Television

Dancing Mortgage People Ate My Brain

My weblog entry on protecting yourself from dancing mortgage people attracted the attention of New York Times reporter Brad Stone, who tracked down Jennifer Uhll, the graphic designer who created the ads for LowerMyBills.Com. Whenever I see one of these ads, I'm reminded of the door-to-door meat salesmen who occasionally show up at my house offering steaks from a beer cooler in their trunk. Every time they do, I want to ask, "Who are the people keeping you in business?" I half expect to find ... (read more)

2007/01/18

The Digger Diggs, and Having Dugg Moves On

When Ryan Tomayko's blog was linked recently on Digg, he was so freaked out by the experience he wrote some code to reject all Digg traffic: The funny thing about Digg is that it changes the way people read. The average Digger seems to assume that people write stuff solely for the purpose of making it to the Digg front page. ... No one knows you there so you have to write in a way that is completely void of who you are and what you're about. That sucks. I'd rather just opt out of the popularity ... (read more)

2007/01/10

Stephen Colbert on D&D: 'Enjoy Your Magnificent Isolation!'

Stephen Colbert was once an 11th-level paladin who explored Barrier Peaks: I had an eleventh-level paladin (it took me years to advance those levels) whom I took on Expedition, and he got the Power Armor, which was the big thing to get in that module. But he also went a little power mad. On the next campaign we saw merchant caravans crossing the desert, and my character flew down and landed next to a merchant and tore off the guy's head. The DM informed me that I was not a paladin anymore. I ... (read more)

2006/11/22

59 of 60 Web Users Prefer the Drudge Report

The ad broker for the Drudge Report says that Matt Drudge's site broke traffic records on Election Day with 2.3 million unique visitors and 25.1 million page views. The scariest part of the press release: This proves, once again, that when Americans want reliable, unbiased, instant news on what's happening and what's important, they trust Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report to deliver. Drudge also had 100 million ad impressions that day. If you figure a click-through rate of one percent and 5 ... (read more)

2006/11/09

Outlook for GOP Looking More Haggard

If you don't know anything about Ted Haggard, the Colorado Springs-based evangelical leader who's accused of sexing a gay prostitute for three years, a recent interview he gave Richard Dawkins provides a glimpse of what he's like. Salon.Com contributor Lauren Sandler calls Haggard the "most important evangelical" in the U.S. I've never heard of Haggard, who has led the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals and advised President Bush, but his quick resignation and the ... (read more)

2006/11/02

Republicans, Campaign Ads and Stem-Cell Research

I caught a little of Rush Limbaugh's show this afternoon as he attempted to gnaw his own leg off to escape the trap he stepped into by taking on television's Michael J. Fox. As medical experts continue to weigh in on the authenticity of Fox's symptoms, Limbaugh could only defend himself by creating an alternate universe in which he provided a dispassionate factual rebuttal to Fox's claims two days ago, not obscenely pantomimed mockery of a 45-year-old man stricken with a severe nervous system ... (read more)

2006/10/26

Mentes Criminales: Pegas Como un Niña Pequeña

One of the benefits of American monolinguilism: Hearing people speak in languages you don't understand is funny. This Spanish-dubbed scene from Criminal Minds gives the dour FBI profilers a little smoldering Latin heat. ... (read more)

2006/10/26

Rush Limbaugh Mimicked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Disease

As Rush Limbaugh accused Michael J. Fox of exaggerating the effects of Parkinson's disease, he impersonated Fox, jerking his head and arms wildly back and forth. I try not to criticize human caricatures like Limbaugh, because their shtick depends on regularly offending people. Every time a liberal blasts Ann Coulter, a cash register ka-ching goes off in her vestigial brain. But the sight of Limbaugh mocking the symptoms of a Parkinson's sufferer hits a new low. From 700,000 to 1 million ... (read more)

2006/10/26

Rob Lowe, Snow White and the Academy Awards

The infamous opening number to the 1989 Academy Awards, which featured Snow White and Rob Lowe and killed the career of show producer Allen Carr, turned up on YouTube: Seeing this for the first time, I thought the opening was campy, hokey and overdone, but that seemed like the point. You don't line up a dozen dancing tables with lampshade heads and a chorus line of male ushers belting out "whenever you're down in the dumps, try putting on Judy's red pumps" without knowing you're completely over ... (read more)

2006/10/24

Six Minute Preview of Sorkin's Studio 60

Before NBC gets it pulled as a copyright violation, check out the six-minute preview of Studio 60, Aaron Sorkin's new fall series about a legendary but washed-up late-night comedy show. I haven't been interested in the series, because television shows about television are like blogs about blogging -- they should be opposed on principle. But the promo, which NBC showed to the press during its upfront event, looks as great as West Wing did when it began. Does anyone know what series it could ... (read more)

2006/05/18

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