ABC Cancels 'Life on Mars'

ABC has cancelled Life on Mars, the surreal crime drama that dropped a New York cop 35 years into the past, reports Michael Ausiello of Entertainment Weekly:

Multiple sources are confirming that ABC has canceled my beloved Life on Mars. Per an insider, the network recently advised the show's producers that it would not be ordering a second season. The heads-up will allow them to make this year's season finale a series finale, thus leaving no questions unanswered. And unlike Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone, etc., all indications are that ABC will actually air this series finale. We're making progress, people!

This is good news for my TV Deathpool but bad news for me personally. Life on Mars was my favorite show of the new TV season. The cast is great -- Jason O'Mara, Gretchen Mol, Michael Imperioli and Harvey Keitel in his first TV series -- and the 1973 period details were completely funkadelic. The series convinced me that the '70s were not the musical black hole I thought they were, working songs both popular and obscure into the proceedings. Recent episodes featured Harry Nilsson's Spaceman, The Kinks' Supersonic Rocket Ship and Marion Black's Come On and Gettit.

That's some pretty impressive James Brown sex grunting from Black, a performer who's so forgotten today that his family was surprised and proud to find something about him on the web. Television remembers him, though -- another one of his songs, Who Knows, showed up on an episode of Weeds.

The Life on Mars finale ought to clear up whether Det. Sam Tyler's trip was the result of time travel, a coma, the afterlife or nanobots living up his nose. I was hoping we wouldn't find out the answer for a couple years.

Television · Music · 2009/03/03 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

eHarmony's Tanyalee Does Not Oppose Gay Marriage

Tanyalee Pearson, one half of the eHarmony TV commercial couple I wrote about in January, has posted a comment on Workbench:

I would like to inform you that My husband Joshua wrote a blog about prop 8 back in Oct.

She also wrote a longer response on a blog devoted to eHarmony:

This post we oppose gay marriage, Now first off ... Joshua wrote the whole prop 8 back in oct. I tanyalee did not write the comment, I do love my husband, I have a lot friends that are gay, I love them all, they all are people, and don't judge them at all. I lived in Hollywood for a long time, and 90% of my friends were gay ... I do not judge, not is not for me to do, I think we have was too much judging going on in this world, I don't need to be a part of that. I know how it feels to be judged people have been doing that to joshua and I a lot from the moment we met ...

Pearson's comments could be fake, but the blog post to which they refer was deleted from the couple's blog within the last seven days, which suggests they are legit. The post can still be retrieved from Google's cache and was reprinted in full on Survivor Sucks.

So it appears that I reached the wrong conclusion earlier about who wrote the anti-gay marriage post on their shared blog. Instead of being written by the artistic boutique owner, the biblical argument for Proposition 8 was penned by the "geeky chemist" whose MySpace motto is "come on jesus!" I should have realized this might be the case, since the guy's church prescreens applicants to its School of Supernatural Worship with the questions "Have you ever been involved in homosexuality or lesbianism?" and "If yes, how long since last involvement?" (To any reader who might face these questions in the future, anything that happened in college when you were really drunk does not count.)

So my apologies to Tanyalee, who does not oppose the right of her 90 percent gay friends to marry, thus putting her in strong disagreement with her husband.

Unless I'm mistaken, Joshua and Tanyalee now have only 28 degrees of compatibility.

Television · Politics · 2009/03/02 · 20 COMMENTS · Link

Newspapers Have Been Dying Since the '50s

Debra J. Saunders has an impassioned rant in today's San Francisco Chronicle about how we'll all be sorry when newspapers are dead:

News stories do not sprout up like Jack's bean stalk on the Internet. To produce news, you need professionals who understand the standards needed to research, report and write on what happened. If newspapers die, reliable information dries up. ...

I wonder who will be around in five years to cover stories. Or what talk radio will talk about when hosts can't just siphon from carefully researched stories, because they never were written.

Saunders blames the web and ideologically motivated haters for the demise of newspapers, but she ignores the fact that major dailies have been dying for decades, long before the Internet came along. Back in the '50s when Saunders was a child, the legendary journalist A.J. Liebling devoted numerous New Yorker articles to the sad demise of major papers and the societal hole that each left behind when the presses rolled to a halt. The industry has been dying for as long as many of us have been alive. Multiple newspaper towns became two paper towns, morning and afternoon. Two-paper towns became single-paper towns, usually when one paper killed the other. I can still remember where I was on Dec. 8, 1991, when I heard the news that the Dallas Times-Herald had been bought for $55 million and immediately shut down by the rival Dallas Morning-News. When a paper dies, a sizeable chunk of its readership doesn't move to another paper. People just break the habit. Even though half the reporters in town were gone, I don't recall any stories in the News back then lamenting the stories that would never be written.

