Remarkably efficient

The new Pacific Bell San Fernando Valley White Pages just came out...excuse me, that should be "Pacific Bell Presented by SBC, a Tiny Little Division of ConHugeCo." Anyway, instead of just stacking the phone books for the entire apartment complex down by the mailboxes like they have in the past, someone put a copy of the White Pages in front of every door in the complex.

Yes, every door, including doors leading to places that don't technically have phones in them, such as the stairwell and the custodial storage closet. (Phone Book Santa Claus did manage to miss the elevator, although I would argue that there's actually a greater chance of finding a telephone in an elevator than in a storage closet. They just don't have dials on them, which makes the use of a phone book problematic at best.)

Call it the local lane

New rule: Anyone clutching a copy of the supermarket's in-store circular is not allowed to use the express lane, because he or she will invariably try to argue about the price of something, leading the cashier to have to use the phone, and eventually word will come from the mysterious voice on the other side of the phone that the special price is only valid on the 3-pound size, not the 40-ounce size.

Movie nostalgia

I was recently trying to think of movies I had a distinct memory of seeing in the theater in my younger days. The earliest one I came up with was "Popeye," believe it or not, and I also remember my father taking me to see "Tron" in the summer of 1982, and later that year, of course, we all went to see "E.T."

I have a vague memory of seeing "Return of the Jedi" in the summer of 1984, in Sweden, in English with Swedish subtitles, but I don't remember any of the theater-going experience. I also believe I was taken to see most if not all of the classic Disney theatrical rereleases in the late '70s and early '80s, back before they switched to just putting everything out on video for a limited time only (heck, I have a vague memory of seeing "Song of the South" in the theater).

Later on, there were a few special experiences, such as my father coming home early from work so we could see the "twilight" showing of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" on the day it was released, seeing "Speed Zone" on its first day of release in a nearly vacant theater, and seeing "Jurassic Park" at the only theater in Tampa that was equipped with digital sound equipment at the time (at one point of maximum volume, my father leaned over and whispered to me, "Thanks for insisting we see this movie here").

What I remember better than the movies are the theaters where I saw many of these movies, most of which are either gone now (the Tampa Bay Center mall theater, the Horizon Park 4, and the $1.00 second-run Twin Bays theater), were torn down and replaced (the Hillsboro 3-plex, replaced by the Hillsboro 8), or were gutted and replaced (the Britton Plaza 3, where one of the auditoriums was downright gigantic, now the Britton Plaza 8, where all the auditoriums are downright tiny). But then there was the art house, the Tampa Theatre, which is still exactly the same, and for good reason; also, it was a big event when the Old Hyde Park 7 opened in 1985 ("Young Sherlock Holmes" is the first movie I saw there), and it's still exactly the same, as far as I know.

In 2000, I finally started keeping a list of all the movies I see in the theater, most of them in nondescript Los Angeles multiplexes, just so I'll be able to remember years from now, for example, that I saw "The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle" on July 4, 2000, at the Valley Plaza 6. I don't know why I'd need that information in the future, but more information is (almost) always better than less.

Another triumph for medical science

All of a sudden Saturday night (actually early Sunday morning), I had a sharp pain on the left side of my lower back. I mean sharp. Since it came on suddenly very soon after I had finished a hard-fought broomball game, I at first thought I had somehow managed to pull a muscle or something, but since I hadn't been playing that hard, I discounted that theory and decided it was somehow digestive system-related.

I made it home, despite not being able to find a comfortable sitting position in the driver's seat of my car. I took Pepto-Bismol and Tylenol and tried lying down, but couldn't find a comfortable position there, either. The pain continued, and I alternated between tossing and turning in bed and making trips to the bathroom to see if, uh, anything needed to come out. At one point, I checked webmd.com to verify that I was correctly remembering that appendicitis causes sharp pain on the right side, and it turned out I was.

I thought about putting clothes on and driving to the hospital, but I figured that since I wasn't bleeding profusely, I'd just have to sit around for several hours waiting to be seen, and I'd be even less comfortable in public than I was lying in bed. Then I remembered that my health insurance plan had just sent out information about their exciting new 24-hour "ask a nurse or counselor or whoever happens to answer the phone" service, so I decided that if the pain hadn't subsided by 3:00, I'd go ahead and call and see what they said.

At 2:58, I felt the pain suddenly start going away, and it was completely gone within one minute. I fell asleep almost immediately, and felt perfectly fine when I woke up Sunday morning.

I still feel fine, I have no idea what the problem was, and I'm glad I didn't actually go to the hospital and waste everyone's time and the aforementioned insurance company's money. Maybe it really was some bizarre broomball-related muscle strain that cleared up once the Tylenol got to work on it.

