Monthly Archives: April 2007

Apr262007

Pet Peeve: The Today Show

This is something that’s bothered me off and on for several years, but this morning I finally reached my breaking point: what the hell is the matter with the audio mix on The Today Show?

Anytime they use background music for a segment — which is pretty much all the time these days on this increasingly fluffy and pointless “news” program — the music is so loud that it drowns out the voiceover. It happened this morning while Matt Lauer was reminiscing about his best experiences while doing his “Where in the World is Matt Lauer?” segments, which I still enjoy despite my general disdain for Today. The insidiously catchy and terminally annoying Outkast tune “Hey Ya” was playing over the story, cranked up to the point where I could hardly hear Matt at all, so what I ended up with essentially a music video with visuals of Lauer on an aircraft carrier, walking around Red Square, etc.

I’ve wondered for some time if the problem was with the TV in my bedroom (I usually half-listen to the various morning shows while I dress for work, so I can catch a weather forecast), but today, because I was actually interested in the story in question, I tried the HDTV in my living room; same thing there. Are the show’s producers even aware of this issue? Is it deliberate on their part? Do they think for some reason that viewers find it pleasant or exciting to have music drowning out the host personalities that we’re supposedly tuning in to listen to? Or are we just supposed to look at them? Why have the hosts at all? Why not just play music? Oh, wait, that’s what the radio is for, isn’t it? Idiots…

Oh, and as long as I’m bitching, I’d love to see all the national morning shows drop their outside “plaza” segments, too; listening to the screaming crowds of people who all seem to think that their Aunt Mildred in Peoria will somehow pick out their single voice from the cacophony is even more annoying than the nine-millionth play of “Hey Ya.” Not that the goofball weather-guessers who mingle with the crowd ever have anything all that important or amusing to say, I just don’t like all the noise. Arg…

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Apr252007

Update: FDA Listening to Chocolate Campaign!

The Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate site is reporting that the FDA has extended the comment period through May 25, so we might have a chance after all of stopping the corporate weenies who want to cheapen our chocolate in the name of bigger shareholder profits! Don’t hesitate: click that link above right now and follow the campaign’s instructions on how to submit your thoughts to the FDA.

And if you just tuned in and don’t know what in the hell I’m talking about, read my previous entry on this subject, then click over to Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate. Power — and decent quality chocolate — to the people!

(In spite of the light ‘n’ sassy tone I’m using with these posts, I really do take the subject very seriously, and I hope you’ll join me in fighting this. I despise the thought of stockholders fattening their bottom lines by taking away value for the consumer — a game they’ve learned to play with consummate skill over the past 20 years — and I feel like it’s finally time to draw a line in the sand on something. Chocolate is a good place to start. Maybe if we’re loud enough, we can not only stop the plan to cheapen the quality of this one product, but actually turn back the clock on some other things as well.)

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Apr242007

Don’t Mess With My Chocolate!

One of the many, many items on the List of Things That Are Turning Me Into a Grumpy Old Man™ is the fact that an entire generation of kids has grown up not knowing what Coca-Cola is supposed to taste like. That’s because, back around 1985 or so, the evil penny-pinching, bean-counting corporate stooges in Atlanta decided — without bothering to consult the consumers who would be buying and drinking the stuff, mind you — to replace the yummy, yummy sugar in Coke with this new-fangled, better-living-through-modern-chemistry (and, not coincidentally, cheaper) dreck called high-fructose corn syrup. The value of this change was entirely one-sided: the company saved money on the production side by using the cheaper sweetener, which of course boosted the stockholders’ portfolio. Coke drinkers, on the other hand, got shafted. They lost the flavor they’d enjoyed for a hundred years and were forced to either adapt to the new, less-pleasant (and possibly downright harmful, if you believe the bad press on corn syrup) Coke formula, or find some other beverage fix.

(For the record, I don’t generally buy into conspiracy theories, but I find it entirely plausible that the marketing disaster that was New Coke really was an insidious ploy to wean consumers off sugar-based Coke so we’d be more accepting of the corn-syrup formula when Classic Coke “returned.” I’m not saying I definitely believe that, only that I find it believable.)
The really frustrating thing about the Coke situation was that the battle was lost before anyone knew it was being fought. And the same damn thing is about to happen again with another beloved luxury food: chocolate.

Continue Reading…

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Apr222007

2007 Telos Awards

For the past several years, my friend, collaborator, and frequent Simple Tricks commenter Mike Chenoweth has been working with a local charter school called East Hollywood High. EHHS is a pretty exciting idea, a place where artistically inclined kids can take, in addition to a standard high school curriculum, elective courses in film history and practical film production techniques, taught by people who actually work in the film industry. Mike has been instrumental in shaping this elective program, first as a teacher and, more recently, as Director of Film Studies.

