Life Imitates South Park

The following headline in the London Evening Standard for a story about Michael Phelps reminds me very much of something:

Rise of the human dolphin

Oh yeah, it's this video.

Ode to The Final Score

I've sang the praises of The Final Score before. It's the sports highlight show that dispatches all of the usual crap in a SportsCenter or ESPNews broadcast and just shows highlights of sports we care about.

Today I have another reason to love it. Take a guess how much time was spent on the Olympics this morning...

It was about 2 minutes. The rest was baseball, with a little of the football game last night thrown in. I wanted to get on my knees and cry! Finally, I see other people in the sports broadcasting business who understand that lots of people don't care at all about the Olympics.

So thank you, Final Score, for giving me a glorious morning.

As an aside, I'm not sure why anyone would watch the Olympics last night, either. Between the White Sox game and a couple of great shows on History Channel (first, a Modern Marvels episode on carbon; second, a 2-hour documentary about hillbillies hosted by Billy Ray Cyrus), my night was full without having to degrade myself into watching the same kind of crap my mom most likely was.

Prison Break Season 4

The new season of Prison Break starts Monday September 1 at 7PM with a 2-hour premiere.

As I track down more start dates I'll add them to the list on the left of this page.

UPDATE: OK, I did some more work as you can see.

24 starts in January, as per usual.

Lost kicks off early next year, according to ABC's website.

I can't find anything about King of the Hill, The Simpsons, or Family Guy. Those shows also had late start dates last year, I believe, that started around Halloween and after the MLB playoffs.

This morning's reason why I hate ESPN

Being in a hotel in Hartford, I didn't have access to any of the FSN affiliated channels that I'd usually have. Thus, I couldn't watch The Final Score this morning for my sports news. This was one of the worst possible days for me to be stuck with ESPNews. Why?

ESPNews is a 30-minutes program. You might have heard that Brett Favre was traded to the Jets late last night. What does ESPN show on their half-hour show?

The first 26 minutes were about Favre. Then they decided to throw a bone to everyone outside of Wisconsin and New York City by showing a couple of baseball highlights. And of course by highlights, I mean one play from each game, the Rays and Yankees games.

Effectively the show was engineered to appeal to people in Wisconsin, NYC, and a very smal group in Tampa. Everybody else got a big FU. Want to see White Sox highlights? FU! They didn't even play on a day when Brett Favre got traded! Neither did 25 other MLB teams!

There are probably too many illegals in New York City

It appears that Univision's evening news broadcast has the highest ratings in New York City. But Barack Obama and John McCain and all of the other open-borders advocates tell me they will assimilate!

Could they wrong about yet one more topic in illegal immigration?

I love Dragnet

In 1990, cable TV finally made it out to the country and my parents' house. One of my favorite channels was Nickelodeon, as it allowed to see shows that I'd never seen before. My favorite was Dragnet.

I loved the straightforward way they solved crimes and such. Plus, they were always taking down hippies. That ruled.

Thankfully, MeTV on channel 23 here in Chicago has become a latter-day version of Nick At Nite, but with old shows on all day. It must be the cheapest station in the country to run, considering all they show are old episodes of shows no one else wants. Anyway, every Saturday morning they show back-to-back episodes of Dragnet that record. I should just get them on DVD and be done with it.

What made me post this? The episode I am currently watching is titled "Community Relations". They are spending the episode trying to convince some high school graduates to take the police entrance exam. The fun part? Check out who is playing "Student (uncredited)". That's right, it's everyone's favorite acquitted double murderer, OJ Simpson! Maybe his experience on the show helped him avoid prosecution.

Rachel Lucas watches some HGTV

And she hates everyone on it.

Her bigger message is that she finds the women on these shows so stupid, irrational, spoiled, and emasculating that she wonders how any man who watched that channel would want to ever marry.

I've never seen the channel, but I will agree that there is a larger than desired proportion of women who are just as she describes.

Not being married and having no prospects doesn't sound so bad after all...

UPDATE: Dr. Melissa Clouthier has more. Her conclusion?

What will reverse this frustrating tide? I don’t know. Men may revolt and give up women and encourage legalized prostitution like some of the commenters recommended. Men may just consign themselves to lead single and happy (well, happier than being with a shrewish woman) lives. Or, as Rachel suggests, men might go gay. But I have to say, that last choice might be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fryer.

We can all enjoy the NCAA tournament again

Billy Packer is gone!

Everyone should have the DirecTV sports pack

After ESPN SportsCenter's "Who's Now?" fiasco last summer, I swore off the show. It had become bloated with commentary and slim of actual highlights, along with spending too much time on crap that no one cares about (Olympics, NASCAR, WNBA, NHL, etc.). Then there are all of the human interest stories, interviews, and various Salisbury-laced analysis segments. All I want are highlights of the prior night and straight news of trades, you fools! Do you think I give two poops about John Kruk thinks about a free-agent signing? I know more about baseball transaction analysis than he does.