On another note, on Saturday, I got a snail-mail letter from my Congressional representative responding to an e-mail supporting Amtrak that I sent four months ago. I'm glad certain pain relievers in "capsule" form work a little bit faster than my representative's communications department. (I sent similar e-mails to both my senators, and got a generic "thanks for sharing your views" e-mail back from one a week later, and still haven't gotten anything back from the other one. I happen to know they're both in favor of Amtrak, though.)

Once a year, like clockwork

I got a jury summons today for Los Angeles county court, with a report date of September 3rd. Since I'll be on an airplane that day and unable to report to the courthouse in the morning, I used the automated phone system to postpone until the next week, September 9th. (I could have postponed to any Monday for the six months after September 3rd, but I wanted to get it over with ASAP.)

Last year, I served jury duty in Federal court in downtown L.A. In fact, it was exactly a year before this jury service. In fact, my initial reporting date for that jury duty was...September 11, 2001.

This can only mean trouble.

What do calendars have to do with anxiety dreams?

On my page-a-day "Lionel Trivia" calendar that I have at work, today's trivia fact is "In 1992 Kughn entered into a partnership with former rock legend, Neil Young." Now, aside from the misplaced comma being yet another sign that this calendar had horrible copy editing, I think if I were Neil Young, I'd sue for libel. Once someone gets dubbed a "rock legend," I think that title sticks with them forever.

I don't remember ever having a dream where I can't remember my locker combination. The only school anxiety dream I get on a semi-regular basis is that it's getting kind of late in the term and I haven't started working on the term paper yet. Last night, I had a test anxiety dream, but it wasn't about a school test, it was about the "Jeopardy!" contestant test. I dreamed I was taking one that was much, much harder than the one I actually took in April. One of the few answers I knew was "Lataan," which appears to be a Finnish word in real life, and one of the questions I didn't know was, "People from what area code filmed their own destruction?" I have no idea what that question means.

I assume the test anxiety dream was prompted by A&E rerunning one of my favorite episodes of "Newsradio" yesterday, in which Lisa and Dave retake their SAT's, but Dave does poorly because he was up all night before the test playing the Stargate Defender video game that was just installed in the lobby. But why couldn't I have had a dream about playing video games?

What do breasts have to do with "The Twilight Zone"?

It is my firm belief that at least half of all the women in the world between the ages of 18 and 40 would look just as good as the average Playboy centerfold if they had access to the same costumers, makeup artists, hairstylists, lighting people, and, most importantly, photo retouchers. (And a fair number outside that age range, too.)

Of course, real women are better because they actually exist in 3-D space, and one can have actual conversations with them and things like that. They might not have a page of jokes conveniently printed on their backsides, but nobody's perfect.

The ideal situation would be to have all the women in the world looking like Playboy centerfolds in real life, but that would probably be impossible without some sort of heretofore unknown scientific breakthrough, or sex-obsessed aliens with superior technology invading Earth, or something like that. There was a "Twilight Zone" episode along these lines in which it was postulated that the drawbacks of such a society would include stifling government-controlled uniformity and lack of freedom of thought, but I believe that the main drawback would involve there not being as much room on crowded subway trains because of all the breasts.

Besides, there was a "Twilight Zone" episode that attempted to show the drawbacks of just about every possible society, from the "hey, we're the first two people on Earth" type of society to the "hey, I'm the last man on Earth, but at least I have time enough at last to read all these books" type of society. That Rod Serling was a real killjoy.

Rod Serling wasn't even involved in what I consider to be the scariest "Twilight Zone" ever, because it was an episode of "The New Twilight Zone" from the '80s. A man's been having to deal with a lot of semi-indecipherable jargon in his work recently, and then one of his co-workers asks him, "Where's a good dinosaur to take a girl for lunch?" The entire English language keeps getting more and more jumbled up like that for him until everything he hears or reads is complete gibberish, and the episode ends with him sitting on the floor with a child's picture book on his lap open to a picture of a puppy; the text says "Wednesday." A while back, this episode ran on TNT in the wee hours and my TiVo recorded it as a suggestion for me. I didn't watch it...make that couldn't watch it.

That's one of only two "New Twilight Zone" episodes I can distinctly remember the plot of. The other one involved a man going back in time and successfully preventing JFK's assassination by running alongside his limo yelling, "Duck, Mr. President, duck!" For reasons involving the balance of the universe, though, Khruschev was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and the time traveler's computer device claimed that nuclear war would be the inevitable result of all this, so he had to convince JFK to now go a couple days back in time with him and go ahead and get assassinated. I think even at the age of 13, that episode caused me to roll my eyes repeatedly.