Now that even the last paper standing in many cities is at risk of closure, we're supposed to agonize over the loss in a way that those papers never mourned the death of their cross-town rivals. Does Saunders realize that every paper left in this country has been cutting costs by dropping experienced reporters and limiting beats as fast as it can? The reporting she thinks we'll miss -- enterprise stories, investigative reports and government watchdog news -- is already a shadow of its former self. Former reporter David Simon devoted the final season of his TV series The Wire to the decimation of his old employer, the Baltimore Sun. By the end his alter ego, a long-time city editor named Gus, had been relegated to the copy desk with his most knowledgeable reporters shown the door. Most of the experienced reporters and editors who do the kind of journalism Saunders celebrates aren't in the newsroom any more. They got fired, bought out or took early retirement.

Saunders also ignores the role that massive debt has played in the economic troubles of our remaining dailies. Newspaper chains and other big media corporations have been gobbling up papers for years by borrowing to the hilt, counting on future profits to stay fat. A July 2008 Bloomberg article shows that the newspaper chains were overleveraged even before the current economic bust. The blogosphere and talk radio did not make the Gordon Gekkos who own newspapers saddle their publications with crushing piles of debt that require constant cost-cutting to finance.

I love newspapers. I began reading the Times-Herald when I was eight years old, delivered papers as a teen, majored in journalism, married a journalist and got my first job out of college at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. I will read them until the last one folds.

But if we really begin to see major cities left without a single daily newspaper, I believe that it will create opportunities for leaner, more focused, more Internet-savvy media operations. There also will be more altruistic efforts to cover the news, like what's happening in Southern California with the non-profit Voice of San Diego.

Voice of San Diego is a four-year-old, 11-member news outlet that's funded by charitable foundations and reader donations. It began with the mission to "consistently deliver ground-breaking investigative journalism for the San Diego region" and "increase civic participation by giving citizens the knowledge and in-depth analysis necessary to become advocates for good government and social progress."

I don't believe there will be no news without newspapers. If journalism meets an essential need for an informed citizenry, something else will arise in their place to meet that need.

Journalism · Business · 2009/02/26 · 17 COMMENTS · Link

TechCrunch Runs Bogus Last.fm Rumor

Late Friday, TechCrunch ran a single-sourced allegation that the CBS-owned music-recommendation service Last.fm had handed over user data to the RIAA for use in illegal file-sharing lawsuits:

... word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user's listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA. According to a tip we received:

I heard from an irate friend who works at CBS that last.fm recently provided the RIAA with a giant dump of user data to track down people who are scrobbling unreleased tracks. As word spread numerous employees at last.fm were up in arms because the data collected (a) can be used to identify individuals and (b) will likely be shared with 3rd parties that have relationships with the RIAA.

Reporter Erick Schonfeld's story had several red flags that it might be bogus, including the weasely phrase "word is going around" and the fact that he got it secondhand from a friend of a CBS employee, not directly from someone at CBS, Last.fm or the RIAA. But the allegation was so spectacularly damaging that it spread quickly across the web, scaring users into deleting their Last.fm accounts. They had good reason to be concerned. Users running Last.fm's AudioScrobbler software tell the service every song they play on their computers. If you're playing pirated songs from an album not yet released, and they RIAA finds this out, its lawyers could sue you so hard your grandmother gets served.

Last.fm founder Richard Jones says that TechCrunch is full of bleep:

On Friday night a technology blog called Techcrunch posted a vicious and completely false rumor about us: that Last.fm handed data to the RIAA so they could track who's been listening to the "leaked" U2 album.

I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email -- basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we're denying it on our blog.

Schonfeld has updated the story several times in response to angry pushback, digging a deeper hole each time:

From the very beginning, I've presented this story for what it is: a rumor. Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I've been able to gather, I still don't have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don't have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either.