All of that isn't even getting into how self-congratulatory the show had become. The anchors were all about themselves and the network. And the show is 1 hour long, 1.5 hours on Sunday night/Monday morning. That's just not necessary, and it leads to much of the bloat.

Anyway, I quickly found ESPN News as a nice alternative last summer. It is kind of SportsCenter light since they only have a half-hour to work with. As a result, they just don't have time to unload most of the useless stuff on us. It still has its flaws (such as spending too much time on sports no one cares about and analysis), but it is good enough. Plus, I can wrap it up in half an hour without missing anything.

The flaw in the channel is that they still have too much of the junk in the show, so there are whole baseball games (keep in mind there is NOTHING ELSE GOING ON right now) they completely ignore. Since the White Sox aren't exactly a media darling, they often are in those games. I can only imagine being a Royals fan...

I guess ESPN management has gotten pissed about people bailing on SportsCenter (the network's flagship show, mind you) in the morning to watch ESPN News, because they have started showing a live video broadcast of their ESPN Radio show Mike and Mike.

Setting aside the merits of the show, which I have never heard, why would they possibly do a video broadcast of it? Everyone in the country gets it on the radio, and people are free to listen to it at home. Anyone can do so with an old AM radio stolen from one's grandparents' house. My only guess (as I wrote above) is that the ratings differential between SportsCenter and ESPN News in the morning has become embarrassing. (I have not seen any ratings, so it's just conjecture.)

What was I to do? Watching 2 minutes of SportsCenter reminded me why I hated it. We do have Comcast Sports Channel here, but since they have no national affiliation the sports highlight show is all Chicago stuff. Jeez, I don't need 15 minutes of highlights, interviews, and analysis of a Sox game I watched half of the night before. So that was out. A solution appeared before me...

Last spring I purchased the sports pack on DirecTV, which gives access to all of the regional sports channels (blacking out games on the MLB, NBA, and NHL packages, of course). I always thought most of the channels were useless other than having ESPNU for college basketball and Fox Soccer Channel for EPL games.

Given my dilemma a few weeks ago, I hoped that the array of local Fox Sports Channels had a national highlight show. And it did! It's called The Final Score. Here are my favorite things about it:

It's only a half hour long.

They show highlights to every game.

There is NO analysis by so-called "experts".

Interviews clips are brief.

There is a crawler on screen showing what the next few topics are.

There are TWO score crawlers at the bottom. One is just scores (and it moves fast) and the other has some news mixed in, like Bobby Jenks going on the DL yesterday.

There is only one anchor, at a time, so there is no stupid banter between them.

They only show things that a regular sports fan cares about. NASCAR, golf, tennis, Olympics, and whatnot are all brief. They know the reason for their existence is to show highlights of games we care about.

Here are the downsides:

I am nitpicking here, but I could do without the highlight of the day at the end of the show, or whatever it's called. But that only takes about 10 seconds, so it's no big deal.

That's it. No other negatives!

Best of all, they actually showed a WNBA highlight today, and the anchor was making fun of it! First, it was the last highlight of the show (which is good because NO ONE CARES). Second, he starts off with saying, "How about a WNBA highlight?" is a fake serious voice. Third, he said something about the game and followed it with, "in front of dozens!" with the camera showing a sea of empty seats behind the court.

(Now, as a digression, this is fantastic. The mainstream sports media is as liberal as any other aspect of the media. [A cursory viewing of SportsCenter would make this clear to anyone.] They are deathly afraid of making fun of the WNBA, even though it is clearly deserving of ridicule. No one attends the games, the ratings are horrible, and the action sucks. Example #1: Check out how newspaper articles/columns will rip MLS or NHL TV ratings, without ever mentioning that the WNBA does even worse. Example #2: Remember the XFL? The MSM hates Vince McMahon, so they loved hammering him and the league for any failing of it, be it ratings, level of play, etc. Some of that was brought on by Vince himself, but how come the WNBA never faces that kind of scrutiny? Why does the media never make fun of David Stern for standing behind it so ferociously?)

Clearly, this show is for regular sports fans. They aren't out to win any reporting awards for their lame-ass stories about blind cyclists or whatever, and they certainly aren't full of political-correctness.

I highly recommend this show to every sports fan tired of the ESPN culture. If you can, order the sports pack. If you don't have DirecTV, I am sorry. No joke.

(Here's an article mentioning everything above! It's too bad we are stuck here in Chicago without FSN, though it may be on cable.)

UPDATE: I see that Comcast Chicago does show it, but only the live version at 12:30 AM. Since I need it in the morning, I always use MSG+, which is channel 624 on DirecTV.

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia season 4

Just saw a promo. Premieres September 18!

Fear Itself review

I gots a little A-How in me, but I finished the first four episodes of the new NBC show Fear Itself last night. Since this post is going up an hour before the next episode, I know it does no good for this week. Anyway, here goes.

