Monday, October 25, 2004

Almost Bialystock

Wanna read an article about the replacement of Richard Dreyfuss in the London production of The Producers? Here's one.

• Posted at 10:55 PM · LINK

That's Rich!

One of the many clever cartoonists I know, Peter Kuper, has created a short flash animation that takes the classic Harvey comics/cartoon character and turns him into Guess Who. You can see it at this website [CAUTION: Contains unRichie-like language] and after you do that, visit Peter's site and notice what a versatile artist he is. Those monthly "Spy Vs. Spy" cartoons in Mad magazine are only a smidgen of what he does. (Did you know he does them by cutting stencils and then spraying paint through those stencils? You'd have known that if you read Mad Art, the stunning and incisive history of that rag and all the talented illustrators who've drawn for it. (Hey, don't complain. It's been months since I plugged my book.)

• Posted at 9:25 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

I just want it over with. I'm sick of this election. I'm sick of spin. I'm sick of talk about an October Surprise. It's starting to look like the October Surprise will be that there's no October Surprise.

Most of all, I'm sick of looking at polls and of electoral maps with these states colored red and those states colored blue and the undecided ones white, and Florida and Ohio switching back and forth every day or so like a damn neon sign.

All of us are wasting way too much time with that stuff. We're even getting delusional, acting like the polls are telling us who's probably going to win. We're like people who have seen that the faith healer's patients always die but we still go to him because he's better than nothing.

An awful lot of sites are like Real Clear Politics — which, despite the following wild pitch, is still a well-respected political site in some circles. Four years ago, they analyzed all the different polls and coughed up an electoral projection that had Bush winning 446 electoral votes as opposed to Al Gore's 92. They had Bush winning 51.2% of the popular vote to Gore's 41.9% and said Nader would get 5.8%. (The actual totals, just to remind you, were 271 electoral votes for Bush versus 266 for Gore, and they split the popular vote with Gore getting 48.38%, Bush getting 47.87% and Nader racking up 2.74%.)

As predictions go, that's a pretty wide miss. You wouldn't phone a Psychic Hotline a second time if the first time was that far off the target. But somehow, people are still flocking to Real Clear Politics and to other sites and pollsters with similarly poor track records. The final Gallup Poll in 2000 had Bush at 48%, Gore at 46% and Nader at 5%. The final Battleground Poll had Bush beating Gore by five points. The final USA Today/CNN poll had Bush beating Gore by six.

We're still a week from the final polls...and even when we get them, why expect them to be any more accurate than they were last time?

By the way: In case you haven't heard, Zogby says Kerry is up a point in Colorado.

• Posted at 8:13 PM · LINK

Corrections

Unlike most newspapers today, when we get it wrong here at news from me, we correct ourselves. Usually.

In one of the pieces about the Ashlee Simpson incident, I referenced the famous incident where Sinead O'Connor concluded a song by tearing up a picture of the Pope. I said, referring to the way it played on subsequent reruns, "They inserted some or all of the dress rehearsal performance which ended with her ripping up a different, non-controversial picture." Actually, in dress, she held up but did not tear a photo of some children. (I made this mistake before. Then, as now, reader Tom Collins wrote in politely to correct me.)

Also: The two newspapers that endorsed Gore in 2000 but have gone for Bush this time are not The Denver Post and The Columbus Dispatch. The latter endorsed Bush both times. The second paper that switched this time around is The York Daily Record.

The Management of news from me regrets the errors. And plenty of other things he's done.

• Posted at 5:11 PM · LINK

Extra Innings

How long is a baseball game? I just did an Internet search and found varying times, but the average seems to be about 2 hours and 47 minutes. That means there are plenty of games that run over three hours.

The first game of the World Series ran four hours. The second ran close to 3 hours and 35 minutes. In the playoffs, the Red Sox and the Yankees played two back-to-back games that each ran over five hours. One came close to six.

Simple enough. So why does my TiVo presume that all baseball games are three hours long?

Well, I know why: They take their schedules from the networks, and the networks use that number. But that's because that's the least amount of time the game will consume. If it starts at 5:00, the following show is announced for 8:00 because that's when it may start. It won't start earlier than that but it may start later...or not start at all. That's fine for their purposes. But if you're TiVoing a baseball game for later watching, you're not going to use that number. The odds are pretty good that you'll lose the end of the game.

Some day, personal video recorders and TV networks will have some sort of alliance where a little "end of show" signal will be encoded in broadcasts, and you'll be able to set your TiVo (or whatever we're using then) to record until it receives that signal. Right now, if you want to record a baseball game and don't want to live dangerously, you need to pad your recording time with an extra three hours for a total of six. And even then, one of these days, there'll be some incredible multi-inning game that will run longer than that and you'll come home and find your machine didn't get the end of it. The Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers once played a game lasting 8 hours and 6 minutes.

I don't have a solution to this, other than that TiVo should maybe pop up a little reminder any time you set to record a baseball game for three hours. But I'll bet the next generation of digital video recorders addresses the problem...or maybe the generation after that.