There's going to be a new "New Twilight Zone" this fall on UPN, hosted by "Waiting to Exhale" director Forest Whitaker. I can only hope it lives up to the high standards set by its immediate predecessor, or perhaps even the high standards of (dare I say it?) "Amazing Stories." And that it has as much breast-related content as "Charmed" does, over there on the WB.

The power of old TV Guides

A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon this web site, covering the history of one of the TV stations in my hometown of Tampa, created by a man who was an employee at the station during the 1970s. (It was the CBS affiliate back in the olden days, and now it's the Fox affiliate.) I e-mailed him and asked him if he'd be interested in any scans of old "Big 13" ads from my old TV Guides. He was, so I scanned what I could find and e-mailed the scans to him.

He now works as an editor at Columbia-Tristar Television Distribution, on the Sony Pictures lot, and he was so impressed that he invited me to lunch. Today, I took him up on his offer, and drove down to Culver City to meet him.

He showed me something he'd recently been working on, a promo video for advertisers for Columbia-Tristar's syndicated sitcom reruns ("Seinfeld," "Just Shoot Me." "The Steve Harvey Show," and "Married...with Children"), and then we walked over to the lot and he showed me around. We walked into the sound stage that was set up for the new version of "Pyramid," the game show, and although much of the set had tarps over it, I could definitely tell that it's not going to be primarily red and blue like the previous versions; it's going to look more like "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."

Then we ate at the commissary and talked about TV history, including the fact that the NBC affiliate in Tampa, at least in the late '60s/early '70s, ran its own audio-only promos during the network's "the following program is brought to you in living color on NBC" announcements that preceded just about every show. I still can't decide if this is more or less egregious than the time the aforementioned "Big 13" pre-empted a CBS "Peanuts" special for a syndicated "Benny Hill" special, but I'm actually leaning towards more egregious because it was ongoing, and because that NBC announcement had a very nice flute-heavy tune behind it.

So, in conclusion, the lesson is that you should offer materials for people's web sites if you can, because you might get a free lunch out of the deal.

Ratings and ticket prices of the times

Excerpted from the "As We See It" column in the November 29, 1975, issue of TV Guide, which I just acquired for my collection...

"Baseball, once unquestioned as the National Pastime, has taken a pasting in recent years--most of it dished out by the National Football League....

"Ah, but this year was different, as fans suddenly rediscovered baseball. One reason was that baseball is a bargain. It certainly doesn't cost $18 a ticket, which is the top price for warming a seat at a Washington Redskins game. As if to reward its fans, baseball responded with the most exciting World Series in years.

"For seven games, the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Red Sox played raw, frightening baseball, full of sensational saves and staggering errors, smashing victories and stunning reverses, heroes to idolize and goats to blame...

"The ratings were gratifying to NBC, but even more so to baseball, which had grown weary of being No. 2. For the final game, 60 per cent of the viewing audience was watching baseball on NBC. That came to nearly 76 million viewers--more than for any other sports event ever telecast.

"Baseball, at least until the next Super Bowl, is No. 1 again."

By way of comparison, Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, which had the highest baseball TV ratings since 1991, had about 39 million viewers. The Redskins actually currently have the highest ticket prices in the NFL. I can't find what the actual ticket prices are, but my guess is that, 27 years later, the face value on the worst seats at FedEx Field is at least twice $18. Face value because there's also a "personal seat license" thing involved. I don't want to think about what the top price would be, which would involve "club seating," I'm sure, and a pair of season tickets there probably cost more than I make in a year.

Then again, it's easy to pay $18 or more for a ticket to a Major League Baseball game these days. But, and I'm not sure Bud Selig and the players' union realize this, it is also still fairly easy to pay less than $18 for a ticket to a Major League Baseball game.

It's a merry-go-round of musical fun

I just can't stop thinking about this new version of iTunes, because I'm a big geek.

Part of TiVo's raison d'etre is to allow you to rate TV shows, from three thumbs down to three thumbs up, and then, based on your ratings of the TV shows you've seen, suggest other TV shows you haven't seen that you might like, even going so far as to automatically record them when they air. And the new version of the TiVo software uses, as a portion of the algorithm involved in figuring out which shows you might like, data on what shows other TiVo users liked. Of course, this means that when my TiVo keeps recording something I don't particularly want to see, such as the 6:30 P.M. rerun of "MAD TV" on TNN, it's no longer the TiVo's fault, it's the fault of some other person, probably in Minnesota. (Not that I object to "MAD TV" per se, the main problem is that something on TNN would have to be really compelling for me to be able to ignore that stupid black bar at the bottom of the screen that continuously displays the title of the show.)

