So, as long as I’m complaining about copy errors that makes me want to reach for a cocktail, it’s probably a good time for another in our on-going series that I like to call Egregious Examples of IT Industry Corporate-Speak. This one illustrates my biggest personal pet peeve as a copy writer, proofreader, and editor, namely the repurposing of nouns into verbs. (Is “repurposing” yet another example? Hmm… could be… might have to look that up.)
Oh, this is rich: Johnny Carson’s former sidekick, Ed McMahon — whom Johnny often teased about his appetite for distilled beverages — has lent his name to a new brand of vodka, McMahon Perfect. Even the name just shouts out for one last jibe from the grave, doesn’t it? Quick, somebody call Jennifer Love Hewitt and see if she can contact Johnny on the other side!
This makes me smile: it seems a gang of German anarchists is dressing up as superheroes, knocking over gourmet food markets for high-end chow instead of money, and giving the booty to the poor:
The gang members seemingly take delight in injecting humour into their raids, which rely on sheer numbers and the confusion caused by their presence. After they plundered Kobe beef fillets, champagne and smoked salmon from a gourmet store on the exclusive Elbastrasse [in Hamburg], they presented the cashier with a bouquet of flowers before making their getaway.
The latest robbery is part of a pattern over the past several months, suggesting that the thieves deliberately set out to highlight what they perceive as the inequality inherent in German society.
The linked article notes that “The gang are also behind black market cinema tickets which they distribute free to the poor, and they have printed leaflets telling passengers how to dodge ticket inspectors on the city’s underground and buses.”
No word as to which superheroes they are dressing as, however. Personally, I like to imagine Green Lantern handing out purloined steaks and forged movie tickets. Green Lantern is cool…
Media critic Jaime J. Weinman on what was so good about one of my all-time favorite TV shows, WKRP in Cincinnati:
“WKRP” has never really had a reputation on a par with “Taxi” or “Mary Tyler Moore” or “Barney Miller” or “M*A*S*H,” but I think it was actually the best sitcom of its era when it came to the most important thing a sitcom can do: create memorable, distinctive characters and create comedy from those characters, instead of a lot of extraneous jokes. The characters on “WKRP” were all so well-defined that seeing them act out of character, even slightly out of character, could be inherently funny, and the characters all had different and well-defined relationships to each other, so you could put any two characters together in a scene and get a different type of comedy out of it.
The other thing Wilson did with the show was give it more variety than most sitcoms: it’s not just that they’d do an occasional “very special episode,” like the one about the Who concert in Cincinnati where kids were trampled to death; they would actually change the style and tone from week to week depending on what the story was about. So one week it would be a farce, another week a dramedy, still another week a traditional sitcom story and still another week an extended comedy sketch (there is one episode, “Hotel Oceanview,” that is literally an adaptation of a Toronto Second City sketch by the same writer). “Mary Tyler Moore” and other MTM and MTM-style shows valued consistency in style and tone; “WKRP” fluctuated and experimented more, which may explain why it was treated as the red-headed stepchild at MTM (“I wouldn’t watch it” — Mary Tyler Moore).
The rest of his post contains a whole mess of ‘KRP clips for your viewing pleasure. Go on over and have a look…
Here’s an interesting tidbit from the weekend’s headlines: the last American survivor of Titanic has died at the age of 99.
Lillian Gertrud Asplund was five when the great ship went down; she lost her father and three brothers in the disaster, while her mother and a fourth brother made it into the lifeboat with her. Curiously for a woman of her generation, she never married, and, unlike other survivors, she rarely spoke about what happened on that cold night in the Atlantic.
Uncle George may have finally knuckled under and given the fanboys the ORIGINAL original trilogy on DVD, but there remain certain media properties I’d love to own but which are unlikely to ever appear on those shiny silver discs we love so much here at Simple Tricks. Like, for instance, WKRP in Cincinnati, one of my all-time favorite television shows as well as one of the best situation comedies of the late-70s/early-80s (and, arguably, of all time). Judging from what I read in various forums and message boards, there is strong consumer interest in WKRP on DVD, but part of what made the show so special is exactly what will probably keep it out of release forever: the music.
Among my various and sundry oddball interests, I am fascinated by the life and legend of Howard Hughes. His biography is, in my humble estimation, a quintessentially American tragedy, the story of a guy who possessed all the superficial trappings that everyone thinks will make them happy — wealth, fame, power, sex appeal — but who ended up as a miserable and pathetic wreck of a human being. The very trait that made him so successful in his various pursuits — his obsessiveness — was also his ultimate downfall.
Courtesy of Scalzi’s AOL Journal, here’s a lovely true-color photo of our little corner of the universe. It’s a mosaic assembled from multiple satellite images. I’ve seen pictures similar to this before, but they never fail to take my breath away. I especially like the glint of sunlight over Baja. That’s a detail that all those Star Trek episodes seemed to miss. Click on the picture to see it larger, click here for other (and even larger) images…
Hmm. Only hours after hearing the news about the original, unaltered Star Wars movies being released, my buzz is crumbling because of all the rumors flying around the ‘net about them. Basically, folks are suggesting that my long-awaited grail is going to turn out to be a half-hearted effort at best. According to a USA Today article, “the original films’ video quality will not match up to that of the restored versions.” The article quotes a Lucasfilm employee as saying, “It is state of the art, as of 1993, and that’s not as good as state of the art 2006.”
Stupendously big news has come down from the Holy Sepulchre of The Great Flanneled One:
In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie and, as bonus material, the theatrical edition of the film. That means you’ll be able to enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983. [Emphasis mine.]
Uncle George is taking a page from The Disney Book of Dirty Tricks and General Corporate Evil and will be offering these discs for a limited time only — September 12 to December 31 — but I can live with that. Yes, it’s manipulative and no doubt designed to maximize sales by threatening us with an artificial scarcity, but who really cares if it means that Han shoots first, as he should? I know what I’ll be wanting for my birthday. Hell, I’ll probably buy two copies in addition to asking for the birthday gifts, just to have the spares on hand.
The complete press release is here. I don’t know about you, but my day has suddenly gotten drastically brighter. My morning cup of coffee even tastes better. How odd…