A couple weeks ago, he asked me to do him a favor and judge a number of student-made films for the school’s annual Telos competition. On Friday night, it was my honor to attend the awards ceremony for the nominees and winners.

Continue Reading…

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Apr212007

Music Quiz

Look, kids, it’s another quiz! It’s the lazy blogger’s way of posting up some quick ‘n’ easy content for your reading pleasure!
This one is a little different, at least. It’s about music:

Continue Reading…

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Apr192007

Tales of Gold Monkey

Tales of the Gold Monkey, which I mentioned in the previous entry, was another one-season-wonder of a television show that gouged a huge divot in my impressionable young brain. Curiously, it ran in the same 1982-83 television season as Voyagers! (back when network series still had discreet and contiguous seasons instead of only occasionally airing new episodes in between re-runs); there must’ve been something in the air that year that caused TV shows to lodge themselves so firmly in my memory. Hell, I still remember the actual time slots of the shows I loved: Voyagers! was on Sunday nights and Gold Monkey was Wednesdays. Yes, I did spend far too much time thinking about what was on the tube…
Be that as it may, Gold Monkey was a nifty show, a good old-fashioned pulp adventure set in the South Pacific of the 1930s. I think it failed largely because people compared it unfavorably to Raiders of the Lost Ark; both were set in the ’30s and featured an all-American leather-jacketed hero and dastardly Nazis, so of course one had to be a rip-off of the other. But I didn’t care about the similarities when I was a kid, and I’ve since decided that Gold Monkey was actually far more similar to the Bogart-Bacall classic To Have and Have Not than any of the Indiana Jones movies. Even in the ’80s, however, nobody bothered to watch the classics, so the rip-off accusation stuck, and by the start of the ’83-’84 season, Gold Monkey was only a memory. At least until somebody finally gets those DVDs into production!

While we wait for that boxed set of shiny silver discs, here’s the opening title sequence, featuring an appropriately jaunty theme song by uber-composer Mike Post. I miss opening title sequences…

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Apr172007

Voyagers! on DVD!

Wow, here’s an announcement I never thought I’d read: the TV series Voyagers! will be released on DVD on July 17th.
What’s that? You say you’ve never heard of Voyagers!? Well, I’m not surprised. It lasted only a single season, but it made a huge impression on me. Aimed squarely at the 10-14 year old market, the show was about a handsome-but-lunkheaded time traveler who accidentally picks up a 10-year-old companion, then finds himself unable to return the kid to his own time. Not that the kid wants to go… you see, he’s a history buff and an orphan, so blazing through the past is far more appealing than growing up in a boring old foster home in 1982. And his knowledge of history comes in useful, because our grown-up Voyager lost his handy guidebook and doesn’t know crap about any of the events they keep finding themselves in the middle of.

It was all pretty silly and self-consciously educational in the way of early-80s kidvid, but I’m pretty sure this is one I’ll still enjoy. I’ve already earmarked my $49.98 for the set. Now, if only somebody would get to work on Tales of the Gold Monkey…

Here are the opening credits for Voyagers!, which should give you a taste of the show if you don’t remember it, or generate a nice nostalgic glow if you do:

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Apr172007

Zombies Don’t Giggle!

There were zombies wandering the streets of Salt Lake this past Sunday… and no, I don’t mean the usual handful of homeless guys or would-be shoppers who didn’t get the memo about the downtown malls being demolished. No, I’m talking about genuine, flesh-eating, shambling-corpse, movie-style zombies. Seems there was a film crew here last week shooting a pilot for a new TV series called The Rising, about the undead taking over an unnamed American city.
This really is the perfect location for a zombie project — anyone who lives around here can tell you that Salt Lake is eerily appropriate for the anonymous role of “unnamed American city,” and filming downtown on a Sunday provides that deserted, end-of-the-world look without even having to redirect traffic.

Brandon Griggs of the Salt Lake Tribune lent a helping hand as an extra; he writes about the experience here. There’s also this nifty little behind-the-scenes video:

A quick note of explanation for the out-of-towners: that distinctive “cuckoo” sound you can hear as the zombie crowd begins to move is a audio cue that’s linked to all the “walk/don’t walk” lights in the downtown area. I guess it’s intended to help blind pedestrians. If you’re crossing in the north-south direction, you get the cuckoo; east-west is a “cheep-cheep” noise. As far as I know, this system is unique to Salt Lake. I’ve never heard these sounds in any other city I’ve ever visited.
Also, if you’re curious, that zombie crowd is only about two blocks from my office building…

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