USA. USA. USA.
The Economist notes that TV is as popular as ever, and that America takes the couch-potato crown, with households goggling at the box for an eye-straining average of 8 hours and 11 minutes every day.
Category: TV
Daily Show – John Hodgeman
Illegal aliens have tuberculosis and leprosy!
Click PLAY or watch it on News Cloud.
jet-powered kayak vs Land Rover Tomcat 4×4
I’ve blogged about the excellent BBC TV program Top Gear before.
This 6min video clip shows a cool race in Greenland.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
(via The Adventure Blog)
TV – Top Chef – Opening Soon
By complete accident, I awoke from a nap with the Food Channel playing on TV.
Reality show Top Chef was on. Gripping, dramatic. Really fascinating!
It’s a reality TV competition where … (ah, … the usual). I saw the second last episode of Season 2.
It was no Amazing Race, but almost as good.
Reality TV editors must be fantastic at their work. (I suspect they could turn a day in my boring life into an interesting half hour if they tried.)
The audience for Top Chef is passionate. A fan of the show attacked season 2 runner up Marcel Vigneron with a bottle, requiring 30 stitches to close the wound over his eye.
Next up after Top Chef … was Opening Soon. I LOVE that show!
Eddie Murphy – best yet to come?
For the most part, I feel Eddie is a super talent, wasted.
I’d probably like The Nutty Professor and Norbert. But I couldn’t bear to watch them.
But having seen Eddie interviewed on the excellent TV show Inside the Actor’s Studio, it dawned on me that his best movies are in the future.
I think he’ll be like Bill Murray. Another aging comic genius who has gotten even better in later years.
Certainly Murphy was amazing in Dreamgirls. He should have won the best supporting actor Oscar.
Dream Girls should open doors for him for more serious roles than as a donkey in Shrek.
Looking back at his career. …
Murphy was unbelievably good in the Saturday Night Live TV show. Fantastic in the first Beverly Hills Cop.
That about it, for me, until the painfully excellent acting he did in <a href=”Bowfinger with Steve Martin.
I love the premise of that movie!
Bush Is Back! – Colbert gleeful
It’s getting easier and easier to watch Colbert and Jon Stewart clips on the internet.
Newscloud.com is the best yet.
These are legal clips from Comedy Central.
Here’s a sample:
Bush Is Back! – The Colbert Report – NewsCloud.com
Katee Sackhoff – best actress on TV
At times I’ve felt she has the best part of any woman in any role ever on TV.
Hers is the best of many fantastic characters on the latest Battlestar Galactica.
Shame the series will end after a 4th season. And I understand Starbuck has a reduced role in the 3rd season.
Captain Kara “Starbuck” Thrace is not like many women on television, period. She is a hot-headed fighter pilot who is protecting a convoy of spaceships filled with travelers looking for Earth after their home world is attacked by a group of robots known as Cylons.
A top gun who drinks heavily and smokes cigars, Starbuck has a reputation for being tough. She punched a superior officer in the face during a heated card game, landing herself in the brig. She shot down a whopping five enemy ships during a battle to save some comrades. She tortured a captured Cylon during an interrogation.
A married woman, she is struggling to end a love affair with a married man, Lee “Apollo” Adama .
“When I first got the role, I was a little intimidated,” said Sackhoff. “Up to that point, I had always played pretty stereotypical blond roles. This was definitely a stretch for me. I wear high heels and dresses. I am a total girly girl. Now people avoid me at the gym.”
On TV, she’s gone where few women have before – The Boston Globe
Katee Sackhoff – Wikipedia
Red Bull Air Race – Monument Valley
I’d always wanted to visit Monument Valley on the Utah / Arizona border.
It’s amazing.
original – flickr
But when I drove up in May the entrance was congested with big trucks.
Monument Valley is managed by the Navajo Nation. (Red flag for me. My experience is that indigenous peoples are almost always the worst stewards of “the land”.)
They had rented the pristine landscape to Red Bull for a smoky, loud event tagged “formula 1 racing in the sky“.
I can argue this is WRONG in at least 6 different ways. …
But — like everyone else in the audience — I thought it was pretty bloody cool. See for yourself.
Details on the race:
Hungary’s Peter Besenyei, piloting a Team Red Bull Edge 540, beat 11 other air racers around a nine-gate airborne slalom course set up at Monument Valley, UT on Saturday, May 12, 2007, with a time of 59.87 seconds to win the third in the series of 2007 Red Bull Air Races. Besenyei, a former aerobatics world champion, attacked the race course by accelerating from a high perch position to the east in order to pass through the entry gate at 185+ KTAS. Passing through the second air gate, he had to pull 9.8Gs to reach the third air gate in minimum time. …
Eight additional Red Bull races are slated for 2007, including one in San Diego, CA on Saturday September 22nd, 2007. Other races will be held in Istanbul, Interlaken, London, Budapest, Porto, Acapulco and Perth. The race planes are disassembled between events and shipped by air freight to the next race venue. …
Red Bull Air Races now are carried by 97 television stations around the world, according to race executive Tino Landl. …
Red Bull Air Race sponsors Red Bull, Audi, Seat and Breitling teamed with the Navajo Nation to develop the Monument Valley race event venue. Landl estimates that the television exposure for the sponsors is worth up to $500-million annually, but the event has yet to reach the financial break-even point after the first two full years.
Rick as local cable Access TV commentator
One of my favourite movies is the first Wayne’s World. Mike Myers and his nerdy pal Garth (Dana Carvey) are “teens who live at home and have their own low-rent cable-access TV show in Aurora, Illinios, in which they celebrate their favorite female movie stars and heavy-metal bands.”
This past week-end I lived Rick’s World.
One minute I was a volunteer Floor Manager at the Canadian Gymnastics Championships in Regina — the next, called up to the VIP mezzanine, suddenly moderating a live-to-tape 3hr broadcast of the Finals.
(Pretty boys like Bart Conner and myself are often asked to be TV sport commentators.)
I had a number of expert assistants in each of the gymnastics disciplines. Even Olympic Floor Champion Kyle Shewfelt stopped by for a chat.
What I like about cable TV is that it’s unscripted and irreverent. The more blatantly amateur and “real” the coverage, the more I appreciate it compared with professional Network TV.
Now that I am a celebrity of the Canadian gymnastics media elite, I’d like to thank the little people: athletes, coaches, judges and volunteers without whom there would be no local cable TV coverage.
Bad on those jealous few who complained I disappeared completely from the Floor after being called upstairs.
more random photos from Nationals 2007 – flickr
Little Mosque on the Prairie
I’ve gotta see this.
Sounds right up my alley.
This is the story of the Muslim population in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan.
The show derives much of its humour from the interactions of the Muslims with the non-Muslim townspeople of Mercy and by the contrast of conservative Islamic views (held primarily by the characters of Baber and Fatima) with more liberal interpretations (as represented by Amaar and Rayyan).
The show premiered on Tuesday, January 9, 2007 …
Unusually for a Canadian television series, Little Mosque received extensive advance publicity in international media, with profiles appearing in The New York Times, the Washington Times and the Houston Chronicle, as well as on CNN, NPR and the BBC.
The series premiere drew an audience of 2.1 million — an exceptionally strong rating for domestic programming in the Canadian television market, and on par with Canadian ratings for popular American series. By comparison, Corner Gas, one of the highest-rated Canadian TV shows, attracts just under a million and a half viewers for a typical episode.
Little Mosque on the Prairie – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
