but people like Wally Phillips, Bob Collins and Spike O’Dell are pretty much the reason I got into radio to begin with. I think the reason that WGN Radio can accurately bill itself as “The Voice of Chicago” is because of the impact Phillips had, and that’s saying something since he left the radio landscape just about 10 years ago.

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Recovering the satellites

By Keith, 27 March, 2008, No Comment

(I’ll give one of my five remaining Early Spin Slot Machines to the first person who can tell me where I got that title from… you’re on the honor system, but no googling)

While I’m on the subject of a local radio giant like Wally Phillps, I think this also gives a pretty decent opportunity to respond what David said earlier this week about the XM/Sirius merger.

For David I think it’s easy to say that satellite radio will take off… David has lived his entire life in the southeast, and quite literally the closet they get to a “local media giant” is probably Jamie Cooper. So it should come as no surprise that he wouldn’t quite understand the impact that a successful local personality can have on a community.

Sure the internet and satellite radio have taken their toll on stations across the country, but if you look at the stations that are still doing well… places like WGN, WTMJ, KMOX, WLW, WTAM and others, they all have something in common: strong local hosts. No one is quite like WGN, whose only syndicated show is The Twilight Zone… but rather than leaning on syndicated hosts like Limbaugh, Hannity or Boortz, they make their living on hosts like Mark Reardon, Willie Cunningham and Bob Frantz. Those stations won’t be effected at all by satellite or the internets… as a matter of fact, lately they’ve been embracing it more and more.

The stations that would be hurt by new media and satellite radio are the… well, let’s call them “McRadio” stations. In other words, the stations that have little or no local content to offer listeners. I think people will always prefer shows that they can feel like they are a part of. That’s something that a place like WBHP simply can’t claim offer, and if you’re in a market with a station like that, I’d expect you to look into XM… if you’re in Chicago, Cleveland or another market that has a history to it and still takes some pride in what they put on the air, they won’t feel all that many ill effects, as long as they are smart in the way they use the web.

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