Calling something a rumor doesn't give journalists a free pass -- spreading a bogus rumor can have the same consequences as passing along bogus information, and in either case the reporter owes readers an explanation of why the story was published. TechCrunch needs to explain why it trusted the friend of a CBS employee with a secondhand tip, whether anyone tried to contact the employee to corroborate the claim and whether it was wrong to run such a damaging story without at least one source who had direct knowledge of the alleged data transfer.

Time magazine recently declared TechCrunch one of the most overrated blogs, stating that the the site has become "irrelevant." That judgment isn't borne out by the traffic, but this story shows one reason why TechCrunch has lost some of its rep. Like other pro blogs constantly churning out new posts, TechCrunch is more concerned with being first than being right.

Business · Music · 2009/02/23 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Creating a CSS Menu Bar with Listamatic

I'm working on a relaunch of Wargames.Com, the wargaming site that attorney Wade Duchene and I successfully defended from a UDRP arbitration challenge by MGM Studios two years ago. The site began as a wargame store, but sales and traffic weren't enough to justify the aggravation of running an online storefront, so I retreated from ecommerce after 18 months. (I was the entire customer service department. You'd be surprised at the number of people who order from one web site, then call a completely different site to complain when they're unhappy with the product.)

As someone who has played wargames and role-playing games since the '70s, I'd like Wargames.Com to become a site for wargame enthusiasts that's worthy of its killer domain. For the relaunch, I'm rolling out features over time, beginning with a wargame store locator and convention calendar. The site's database currently contains 960 stores and 34 conventions. After these features are done, I'll add community forums, product news and perhaps blogs.

Although I've been publishing on the web for more than a decade, I suck at web design. Yesterday it took me six hours to create a vertical menu bar for the site using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The Wargames.Com main menu is defined in HTML as a simple list:

<div id="navcontainer">
<ul id="navlist">
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/add-store">Add a Store</a></li>
<li><a href="/conventions">Conventions</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

CSS can transform a list like this into a row of graphical menu buttons. Instead of using cut-and-paste to swipe somebody else's design, I decided to learn all of the CSS that goes into the creation of a menu bar and develop it one step at a time.

Huge mistake.

You'd be surprised at all the different styles that have to be set to make a simple row of buttons light up when a mouse hovers over them. Changing one style like float, width or display can dramatically hose a bunch of other styles -- style sheets, like nuclear power plants, are susceptible to cascading failure.

With the help of A List Apart, I learned just enough CSS to understand that it was hopeless for me to go on and I'd never be able to create a row of three rat bastard blue buttons with goat-humping shiny blue hover effects.

I was ready to choose another profession when I discovered Listamatic, a site that contains several dozen example CSS lists with the HTML and CSS required to create them. You can preview lists, find the one that's closest to your desired effect and boom. I chose Russ Weakley's rollover horizontal list.

Css · Publishing · Gaming · 2009/02/20 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

The Fine Line Between Sucks and Rocks

The political blogger Andrew Sullivan has the obnoxious practice of running reader emails without naming the person. I can only assume his motivation is to hog as much of the spotlight as possible, yet still allow other people to shoulder some of his workload. I enjoy reading Sullivan, but he strikes me as a person who always has to be the prettiest brain in the room.

One of his wrongfully uncredited readers just submitted the perfect explanation for the popularity of the Pet Shop Boys:

I'm male, straight, and 38. I first heard the Pet Shop Boys in high school and dismissed it as yet more soulless, computerized Brit-Pop. Then one night in a club I heard their version of U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name." I thought, "Listen to this crap. They take this well-made, passionate song and drain it of all feeling. Oh wait. That's brilliant. They're geniuses."

There ought to be a name for the principle the reader has identified here, which is the possibility for something to be so terrible that it circles around and achieves brilliance.

I experimented with the Pet Shop Boys in college (I was young; it was the '80s; I don't have to apologize for it). I nearly bought their 1986 debut album Please recently on iTunes to replace the cassette version I once owned, but the money went instead to the smooth jazz stylings of the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

Music · 2009/02/20 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Adobe Portable Document Format 1, Rush Limbaugh 0

On the Feb. 13 broadcast of his show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that them debbil Democrats were trying to hide the facts on the stimulus bill by publishing it as a PDF file:

... they have reformatted the bill -- they've made it a PDF file when they posted it. Now, for those of you that don't use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page. And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this; they want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what's in it.

PDF files are searchable, as Media Matters demonstrated by searching for the word "false" in the PDF version of the bill.

Politics · 2009/02/17 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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