Monday, February 27, 2006

Synch Hole

Several hours later, the hi-def feed on KNBC Los Angeles is still out of synch. I think it's less pronounced than it was earlier but Mr. Leno's mouth is not moving precisely in accord with his audio.

To answer a couple of questions I've received: No, it's not my set. All the other channels are fine. And I talked to my friend Earl Kress who lives out in the valley and it's out of synch on his TV, too. He's noticed it several times in the past, too.

I just called NBC again and a bored-sounding operator heard me out and said, "I'll report it." Betcha nothing changes tonight.

This just amazes me. You'd think there'd be some NBC executive sitting at home, watching his or her network on a big hi-def plasma screen who'd notice this, call in and demand it be fixed. Apparently, they either can't afford good sets or they don't watch their own channel.

• Posted at 11:48 PM · LINK

Mail Call

My longtime friend Dan Gheno gets a good letter-to-the-editor published in the New York Daily News. It's about halfway down this page.

• Posted at 10:05 PM · LINK

That Synching Feeling

I'm watching Deal or No Deal on our local NBC affiliate, KNBC, via their high-definition feed. This is about the seventh time I've tuned to this channel since I got my new TV and it's about the fifth time the video has been out of sync with the audio.

It's also about the fifth time I've called KNBC about it and don't think that's easy because the only phone number they seem to have listed is for the KNBC Newsroom. Each time, I call there and someone forwards my call to what they say is the appropriate department. I explain to the person who answers there what the problem is and they always say, "Let me forward you to the people who handle that," and they proceed to forward my call back to the same guy in the KNBC Newsroom, who of course has nothing to do with that.

He then tries forwarding me to someone else and eventually, I get to someone who seems to actually be in charge of the transmission they're beaming to all of Southern California. This person says something like, "Not again" and promises to get it fixed right away. The last four times, it hasn't been fixed, at least before I gave up and turned to a regular-def channel.

I don't understand this. I can't be the only human being watching NBC in high-def in this half of the state. And yet, in spite of how difficult they make it to reach the person in charge of their broadcast, I seem to be the only person calling up to say, "Uh, excuse me, but could you get the actor's lips to match the words coming out of their mouths?" It's like watching Godzilla except for the parts with Raymond Burr. I think I know where the guys who weren't good enough to work for Radio Shack are getting jobs.

• Posted at 8:24 PM · LINK

Shacking Off

Radio Shack has announced they'll soon be closing between 400 and 700 of their 7000 outlets. Blogger Rudy Panucci has a thought...

I've got a suggestion: How about actually having stores filled with electronics and the parts needed to repair them, and hiring sales people who care about what they're doing and have a clue about what they're selling?

You can read what else Rudy has to say but when I read the above, I thought, "He's right." The last few times I've been into a Radio Shack — and I've been to maybe four different ones in the last year to pick up a cable or an adapter or something — there's been no one in the place with a clue as to what they had, let alone what to do with it. As Rudy notes, all the people there know how to do is to try and sell you a cell phone.

I went into one a few months ago to buy an extra-loud ringer for my mother's phone. The salesman told me they didn't have any such device and that I should buy a whole new phone with a loud ringer on it. I explained that her phone already had a loud ringer on it and that we wanted something louder. I easily found just such a device on the store's shelves and the salesguy — who said he'd been working there for more than two years — looked at the thing and said, "Gee, is that what these do?"

I bought it, took it to my mother's home, installed it and discovered it didn't work. I took it back and, lucky me, got the same clerk who suggested maybe I'd installed it wrong. (You plug the phone into it and it into the wall. A blind Amish person could get this one right.) I finally got him to exchange it for another one on the shelf...and watched as he put the one I said was broken back in its box and back on sale for someone else to buy.

