Garrett M. Vonk

Jim Henson’s creative genius was absolutely treasured in our household. I watched Sesame Street nearly every day, as far back as I can remember. This was an era where we certainly weren’t allowed to watch HBO, meaning that I missed out on Fraggle Rock until I could watch it on video, but I think our worn-out tapes of Follow That Bird! more than made up for it.

Of course, YouTube is a great place to catch up on old clips from Sesame Street. I’d post a few of my favorite, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

The reason all of this is on my mind right now is this clip of Big Bird singing at Jim Henson’s memorial service that was passed around today:

As touching as the video is, it’s made even harder to get through by the fact that you can tell Carroll Spinney is having a hard time keeping his shit together for the whole song.

It kinda reminds me of the tribute Horatio Sanz did on SNL when Mr. Rogers died. (Yes, that’s a link to a transcript, because NBC is ridiculous and won’t allow anyone to post clips of their shows.) Here, watch Mr. Rogers’s final message to his viewers instead:

Thinking about the positive memories and the effect this programming had on me is a little bittersweet. Do kids have stuff like this on TV anymore? Are there characters and shows and songs that today’s kids connect with on a level that would cause them to have the same fondness I have for Jim Henson’s work, a full twenty years later?

It makes me wonder what kind of entertainment our kid will connect with. If there’s nothing comparable on TV, I may have to stick with just DVDs of old shows and classic kids movies.
I may not even be able to fall back on my own dependable favorite, because apparently the early episodes of Sesame Street are (now considered) unsuitable for children. What?

• Don’t forget that The Daily Show and Colbert will be back on the air tonight. I’ve missed them, but I’m a little confused about what will comprise their usually incredibly well-scripted shows if the pair, both guild members, are prohibited from writing material for themselves.
• I’d used it before, but I’ve been requesting a lot of books lately and I’ve found that the Atlanta Public Library’s site is actually quite helpful. Sure, some anchor tags contain layers of obfuscatory Javascript and their search leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s quite handy to hold a couple of books, wait for the email confirmation, and stop by after work (the Central Library is across the street from my office).
• Recent diversions include Assassin’s Creed, Rock Band, Scene It: LCA, and The Golden Compass (Er, the book, not the game).
• What, was I gone for a while? Sorry. Didn’t really have much to say. Nothing personal. Let’s see… The holidays went well. Work is good. Heather got me an iPhone for Christmas (in October). We’re going to Dublin and London in March. Can’t wait.

Here are a few things I’m excited about this fall…

• Halo 3 - Duh. After playing the multiplayer beta and following every tiny tidbit of Halo news I could find on X3F, the most anticipated video game of all time is pretty high on my list. I even violated two of my self-imposed rules by A) pre-ordering the game at B) EB Games, but I don’t care. Come September 25th, I’ll be right there in line with the teenagers waiting to unwrap my cat helmet and play all night. Also–I have a Halo 3 party planned with several friends that night. I’m obsessed.
• Trip to Reno/California - Heather and I are heading to Northern California in October to visit my grandparents out there and do a little sightseeing. We happened to find a great price on a flight through Reno, so we’ll probably spend a day in Lake Tahoe, as well.
• Futurama - As far as I can tell, Futurama will be back on TV toward the end of this year or early 2008. It can’t come quickly enough for me. Yes, I saw the Simpsons movie, and it was great, but I’m at least equally excited for new Futurama after all of these years of repeats on Adult Swim.

Somehow, the story of the Geico Cavemen getting a sitcom deal on ABC flew around the blogosphere under my radar last week. So, when Heather clued me in while we were on vacation in Florida over the weekend, I absolutely didn’t believe her. No way, I protested; despite the nagging feeling that we live in a time where originality is at an all-time low on television, I still couldn’t believe that a major network would seriously discuss airing a half-hour sitcom based on the cavemen from the Geico commercials.

Yet here I sit eating lunch, watching the teaser for Cavemen, actually set to air this fall, in which the Cro-Magnon lead characters will “struggle with prejudice on a daily basis [and] strive to live the lives of normal thirty-somethings in 2007 Atlanta.”

I suppose that the mixed reactions around the web indicate that I’m wrong to imagine that a show like this should be universally panned before it even makes it to air. For example, as far as I can tell, one film blogger seems to be totally serious when she calls the premise “can’t-miss-funny“. Still, Ain’t It Cool News called the yet-to-be-leaked pilot episode “astoundingly awful”, and there are those who even find the concept quasi-racist.