Where I'm going with this is that it should be possible for iTunes to do the same thing, something like, "Oh, you seem to enjoy later period Beatles better than early Beatles, and you also like the music of They Might Be Giants. Here, why don't I download this new song by this new band that I think you might like?" However, this would require wildly unprecedented levels of cooperation and trust on the part of the record companies, so it's probably never going to happen. Oh, well, guess I'll never find out about new music, because I never listen to the radio (see below).

The music's on us

Taking advantage of the storage capacity provided by the 120 GB hard drive I recently added to my computer, I converted all my CDs into the popular MP3 format, thereby turning my computer into some kind of gigantic jukebox or something like that. (Yes, it's still legal to do this, no thanks to the RIAA. However, I cannot condone hacking into my computer to get all these MP3s, so I'll have to completely ignore any such attempts.)

Anyway, the final tally is 24.85 GB for 7140 "songs," which would take 15.3 days to listen to all the way through. (15 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes, 36 seconds, to be exact.) Songs is in quotes because some of the so-called "songs" are actually old commercial jingles, or radio station jingles. I have strange musical tastes.

Apple celebrated this accomplishment by releasing a new version of iTunes today, which allows one to rate all the songs in his or her library on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Also, it allows one to set up playlists using logic like "all songs with a rating greater than 3 stars and a year between 1965 and 1969." This means it's to my advantage to spend those 15.3 days rating all these songs, not to mention entering a year for the majority of songs, which don't have them already.

For a future version, I'd like iTunes to create a database of the lyrics of every song, so that playlist logic can include things like "all songs naming a breed of dog," which would include such hits as Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" and the Everly Brothers' "Bird Dog." I'm suggesting this with tongue only partially in cheek, since I really think something like this is going to be possible in the not-too-distant future.

Allen Iverson is 6'0", 165 pounds, which means he and I are about the same size. So why is he making millions of dollars a year, and I'm making thousands? Because he's good at basketball, and I'm not. On the bright side, I've never had reason to surrender myself to the Philadelphia police department, or any police department, for that matter.

People who are spinning in their graves

Although it's been years since I read the book "Stuart Little," I'm almost positive that E.B. White never wrote, or even thought about writing, the line of dialogue, "This is now officially a litter box."

Big Brother is watching you; you are watching "Big Brother 3"

I just learned of the existence of this new program from the Federal government, the Terrorist Information and Prevention Service, a name which I assume tested better in focus groups than Secret Police. They want to start with one million people? That's about four percent of the U.S. population right there. They can't even train that many people to watch UPN on a regular basis.

Something like this was a plot line in "Gasoline Alley" a few months ago. Spurred on by their teacher, the schoolkids in that strip formed an anti-terrorism watch group called the Home Guard. They became suspicious of the new boy at school, and when spying on him, heard him discussing guns and bombs with his father. An army of cops showing up at their house later, it turned out the father drew a syndicated adventure comic strip (presumably one more adventurous than "Gasoline Alley") and was discussing future plots. Despite their complete failure to uncover any terrorist activity, the Home Guard got a congratulatory letter from President Bush anyway. The strip then moved on to other things, such as the over-100-year-old Walt Wallet getting lost while walking through a cemetery and ending up in an open grave. Yes, I'm probably the one person under 50 who reads "Gasoline Alley."

Anyway, we have always been at war with Eastasia, and the ol' clock struck 13 a while ago, so good night.

Staying up all night typing for a good cause

My friend Steph is participating in Blogathon two weeks from today to raise money for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), so, like, go to her blog and use the buttons at the top right to pledge, okay?

The seamy underbelly (make that overbelly) of rent-controlled apartments

Close to the end of March, I noticed part of the ceiling in my bathroom was sagging a little bit. "Huh," I thought, and decided to ignore it until it got worse.

It was pouring rain on March 31st, and it got worse. All of a sudden, water started pouring through a hole that had developed at the lowest point of the sag. Eventually, it abated, I put a bucket on the counter under the hole, and with a little mopping (actually, a lot of mopping), I was able to get the bathroom back close to its normal state. I went down to the apartment office and filled out a "Maintenance Request Form."

March 31st was a Sunday (and Easter). A maintenance person apparently came by on Monday while I was out of the apartment, and as far as I can tell, all he or she did is poke a finger into the hole, thus making it a little bigger.

