Thursday, November 10, 2005

Stuff I'm TiVoing This Weekend...

Some PBS outlets are running an hour called Broadway's Best at Pops, which includes clips of Ethel Merman, Ray Bolger, Carol Channing and Ben Vereen performing with the Boston Pops on past shows. (I guess that last part goes without saying. It's very hard to book Ethel and Ray these days.)

As we all know, late Saturday night/early Sunday morn, NBC runs a complete vintage episode of Saturday Night Live. My TiVo claims the one this weekend is the April 21, 1990 episode hosted by Alec Baldwin with musical guests, the B-52s but NBC press releases say it's the March 12, 1983 show hosted by Bruce Dern with musical guest Leon Redbone. This is the one with the Assassination of Buckwheat, which was among the better things they did that season.

I'm guessing they switched to the 1983 episode because Sunday evening, NBC is running a two-hour special on Saturday Night Live in the eighties. This is preceded by a two-hour Penn and Teller special which I'll also be recording.

I haven't been mentioning the upcoming Mystery Guests on the GSN What's My Line? reruns. But if it matters to you, the next eight shows should be Shelley Winters, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Jonathan Winters, Bob Cummings, Laurence Harvey, Gertrude Berg and Jimmy Cagney. They're now running shows from March, 1960 so we're starting to hear comments about the presidential election of that year, which makes for an interesting bit of history.

• Posted at 11:02 PM · LINK

Meaningful Manga

My friend Buzz Dixon, whose name you've seen many a time on this weblog, is a writer of all sorts of things: Screenplays, animation, comics, games, etc. He has recently turned editor/packager with a new line of what his people are calling "America's Premiere Inspirational Manga." Serenity is a comedic teen soap opera about an unhappy girl who finds a happy ending in today's world. She's a lonely teen from a broken family who's coping with certain anger issues as she enrolls in a new school and gets "adopted" by a Christian prayer group. Buzz wrote it and it was drawn primarily by Min Kwon, a young Korean-American woman who's steeped in Asian storytelling techniques yet immersed in American culture as well. I like the fact that the story is written with conviction but without hectoring, and that the kids seem to talk and act like actual kids.

Each bi-monthly paperback edition is issued by Barbour Publishing, a long-time publisher of Christian and inspirational material. You can pick up the first one (and all to come) from Amazon. Here's a link to order. Good luck with this, Buzz.

• Posted at 7:25 PM · LINK

Another Rumor

Disneyland revamping the Pirates of the Carribean ride to bring it more in line with the movie series of the same name? This site says it's so.

• Posted at 3:04 PM · LINK

This Just In...

A press release from NBC...

NEW YORK - November 10 - "Late Night" host Conan O'Brien and his wife Liza Powel O'Brien are thrilled to announce the arrival of their son, Beckett O'Brien. This is the couple's second child. He was born Wednesday, November 9 in New York City at 8:27 PM. He is a healthy 8lbs 4oz. Mother, baby and father are all well.

• Posted at 9:53 AM · LINK

Frank Talk

The other day, we helped spread the rumor that the Tail o' the Pup, the hot dog stand shaped like a hot dog, may be forced to close soon. This article in the L.A. Times says that its owner is hoping to move it to a new location in Westwood Village. Good news if it happens.

• Posted at 8:35 AM · LINK

TiVo News

TiVo is rolling out a new software upgrade that made it to one of my machines the other night. It simplifies some menus but the main new feature is something they call Overlap Protection. The message you receive with this doesn't explain it well so I did a little research and I think (note the italics for emphasis) I have it figured out.

First of all, you should know that when TiVo installs this software upgrade, it turns the Overlap Protection feature on. You can turn it off if you like. This is done in the Settings section and the control is on the Recording menu.

If the feature is turned off and you accidentally schedule recordings of two shows that overlap, one will not be recorded. If it's turned on and the shows overlap by six minutes or more, that will still be the case.

But if the shows overlap by five minutes or less, TiVo will record both and merely trim the beginning or ending of one. If you look at your To Do List, a clipped show will be marked with an asterisk.

How does TiVo decide which show to clip and which one to record in whole? If one show is a Season Pass and one is a one-time recording, then the one-time recording will be the one not clipped. If both shows are Season Passes, then the one with the higher priority number on your Season Pass List will be the one not clipped. If both shows are one-time recordings (i.e., neither show is a Season Pass), then the most recently-scheduled one will be the one not clipped. In any case, a TiVo Suggestion will have the lowest standing. It will probably not be recorded at all if there's an overlap but if it is, it will be the one clipped.

There. I think I have that right. Someone tell me if I don't.

In other TiVo News, it is now possible to do an online scheduling via the Yahoo TV Listings page. You'll need to have a Yahoo e-mail and also sign up for online scheduling over at the TiVo site. Once you do, it makes things very easy, especially if your TiVo is connected to the Internet so it can receive the data quickly. We like this a lot.

Lastly: TiVo has started a new promotion on its site where you can get a 40-hour TiVo for free if you sign up for a full year of TiVo service and pay a slightly higher subscription fee for the first year — $16.95 a month as opposed to $12.95. That comes to $203.40 for the box and Year One of its usage and then, I assume, they let you go down to the lower subscription price. The standard best deal for a 40-hour TiVo is $49.99 for the machine and then the first year is $155.40 --which equals $205.39. So it's not much of a savings, though it may be greater because I think you have to pay sales tax on the latter deal and don't on the new one. Still, you may not want to avail yourself of the "free machine" offer because a 40-hour TiVo may be too small for you. I bought an 80-hour TiVo for my office and a few years later, I took it in to these people and had its hard disk replaced with two that jointly give me 317 hours at Basic Quality or 142 at High Quality. I record most things at High Quality though I always have the fear that my TiVo is going to look at what I watch and tell me, "Sorry, you can't record a low quality show at High Quality."

• Posted at 1:48 AM · LINK