I'm sure the rise of the Internet has hurt Radio Shack sales since it's now possible to order any electronic part in the world online with a few mouse-clicks. But I wonder if World Wide Webbing has also harmed the company by draining the supply of folks who have a little bit of "tech" sense but are willing to work for minimum wage. I'm guessing those folks now have better options and Radio Shack is stuck with too many of the ones who think that when a piece of software says "Press any key to continue," they're supposed to look for a key that says "any" on it.

• Posted at 6:17 PM · LINK

Silent Movie Memories

Here, recommended to me wisely by Marty Golia, is a short but very good audio story from NPR on the Silent Movie Theatre over on Fairfax. I wrote a brief article on the esteemed film palace some years back and you can read it here. Or you can go off this site and read a longer one here.

You can also visit the website of the Silent Movie Theatre where, they say, a book on the history of the place will be out in May of this year.

• Posted at 2:10 PM · LINK

Don Being Don

Want to see some clips of Don Knotts at his best? Want to see them on your own computer screen? The folks over at LikeTelevision have put up some on this page. Matter of fact, there's a lot of neat non-Knotts stuff on their site you might enjoy.

A couple of folks wrote me to point out an interesting point I should have included in some post. As I mentioned, Andy Griffith did something very wise by allowing Don to run away with The Andy Griffith Show. Ron Howard, who was then playing Andy's son, seems to have learned well. Years later, he sure profited by allowing Henry Winkler to run away with Happy Days.

• Posted at 1:08 PM · LINK

Set the TiVo!

Jon Stewart is on Larry King Live tonight. I wish Costas was guest-hosting but I don't think he is.

• Posted at 12:55 PM · LINK

Dennis Weaver, R.I.P.

Sorry to say I never got to meet Dennis Weaver. I always liked him as an actor and respected him as a human being. The obits (like this one) only touch upon the fine non-acting work he did to make the world a better place. Especially impressive were the efforts of L.I.F.E., a group he headed up that fed hungry people and probably saved an awful lot of human lives. His work for ecological causes was level-headed and never hysterical, and I hope it continues without him.

Weaver had a pretty glorious career in television, starring in many a series. He practically stole Gunsmoke from Jim Arness, then went on to do Gentle Ben and Kentucky Jones, which were both good shows. Then Fess Parker turned down the lead in McCloud, Weaver was cast and you had a perfect match of actor and role. Even Parker later said that Weaver was better in the part than he would have been.

I never heard a bad word about Dennis Weaver. Once, when he was suggested for a part in a show I wrote, a very important network person grinned and said, "He's always money in the bank." Translation: He was always good in what he did, never caused trouble and audiences loved him. I'm sorry that project never went forward because I really wanted to meet the man and tell him how much I admired him.

• Posted at 11:41 AM · LINK

Jersey Boy

Lou Costello, of the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, always talked about being raised in Paterson, New Jersey. It was his hometown and he was proud of it. Returning the favor the town of Paterson is tooling up to celebrate what would have been Lou's 100th birthday with a big Lou Costello celebration. This article will tell you all about it. [Warning: It's one of those sites that will ask you for your age and sex and zip code.]

One correction to the article: Lou most definitely did not write the team's signature routine, "Who's on First?" It was an old burlesque routine that they cleaned up and polished and made their own. It's also, as has been noted by several scholars of comedy, one of the most contrived bits of all time, founded as it was on the dubious premise that "they give baseball players odd names these days." Really? Was there ever a baseball player named Who? Or anything remotely like that? The piece actually made more sense when the satire troupe called The Credibility Gap parodied it and had a rock promoter deciding that at his concert, he was going to put The Who on first. There really was a rock group called The Who.

But of course, logic doesn't matter when they're laughing, and people laughed long and hard at Bud Abbott and Lou Costello arguing about an infield peopled with interrogative pronouns. Costello, when he was on target — which wasn't all the time — was a great comedic performer, and Abbott was one of the best straight men ever in comedy. They were probably better than a lot of their movies, most of which I find a lot more tedious now than I did when I was eleven.

• Posted at 12:20 AM · LINK

February 28, 2006 • Current • February 26, 2006