Good show! It's pretty much what I hoped for. It's got a lot of Tales from the Crypt in it, which is a good thing. Three of the four episodes were very good, while one was meh. Hey, that's a pretty good average.

Anyway, I recommend it if you are a fan of mostly horror/little bit of sci-fi stuff. They also throw in a little classic Twilight Zone at you with the twists, including a breathtaking one in the fourth episode. (Sure, I can usually be sucker for them since I don't like to think when I watch TV, but it was still hard to predict.)

Fear Itself

There's a new summer show on NBC on Thursday nights called Fear Itself. I haven't watched an episode yet, but I am recording them all. It's supposed to be some kind of weekly hour-long horror episode like Tales From The Crypt or something.

I started recording it because I like that kind of thing. Hopefully after watching it I can report back.

Yes, I was just looking for something to make sure I had a post today. I did watch a really crappy movie this weekend that deserves a long review, so maybe I can work on that. Hint: it received a crapload of critical acclaim for reasons that I cannot fathom. Good luck guessing what it is.

Happy birthday, Theresa!

The girl whose character helped mess up Ryan's life turns 31 today. That means she's exactly two days older than my brother, for you trivia buffs.

No, not literally

Ever since I heard Dan Dierdorf say during a Colts-Chiefs game a few years ago, "Peyton Manning is literally carving up the Chiefs defense right now," I have been fascinated by people using the word incorrectly. Why? Because Manning wasn't running around the field with a samurai sword chopping linebackers' arms off. Dierdorf, of course, should have said "really" instead, thereby both emphasizing how great Manning was performing while continuing to keep the metaphorical nature of the action alive.

Stephen F. Hayes is with me. For more reading, click on the link within the link to get to his article on this topic.

That's it

It's 7:30 PM the night before my exam, and my brain is offically full. I can't take any more in without losing things like how to put on pants. It reminds me of a Married...With Children episode. (Yes, I can relate most anything to an episode of Married...With Children, Futurama, The Simpsons, South Park, or Beavis and Butthead. Draw your own conclusions.):

Told he hasn't got enough "personality" to appear on a TV sports-trivia game show, Al (Ed O'Neill) trains his daughter Kelly (Christina Applegate) to take his place. Unfortunately, Kelly's brain capacity is such that she can't handle the onslaught of new information--in fact, all of her "old thoughts" are spilling all over the place (including her memories of her unlamented foster brother Seven [Shane Sweet]). American Gladiators host Todd Christensen appears in this final episode of Married. . .With Children's eighth season, which may represent the last time that an American sitcom invoked the name of O.J. Simpson without mentioning you-know-what (since "you-know-what" hadn't happened yet!)

So yes, I'm no smarter than Kelly Bundy. On an unrelated note, I don't recall ever seeing women wearing clothes like hers in the early 1990's:

...which was always a bit of a shame.

Review of New Amsterdam

I've been watching this new TV show on Fox called New Amsterdam. It's about a NYPD homocide detective who is immortal (long story). He always has flashbacks to similar situations that he has experienced over the past 400 or so years, which helps him solve cases.

There's also some lame side story about him finding his true love, at which point he becomes mortal again. He thinks he found her.

I understand that this isn't a thorough or interesting review, and I also don't know how many more episodes are coming this season. It does receive my recommendation, though, and I don't like crime dramas.

Celebrity birthday - Mariah Carey UPDATED

On a lighter note, today is Mariah Carey's 39th birthday. She is very well-preserved and still looking as good as ever.

UPDATE: Yes, I know she's crazy. I don't care. To quote a character from the short-lived Fox sitcom Hardball (I remember very distincly because I was in college and my roommates and I watched it religiously), "Psycho chicks are the best!"

By the way, if memory serves, I think that line was uttered by a character played by a young Joe Rogan.

New South Park tonight!

Season 12 of South Park kicks off tonight at 9 Central. I'm excited. I know not many others care.

Celebrity birthday - Jaimie Alexander

OK, who is Jaimie Alexander? She's the girl who made Dennis be her prom date in the It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode "Underage Drinking: A National Concern". She's 18 and she loves to party, so Dennis had nothing to worry about (other than the extortion part).

Apparently, Jaimie has been doing some work on TV shows called Watch Over Me and Kyle XY. I don't know what those are.

Pictures? Find your own pictures. I just wanted to post this because she had possibly my favorite cameo ever on the show.

My weekend as Slurms McKenzie (without the suicide part)

For those of you who didn't get into the show Futurama, you may not understand this reference without doing some research.

Slurms McKenzie is a parody of Spuds McKenzie of 1980's Bud Light fame. He's the original party worm. In an episode of the show, the gang wins a tour of the Slurm factory (Slurm is some kind of pop). They meet Slurms, and at the end of the episode he says he's just so tired of partying that:

Slurms McKenzie, exhausted from his years of partying, arrives and sacrifices himself to save Fry, Leela, his two super models, and Bender.

Oh man, I'm partied out. Whimmy wham wham wozzle.