The NSA was probably watching me make this, and took note of the fact that I was bereft of hope. Well, okay, bereft of hope and pants.
Want to file an error report of your own? Vote next time.… Read more
…that local TV station KHBS (my former employers, so it’s not as if they don’t know a thing about me!) couldn’t think of a way to localize this story by contacting, oh, I don’t know, a local author who’s written a giant book on the subject.
The above Twitter link led to this story, which was almost certainly relayed straight from the wire service.
Still, I’m highly amused at the thought of channel 40, or even their Twitter account, running a story about Doctor Who. 😆
Now, about all this Doctor Who business… … Read more
This will be the best Christmas ever. Fruitcakes and all.… Read more
Little E’s new phrase this weekend was “THAT’S what I’M talking about!” Driving home from school Friday, going to the store yesterday… everything was “THAT’S what I’M talking about!” On Sunday, driving to the store, he said it three times in a row about three different things, and then he paused.
“Dad! I’m talking about A LOT OF STUFF!”
I had no response other than “Well, THAT’S what I’M talking about!”
We then proceeded to try to run groceries out to the car in a freakin’ monsoon downpour that proceeded to turn into a hailstorm right on top of us. Even though we couldn’t see two feet in front of us, we raced to the car, which I unlocked by remote and pretty much shoved him into before he took any more troposherically-launched ice pellets to the head. (Speaking as someone who’s been hit by goofball-sized hail before, I can attest to the fact that it hurts.)
After loading the (already soaked) groceries into the car, and still putting the cart in the corral despite the downpour, I slogged my soaked-to-the-bone ass into the driver’s seat, where I landed with a big wet splat. I guess I wasn’t aware of how scary it had been for the little guy.
“THAT’S what I’M talkin’ about!” I said.
“Dad, that’s not what I was talking about,” he said in a small voice. Poor little guy. The whole “that’s what I’m talking about” gag died then and there.
The good news is that I think I’ve finally dried out.… Read more
Just one of those things I had to exorcise from my brain.… Read more
Little E has a Curious George book in which George finds himself in a dunk tank after causing both hijinks and shennanigans at a charity pancake breakfast.
Except that daddy was really tired and George wound up in the drunk tank. That’s a little hard to explain, and I laughed my ass off for the rest of the story without succumbing to the temptation to explain how George keeps a hip flask of a little somethin’ somethin’ to wash down all those pancakes, and was now over the legal limit.
I guess you had to be there. Always read with your child, folks – great moments in parenting!… Read more
The past week or so has been interesting in the world of Doctor Who fandom. Honestly, I’ve almost forgotten that we’re supposed to be taking bets on who replaces Matt Smith at this point. On the off-chance that you’re not really a Doctor Who fan yourself… well, first off, what on Earth are you doing at this web site, which is fairly dripping with Doctor Who?
But, beyond that, all you really need to know is this: during the 1960s, Doctor Who was produced in black & white on video, and the series was made almost year-round to the tune of one 25-minute episode per week. The videotapes were transferred to a more universal medium – film – and sold abroad, often dubbed into the local language. From various points in Europe to the Middle East and beyond, these films were “bicycled” from broadcaster to broadcaster, a practice that was still in force as recently as my early years in the TV biz (I distinctly remember that, at the station where I worked in the early ’90s, episodes of Mama’s Family were bicycled from station to station; no, I don’t know why either).
And then, in the late ’60s, staring down the barrel of an impending change of video format with little reasonable expectation that programs recorded in the older, lower-resolution format could ever be exploited commercially, and knowing that yet a further new format would be introduced in due course (namely, color television), the British Broadcasting Corporation issued internal instructions to its videotape archive: get rid of these old shows. Get rid of everything that isn’t of obvious historic value (such as footage of the Queen’s coronation). In the BBC’s view, there was no point in wasting all of that valuable space to preserve programming which had no commercial future.
If only they’d known. … Read more
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