And within a few days, the water stopped coming. It was mostly dry during April and most of May, but water started dripping out of the hole in late May. (This was very mysterious, since it pretty much hadn't rained at all since March 31st.) In mid-June, I filled out another Maintenance Request Form. As far as I could tell, no "maintenance" was done. The water kept dripping, with as much as three gallons worth of drips landing in the bucket every 24 hours.

Today, I came home from work to discover that the ceiling had collapsed, judging by the 2-foot by 1-foot piece of ceiling that was lying in the sink, and the other pieces that were scattered about.

I went downstairs to the apartment office, told the manager what had happened, and filled out yet another Maintenance Request Form. They're big on paperwork. Anyway, the manager promised to page the maintenance man.

He showed up about 15 minutes later, took one look at the bathroom ceiling and said, "Well, it's the air conditioner." Had this been an educational program for children, I would have said, "Of course! It all makes sense now. The water that broke through the ceiling on March 31st was left over from when the air conditioning system had been run previously, either from the winter when I was using it for heat, or from way last summer. Then it didn't start dripping again until I started running the air conditioner again, and the hotter it got, the more the air conditioner was running, and that's why it was dripping more in July than it was in May."

I didn't say that, though, but the maintenance man left for about 15 minutes to go up on the roof and fiddle around with something, then came back and said he'd fixed it temporarily but the air conditioning guy would come at some point, and then he would come back next Wednesday to see if it had dried enough for him to fix the ceiling.

But for the time being, there's a gaping hole in my bathroom ceiling, offering a beautiful view of wet insulation, ringed by torn pieces of some vinyl-type material, formerly the bottom layer of the ceiling, that are hanging down. It looks like this...


The good news is that Chessie the cat seemed nonplussed by the incident.

Slurp that Slurpee

There are six 7-Elevens within one mile of my apartment, which seems like a dangerously large number.

Speaking of places that are near 7-Elevens, at Wrigley Field today, the Cubs beat the Marlins in 16 innings. Which brings to mind a couple of quotes that were in the sports section of today's Los Angeles Times:

"They saw a great game. They got their money's worth." -- Garret Anderson, Angels outfielder

"They saw 11 innings, they saw every guy play, what else can they do?" -- Mark Grudzielanek, Dodgers second baseman

So I'm surprised they didn't just stop that Cubs-Marlins game after 11 or 12 innings. I mean, other sports don't seem to have a problem with regular-season games ending in a tie. Baseball needs to get with the times, dude. Also, they should figure out a way to have the balls glow blue when they're shown on TV, and there should be some sort of dancing animated robots appearing onscreen during the TV coverage as well. And cheerleaders, just like in the XFL. (Note to Bud Selig: These ideas aren't free, but please take my fee from the Yankees' payroll rather than the Devil Rays'. Thank you.)

From NBC Studios in New York

Shortly after I wrote the previous entry, I read a certain other blog which predicted that this blog would consist of trains, TV Guide, and Conan O'Brien. So, having done all three already, I guess it's time to close the place down. It was fun while it lasted.

All right, I'm just kidding. I was tempted to edit the below entry to read "appearances by both Jamie Kitman and Pat Dillett," but decided to leave it alone as further proof of this Conan O'Brien obsession I apparently have. And if the names Jamie Kitman and Pat Dillett sound familiar to you, trust me, you need to see "Gigantic" as soon as possible.

There it was, in the aisle by the exit sign

The They Might Be Giants song "Number Three" was inspired by John Flansburgh's hatred of Ronald Reagan.

I learned this at the Q&A session following the Los Angeles premiere of the documentary/concert film "Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)," which I highly recommend, and not only because it contains appearances by both Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter.

On another note related to how I traveled to the screening, putting all my foreign language skills to work, I finally figured out that the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority's slogan in English, "Travel Smart...Take Metro," is rendered as "Take Metro, It's Better" in Spanish, assuming I'm correctly translating "Viajar en Metro, es mejor." So either people who speak Spanish aren't smart, or Metro isn't any better for English speakers than the alternative, or both.

By going to see "Gigantic," I missed the All-Star Game, but I didn't really care since the Ted Williams clones aren't fully grown yet and therefore weren't playing. I'll bet if they were playing, it wouldn't have ended in a tie, unless both teams were made up of only Ted Williams clones, in which case they would have been perfectly evenly matched.

My love is in league with the...tollway

I've also completed Interstate 294 in Illinois, I now realize. (See "Same player shoots again" below.) Clearly, I have to get a road map and figure this out once and for all, through judicious use of a highlighter.

There's no cryonics in baseball

"Your attention please. Now pinch hitting for number 9F, Ted Williams Clone Number 6, is number 9Q, Ted Williams Clone Number 17."