I know I’ll be on the edge of my seat this fall, if only to see how the caveman prosthetics hold up in high definition.

It made the rounds earlier this week, but in case you missed it, I recommend this piece in Radar online… Especially the anecdotes about Don Young and (of course) Cynthia McKinney.

Bonus: Reason magazine explains why libertarians just might like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Heather and I enjoy the show, but I’m not sure I cared too much about the politics in the first place. The author of the piece is, I suppose, saying that in comparison to The West Wing, the politics of the show are more palatable.

Background, if you didn’t know: The Slingbox is a <$200 device that sits in your entertainment center at home, connects to your broadband internet, and streams video and audio to yourself, on the road. The idea is that you can watch your home TV system components (Cable Box, Tivo, DVD, whatever) from anywhere in the world with a ‘net connection. It’s neat “place-shifting” technology, and if I ever have to travel for my job, it’ll be at the top of my short list for must-haves.

This technology is very cool, but also has pretty strict precautions against piracy. You can only stream the video to one person: yourself. This is the equivalent of taping a TV show and bringing the tape with you on vacation, just sped up in the internet age. In other words, the courts affirmed rights like these ages ago.

But that won’t stop Major League Baseball, Inc. from getting all huffy about the technology:

At the heart of the issue is that Sling Media, Orb Networks and similar companies cut out cable and satellite operators who pay great sums for transmission rights in their areas, according to Kliavkoff. Baseball sells transmission rights to specific geographical locations. So, a cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city.

Yes, he said stealing. This is a much more cut-and-dried case than music piracy. It’s my TV signal. I’ve already paid good money for it. If a kid wants to run a coax cable out to his treehouse so that he can secretly watch Nickelodeon (I can only assume that’s what the kids are still watching) 20 feet off the ground, he has every right to do that.

What if I want to watch TV in a mirror, so everything appears backward? Am I “rebroadcasting” the signal without permission, and therefore stealing? What if I call home to ask Heather how the game’s going? Is she rebroadcasting, too, by describing the MLB-licensed content she’s lawfully watching? I happen to place-shift and time-shift episodes of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Glenn Beck to my iPod so that I can watch them on the train. (They’re automagically downloaded from my Tivo -> PC and transcoded to iPod format overnight.) I pay Comcast for the right to this content, and innovative and cool technologies make it very easy for me to enjoy said content in more places and situations than ever.

You’d think that any industry that depends on a captive, fanatic audience would be overjoyed that people are finding new and improved ways to consume the industry’s product in their manner of choosing. You’d think that in the era of an increasingly-segmented marketplace, content providers would trip over themselves to get a chance to reach more eyeballs, even when traveling. Not least of all, you’d think that after media giants have failed, over and over and over again, to stem the tide of digital distribution, they’d realize that embracing this flexibility and giving your customers what they want is the best way to get a cut.

“The bottom line,” [Buchanan] said, “is I’d hate to be a lawyer arguing that I want consumers to pay twice for content.”

If the entertainment lawyers had their way, we’d have to pay for everything we watched, every time and manner we watched it.

From Cnet [via Boing Boing]

Hilarious tangentially-related Onion article: Area Man Won’t Do Anything Without Express Written Consent Of NFL

In my excitement to finally get back to the video games last night, I haven’t watched the season finale of 24 yet. So many people on the radio, internet, and at work have been talking about it, I’d better watch it tonight if I want anything to be a surprise.

So… Please, no spoilers. If I’m going to be as disappointed as I was with the Prison Break finale, I want to find out myself.

Update: I did finally see the season finale last night. I give it a B+, only for the last 7 minutes. Up until then, it was great.

I started Season One of Lost last night. Having abandoned Survivor this season, and being desperate for something widescreen to enjoy on the tv, I acquired the whole season and am prepared to hunker down and watch it all pretty quickly, so that we can start watching Season 2 in HD.

I watched the first two hours, which is technically just the 2-hour pilot, though each part has a separate episode number and credits. I know I’m technically the last person on earth to get into this show, but it definitely seems very well done so far. Good characters, loads of mystery and suspense, great-looking special effects and even some enigmatic symbolism really work together to draw you in.

When we watched the first 3 seasons of 24 on DVD, it took us about a month, which is an insane pace for 72 episodes of anything, even something that moves as quickly as that show did. I don’t know if I’ll be able to go as fast with Lost, especially with college football and November sweeps coming up, but I’m definitely interested in getting through it quickly enough to enjoy the current season ASAP.