Let's have a Patrick Swayze Christmas

Now the person who referred to Patrick Swayze as "the motivational speaker in 'Donnie Darko'" claims he, or perhaps she, was joking. So never mind.

She's like the wind

On the alt.fan.conan-obrien newsgroup, someone asked who the guests were going to be on July 16th because he was going to see the show that night. Someone else responded, and helpfully explained who the first guest was: "Patrick Swayze played the motivational speaker in 'Donnie Darko.'" I responded by pointing out that was like saying, "Orson Welles played one of the voices in the 'Transformers' movie," because that was the best comparison I could come up with on short notice.

Same player shoots again

Since I stayed home all day Saturday, I felt like I had to get out of the apartment today, so I drove down to the town of Stanton, in Orange County, to play pinball at a place I'd heard tell of on the Internet, apparently unique among places in southern California for actually having fairly new games.

And it was true. They had a machine called High Roller Casino, one called Austin Powers, and one called Monopoly. High Roller Casino was fairly lackluster, Austin Powers probably would have been better if the sound had turned up a little higher, and Monopoly was the best except for a spot where the ball would consistently get stuck, resulting in a long pause while the "ball search" feature tried to kick it out several times, always failed, and eventually delivered a new ball from somewhere.

Austin Powers also had a mode called "Fat Bastard Multiball," which sounded a little scary. Much better was "Railroad Multiball" on Monopoly.

On the way home, I took a somewhat roundabout route, which allowed me to drive the portion of Interstate 105 between I-605 and I-110, which means I've now "completed" 105. If I'm counting correctly, it's now the fifth Interstate I've traveled over every portion of, joining Interstates 175, 275, and 375 in Florida and Interstate 390 in New York. (Yes, I-175 and I-375 count, even though they're less than a mile long.)

Then there are a bunch of cases where I've traveled every mile of an Interstate within a certain state. Interstate 40 in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, Interstate 78 in Pennsylvania, and Interstate 65 in Kentucky and Indiana, just to name the first few I thought of.

In conclusion, a delightful day, except for the fact that the place with the pinball games is a 50-minute drive from here, and that my car would have been sideswiped by a van that was attempting to change lanes if not for the fact that there was a clear lane to my left. Remember, kids, drive defensively.

Public service announcement

If you're in a position to submit the data for a new CD's track listings to CDDB, or Gracenote, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, proofread!

I thank you, and future generations will thank you as they import CD tracks into their computers, iPods, or other music-playing devices and don't have to edit titles like "Life in a Northeren Town" or "One Night in Bankok."

Also, don't feel you have to match the way the song titles are capitalized on the back of the CD case.

That twilighty show about the zone

There were a bunch of hour-long episodes of "The Twilight Zone" that I've never seen. Most of them were on the Sci-Fi Channel on Thursday and Friday, so I recorded them...but as it turns out, I was right to have never seen them before, because they're all pretty boring, what with having to be an hour long and all.

What I would like to see are reruns of "The New Twilight Zone" from the '80s at their original 60-minute length. A lot of those hour-long shows contained two or three episodes of varying lengths, but then they were all cut or expanded to fit into a half-hour time slot for syndication.

And then there's a new new "Twilight Zone" that's going to be on UPN this fall, the rationale being that the Viacom corporation still owns the "Twilight Zone" title and concept, they own UPN, and so all they need are a few dozen scripts with twist endings and a few dozen unknown actors, and they've got themselves a cheap TV show.

Speaking of TV shows, last week, A&E had a "TVography" about "The Wonder Years," which I watched back in the day but haven't seen in reruns. During the "TVography," they showed the opening titles a couple of times, and every time they did, something about it looked just a little bit off to me. Finally, I figured out that it was because I was seeing the opening titles for the first time without the ABC "In Stereo Where Available" graphic appearing under the "Wonder Years" logo. (There's a similar problem with my DVD of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown": it doesn't start with the "A CBS Special Presentation" bumper.)

Who listens to radio?

In my younger days, I listened to radio a lot, starting off with an FM Top 40 station (actually, I guess the proper name for the format these days is "CHR"). That station had a block of oldies at some point on the weekend, and I eventually came to realize that I liked the oldies better than I liked the new music, so I started listening to an oldies station instead. An oldies station that was on AM. I may have been the only kid in junior high who listened to AM radio. In high school, I switched back to FM, this time picking a rock station (the people who brought you "CHR" would call that format "AOR").

Then, in college, I switched to the "adult album alternative" format (you guessed it, "AAA"), and stuck with that in three different cities. Then I moved to Los Angeles, and there is no true AAA station. I could go back to one of the formats I listened to in the past, but I hate 60% of music being played on CHR stations these days, I hate 40% of music being played on rock stations these days, and worst of all, that AM oldies station had a huge playlist that has spoiled me for most other oldies stations.

So I never listen to the radio, and that's only a slight exaggeration, because the most radio I've heard over the last year has been at Supercuts while I'm getting my hair cut, plus the week when my car was in the shop and I was renting a box on wheels. I listen to CD's most often. Sometimes I listen to the DMX channels on my digital cable. My main source for new music is the bands that perform on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien." I recently put a much larger hard drive into my computer, and I'm currently converting all my CD's into MP3 files in order to make my computer into a giant jukebox.

Today, as I was leaving for work, I realized I didn't have any CD's in my car. My drive to work is less than 10 minutes, so this wasn't a big problem, but I'm so used to listening to something that I panicked and turned the radio on...to an all-news station.

During that drive to work, the radio shut itself off twice, which mystified me until I figured out that the CD player was thinking a CD had been inserted, which causes the radio to turn off. I assume this problem was caused because after 3-plus years straight, the CD player just couldn't believe there wasn't a CD inside. (On the bright side, the power antenna got a much-needed workout.)

Anyway, the new issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived today. One of the letters to the editor was a response to a recent article about satellite radio, written by someone from Clear Channel, an evil conglomerate that owns half the radio stations in the U.S., offering up the sentiment, "You don't need satellite radio to hear variety. Go ahead, listen to your local college radio station. Listen for 30 minutes. You'll come back to a Clear Channel station. You'll be back. You'll always be back. [Evil laughter]"

I, of course, took this as a slap in the face, because I used to do college radio. But what I really want to know is how the entire Clear Channel corporation felt about the letter, given that they are an investor in one of the two competing satellite radio services (and, in fact, some Clear Channel local radio stations are available on the service). If my commute to work was substantially longer than it is now, I'd seriously consider getting satellite radio, because I'm told they do have AAA stations, not to mention oldies stations with wide playlists.

The road (map) goes on forever

I hope this link stays up for a while: look, it's Denver's famous Buckingham Fountain.

Vital trivia

Around noon on November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was spotted buying a soft drink from a vending machine in the Texas School Book Depository lunchroom. He bought a Coca-Cola, even though he always drank Dr Pepper. Clearly, he did this because he was nervous; he was nervous because he had just singlehandedly assassinated John F. Kennedy.

Or at least that's how one theory goes. The other theory is that he naturally thought of Coke because he had just been paid to assassinate the President by the Coca-Cola company. Something about Federal sugar price supports, I assume.

Happy Fourth of July.

Scenes we'd like to see

Alien spaceship lands on Earth, hatch opens, wrapper from interplanetary fast-food place spills out.

Big 13, where news comes first

I just discovered this site, which is a history site about one of the TV stations I grew up watching. It's a pretty good site, although it focuses on the 1950s through the 1970s, which I don't remember. What I do remember about this station is that they preempted CBS's broadcast of a "Peanuts" special for a syndicated Benny Hill special in 1981 or 1982. Yes, I'm still bitter. They also didn't carry some CBS daytime programming, including the game show "Body Language" (which I didn't realize even existed until I saw it on Game Show Network) and "Press Your Luck" after it moved from 10:30 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., and they also weren't perfect on the CBS Saturday morning lineup, if I recall correctly. And they pioneered the use of the "squeezeback" in the Tampa Bay area to promote the 11:00 news, and for several years from the late '80s to the early '90s, every closing credit sequence that ran at 8:58 P.M. was completely unreadable because it was in a tiny little box in one corner.

On the other hand, their news had a good, unique name: "Pulse News," or "Pulse 13." The midday newsmagazine was called "Pulse Plus." (I'm too young to remember this, but it would have been competing against "Password Plus" on NBC at one point. What are the odds of two shows with "Plus" in the title being on at the same time?) But then they wimped out and renamed it "Eyewitness News" in the late '80s. And they had a nice, soothing early-morning show called "Breakfast Beat," starring Ernie Lee and his guitar that had his name spelled out on the neck. I don't remember anything else about it because I was anxiously awaiting "Captain Kangaroo" at the time.

Most importantly, they're responsible for my lifelong love of game shows, since the first game show I have a distinct memory of watching aired on this station: a syndicated show called "Cross-Wits." I really don't remember much about it, because I haven't seen it since 1979 or 1980, but I've got TV Guides where it's listed, so I know where it was on the dial.