I’d ask all kinds of questions about polar bears and transceivers and Korean subtitles, but I guess I’ll figure those things out soon enough.

Added note: The TV show recaps at Television Without Pity are hilarious.

So, I plopped down on the sofa this afternoon to make absolutely sure the Tivo was picking up Family Guy’s triumphant return to TV tonight after 3 long years of cancellation. When I hit the To Do list, I was amazed to see–what’s this?– Tivo was already set to record the show! You see, in my sadness over its cancellation, I could never bring myself to delete the Season Pass on the Tivo. The scheduled recording lingered in desperate futility for over 3 years until Fox finally picked the show back up and ordered 33 more episodes, the first of which was automatically recorded 90 minutes ago.

What does this mean? Well, I kept hope alive through modern technology when there was none, so there’s probably a message there. That message? Tivo is smarter than network executives.

So, this has been a pretty boring week at home. The reason? On Tuesday, our cable blinked out some time during the day. From my own in-depth analysis of the Tivo, we can tell that it was sometime between the morning rerun of The Daily Show and what would have been Ken Jennings’s forty-somethingth win. I’ve gotta believe the suits at Sony Pictures and King World are at least carriers of the capitalism gene, and thus will produce a DVD set of the incredible (rumored to end at 75 times) championship of Ken Jennings.
Where was I? Oh, the cable.

So, I called up Comcast and explained. Customer service at most big utility companies (perhaps justifiably) treats everyone like an absolute retard. They put you through the rigamarole of attempting to find every single way that you could have screwed up before they’re willing to even consider that they may have done something wrong. I understand this policy. It probably makes them money in the end. But our cable just stopped working. It’s not like I plugged 75 splitters into each outlet and bought 6 black-market cable boxes while trying to electrocute the cat with the batteries from the three dollar universal remote that somehow costs $95 to replace. The cable worked in the morning. It didn’t when I got home. It’s really not any harder to understand than that. But they act as if I made a conscious effort to disable the cable. Yes, Joann from Comcast, just like you want nothing more than to sit at a 20-inch wide mini-cubicle and read a script to housewives who “dusted” their cable boxes with 12 ounces of Armor-All, I have nothing to do all day but sit around and try to get my cable to stop working, so that I can call and beg for the privilege of devoting a third of my weekend to waiting on your technicians.
Ohh, the technicians…
Right after we moved in, we got our cable turned on and scheduled our service call for a Tuesday. (The brilliant and efficient company charges you $50 to drive their van over to your house, and screw one wire into another one, so that you can continue to pay them $50 a month.) The call was for 5-8pm. I got in at 4:50 and there was a note on the door saying “sorry we missed you.” There was an answering machine message left just after noon saying they’d be there a little early. I’m sorry, Comcast. I didn’t know that when you said “be there 5-8″, you forgot to also add “and also be there the whole day in case we call. You know, because we’re really busy plugging these wires in and might have to call you.”

The next time they came, when they were bringing us our digital cable box, we had an appointment from 11-2 on a Saturday. I was out at 10:30 but got in at 10:50 or so to another answering machine message. “Comcast here. I guess you’re not home. Please reschedule the appointment…” was the message left… AT 10:45 AM. If you want me to be at home at a given time, just tell me. I was THERE for my appointment, YOU weren’t. YOU probably called all your calls for the day at a time OUTSIDE the appointment time, so that you could sit in your van all day.

The next appointment we had, I made sure to be home for a period of approximately seventy-five hours preceding the appointment time and just managed to catch the technician, when he showed up, without calling, 2 hours into the appointment. And installed an extra cable box. Which they claimed we ordered. And billed us for. And when the technician was in my house, on his way out the door, I told him that we didn’t order the second cable box and we wouldn’t be paying for it. To which he shrugged: “Call and have someone come pick it up.”
“Yes, I’m looking forward to it”, I replied.

So ANYWAY, the point of all of this is that finally, today, just in time for the Georgia/Tennessee game (more on that in a second), twenty minutes before the scheduled appointment, our fourth cable repairman came. His diagnosis? Comcast just *turned off* our cable. Someone tagged our apartment as not paying for cable, and “auditors” unplugged our cable, just for fun.

I don’t even have the energy to address that insanity. It’s back on now, and I talked Comcast into giving us at least a credit for the downtime.

So now I just finished watching the Presidential Debate from yesterday, and I am reminded of something wise I read, which I will now paraphrase without attribution.

You know things are bad when the (Republican) President is boasting about his prescription drug entitlement plan, and (Democratic) Senator Kerry is complaining about deficit spending.