Now, in the early '70s, they were producing commercials that looked like this for what was then a fairly small Florida supermarket chain, Publix. This image is very scary and raises a lot of questions:

1. This is supposed to attract customers?!
2. This is supposed to give people recipe ideas?!
3. Did they realize they were being ironic when they included miniature marshmallows?!
4. F&P fruit cocktail is only 4 for $1.00?!
5. Really, doesn't everyone hate it when perfectly good Jell-O is ruined by having crap put into it, such as fruit cocktail and/or miniature marshmallows (or worse yet, tiny pieces of carrot)?!
6. And isn't it even worse when the problem is compounded by serving the Jell-O with crap in it on top of a lettuce leaf?!
7. How did Publix manage to grow into the giant juggernaut that today blankets much of the Southeast when it had TV commercials like this 30 years ago?!

Anyway, this TV station has been a Fox affiliate for about eight years now, and it's still very bizarre when I watch TV in the old hometown. It also doesn't help that since the cable lineup has been changed, what used to be CBS on cable channel 13 is now Fox on cable channel 14. No wonder they say you can't go home again.

The title of this entry was their slogan during the '80s, usually set to music in "jingle" form. Ask me sometime and I'll sing it for you.

The vanilla-flavored real thing

Just when I thought the most exciting thing I'd see all day was a city bus blatantly running a red light, I stepped into the supermarket, and there it was, shining like a beacon: a display of Vanilla Coke in 2-liter bottles and 12-packs. Now, if only the Los Angeles Coke bottler would also produce Cherry Coke in 2-liter bottles and 12-packs the way all the other Coke bottlers do, I'd never drink anything else.

Also, I saw the movie "Sunshine State" today, and it mentioned my hometown once. Come to think of it, it mentioned Tampa, Miami, Orlando, and Tallahassee exactly once, and Jacksonville twice. Also, it featured two people from "NYPD Blue," the janitor from "The Hudsucker Proxy," and Miguel Ferrer, whose mother just died. It was good, albeit a little too ensemble-y for me, and it's a plot (development threatens an African-American community on the Atlantic coast of Florida) that had more relevance 20-25 years ago.

Have your pet spayed or neutered

As it turns out, I actually have no idea how the camping trailers given away on "The Price Is Right" can be linked to the wildfires currently plaguing the western U.S. I haven't even watched "The Price Is Right" in quite a while, and I don't really have any reason to anymore, now that Heather Kozar is no longer one of "Barker's Beauties," having left so she can move to Cleveland and live with her quarterback boyfriend. Now, from what I've seen, Cleveland is a lovely city, at least in the summer, but if I were Playboy's 1998 Playmate of the Year, I...well, first of all, I'd spend a lot more time in the shower than I do now. But I also wouldn't leave a cushy job in Los Angeles where all I had to do was stand around and gesture at consumer products in favor of moving to Cleveland, where the farthest my career could advance would be Local TV Talk Show Host. And that's much harder than the gesturing, since it involves asking people questions and nodding thoughtfully while they're talking about microorganisms in Lake Erie, or their prize-winning rutabaga, or the new orangutan at the zoo, or whatever people talk about on local TV talk shows in Cleveland. It probably doesn't pay as well, either, and there's no Plinko.

(I also have no idea why this is suddenly saying only "posted by at" instead of "posted by Jim Ellwanger at." You get what you pay for, right?)

Six down and four to go

Game Show Network just aired the final episode of the original "What's My Line?", originally broadcast September 3, 1967. Even though it was a mere seven years before I was born, watching it today, it almost seems like it originated from a different planet. The premise was that a regular person would show up and could win up to $50 if a panel consisting of men in tuxedos and/or women in evening gowns couldn't guess their occupation by asking yes-or-no questions, and it lasted for 17 1/2 years. These days, the only regular people who show up on prime-time TV are bachelorettes in Alaska, or something like that.

Instead of going back to the beginning of "What's My Line?", Game Show Network is replacing it with reruns of "To Tell the Truth," a show which was most recently revived with host John O'Hurley and regular panelists Meshach Taylor and Paula Poundstone, and trust me, that's a lineup that's going to be the answer to a "Tough TV Trivia" quiz in the year 2014. But as it now turns out, the problem with that version of "To Tell the Truth" is that they were never able to convince any corporate executives to appear. ('Cause, see, on "To Tell the Truth," one contestant has to tell the truth, and two others impersonate the first contestant and get to lie all they want, and we know now that corporate executives are really good liars. Come on, I'm trying to tie game shows into current events here. Up next: camping trailers given away on "The Price Is Right" and how they can be linked to the wildfires currently plaguing the western U.S.)